THE BLACK SWAN by Nissim Nicholas Taleb （TR） 黑天鹅
分类: 图书,进口原版书,小说 Fiction ,
作者： Nassim Nicholas Taleb 著
出 版 社：
出版时间： 2008-1-1字数：版次： 1页数： 366印刷时间：开本： 32开印次： 1纸张：I S B N ： 9780812979183包装： 平装编辑推荐
作者简介：NASSIM NICHOLAS TALEB, part literary essayist, part empiricist,
part no-nonsense trader, has devoted his life to immersing himself in
problems of luck, uncertainty, probability, and knowledge.
Taleb was born into a Greek-Orthodox family in Lebanon. He worked as a derivatives trader on his own and with Wall Street firms and as a floor trader in the Chicago pits before opting for more con- templative, and what he calls "nontransactional," pursuits. He has an M.B.A. from the Wharton School and a Ph.D. from the University of Paris. While trading, he taught the application of probability the-ory to risk management for seven years (part-time) at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences of New York University. He is currently taking a break from active life by serving as the Dean's Professor in the Sciences of Uncertainty at the University of Massa chusetts at Amherst. His last book, the bestseller Fooled by Random- ness, has been published in twenty languages (even French). Taleblives mostly in New York.
内容简介
Four hundred years ago, Francis Bacon warned that our minds are wired to deceive us. "Beware the fallacies into which undisciplined thinkers most easily fall--they are the real distorting prisms of human nature." Chief among them: "Assuming more order than exists in chaotic nature." Now consider the typical stock market report: "Today investors bid shares down out of concern over Iranian oil production." Sigh. We're still doing it.
Our brains are wired for narrative, not statistical uncertainty. And so we tell ourselves simple stories to explain complex thing we don't--and, most importantly, can't--know. The truth is that we have no idea why stock markets go up or down on any given day, and whatever reason we give is sure to be grossly simplified, if not flat out wrong.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb first made this argument in Fooled by Randomness, an engaging look at the history and reasons for our predilection for self-deception when it comes to statistics. Now, in The Black Swan: the Impact of the Highly Improbable, he focuses on that most dismal of sciences, predicting the future. Forecasting is not just at the heart of Wall Street, but it’s something each of us does every time we make an insurance payment or strap on a seat belt.
The problem, Nassim explains, is that we place too much weight on the odds that past events will repeat (diligently trying to follow the path of the "millionaire next door," when unrepeatable chance is a better explanation). Instead, the really important events are rare and unpredictable. He calls them Black Swans, which is a reference to a 17th century philosophical thought experiment. In Europe all anyone had ever seen were white swans; indeed, "all swans are white" had long been used as the standard example of a scientific truth. So what was the chance of seeing a black one? Impossible to calculate, or at least they were until 1697, when explorers found Cygnus atratus in Australia.
Nassim argues that most of the really big events in our world are rare and unpredictable, and thus trying to extract generalizable stories to explain them may be emotionally satisfying, but it's practically useless. September 11th is one such example, and stock market crashes are another. Or, as he puts it, "History does not crawl, it jumps." Our assumptions grow out of the bell-curve predictability of what he calls "Mediocristan," while our world is really shaped by the wild powerlaw swings of "Extremistan."
目录
Prologue
On the Plumage of Birds
What You Do Not Know
Experts and "Empty Suits"
Learning to Learn
A New Kind of Ingratitude
Life Is Very Unusual
Plato and the Nerd
Too Dull to Write About
The Bottom Line
Chapters Map
PART ONE: UMBERTO ECO'S ANTiLIBRARY, OR HOW WE SEEK VALIDATION
Chapter I : The Apprenticeship of an Empirical Skeptic
Anatomy of a Black Swan
On Walking Walks
"Paradise" Evaporated
Tbe Starred Night
History and the Triplet of Opacity
Nobody Knows What's Going On
History Does Not Crawl, It Jumps
Dear Diary: On History Running Backward
Education in a Taxicab
Clusters
Where Is the Show?
83/4 Lbs Later
The Four-Letter Word of Independence
Limousine Philosopher
Chapter 2: Yevgenla's Black Swan
Chapter 3: The Speculator and the Prostitute
The Best (Worst) Advice
Beware the Scalable
The Advent of Scalability
Scalability and Globalization
Travels Inside Mediocristan
The Strange Country of Extremistan
Extremistan and Knowledge
Wild and Mild
The Tyranny of the Accident
Chapter 4: One Thousand and One Days, or How Not to Be a Sucker
How to Learn from the Turkey
Trained to Be Dull
A Black Swan Is Relative to Knowledge
A Brief History of the Black Swan Problem
Sextus the (Alas) Empirical
Algazel
The Skeptic, Friend of Religion
I Don't Want to Be a Turkey
They Want to Live in Mediocristan
Chapter 5: Confirmation Shmonfirmation~
Zoogles Are Not All Boogles
Evidence
Negative Empiricism
Counting to Three
Saw Another Red Mini!
……
PART TWO:WE JUST CANT PREDICT
PARTTHREE:THOSE GRAY SWANS OF EXTREMISTAN
PART FOUR:THE END
Epilogue:Yevgenia s White Swans
Acknowledgments
Glossary
Notes
Bibliography
Index
