---
product_id: 1699106
title: "The Black Swan, Second Edition"
price: "₨16643"
currency: LKR
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reviews_count: 13
url: https://www.desertcart.lk/products/1699106-the-black-swan-second-edition
store_origin: LK
region: Sri Lanka
---

# The Black Swan, Second Edition

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## Description

The Black Swan is a standalone book in Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s landmark Incerto series, an investigation of opacity, luck, uncertainty, probability, human error, risk, and decision-making in a world we don’t understand. The other books in the series are Fooled by Randomness, Antifragile, Skin in the Game, and The Bed of Procrustes . A black swan is a highly improbable event with three principal characteristics: It is unpredictable; it carries a massive impact; and, after the fact, we concoct an explanation that makes it appear less random, and more predictable, than it was. The astonishing success of Google was a black swan; so was 9/11. For Nassim Nicholas Taleb, black swans underlie almost everything about our world, from the rise of religions to events in our own personal lives. Why do we not acknowledge the phenomenon of black swans until after they occur? Part of the answer, according to Taleb, is that humans are hardwired to learn specifics when they should be focused on generalities. We concentrate on things we already know and time and time again fail to take into consideration what we don’t know. We are, therefore, unable to truly estimate opportunities, too vulnerable to the impulse to simplify, narrate, and categorize, and not open enough to rewarding those who can imagine the “impossible.” For years, Taleb has studied how we fool ourselves into thinking we know more than we actually do. We restrict our thinking to the irrelevant and inconsequential, while large events continue to surprise us and shape our world. In this revelatory book, Taleb explains everything we know about what we don’t know, and this second edition features a new philosophical and empirical essay, “On Robustness and Fragility,” which offers tools to navigate and exploit a Black Swan world. Elegant, startling, and universal in its applications, The Black Swan will change the way you look at the world. Taleb is a vastly entertaining writer, with wit, irreverence, and unusual stories to tell. He has a polymathic command of subjects ranging from cognitive science to business to probability theory. The Black Swan is a landmark book—itself a black swan. Praise for Nassim Nicholas Taleb “The most prophetic voice of all.” —GQ Praise for The Black Swan “[A book] that altered modern thinking.” — The Times (London) “A masterpiece.” —Chris Anderson, editor in chief of Wired, author of The Long Tail “Idiosyncratically brilliant.” —Niall Ferguson, Los Angeles Times “ The Black Swan changed my view of how the world works.” —Daniel Kahneman, Nobel laureate “[Taleb writes] in a style that owes as much to Stephen Colbert as it does to Michel de Montaigne. . . . We eagerly romp with him through the follies of confirmation bias [and] narrative fallacy.” —The Wall Street Journal “Hugely enjoyable—compelling . . . easy to dip into.” — Financial Times “Engaging . . . The Black Swan has appealing cheek and admirable ambition.” —The New York Times Book Review

Review: Brilliant, Provocative, and Deeply Unsettling - The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable is ultimately a book about the limits of human prediction and the uncomfortable extent to which modern life is shaped by events people failed to imagine beforehand. Taleb argues that history, finance, politics, technology, and even personal lives are driven less by steady linear progression than by rare, high-impact events that only appear explainable in retrospect. What stands out most is the force of Taleb’s central insight: human beings are deeply uncomfortable with randomness, and so they construct narratives that create the illusion of understanding after uncertainty has already passed. The book repeatedly exposes how fragile many expert systems become when they mistake confidence for knowledge. Taleb writes with a distinctive mix of philosophy, probability, memoir, skepticism, and provocation. At times the tone is abrasive or deliberately confrontational, but beneath that intensity is a serious intellectual challenge to conventional thinking about forecasting, risk, and certainty. The sections on fragility and robustness are especially compelling because they shift the conversation away from prediction itself and toward resilience. Rather than pretending uncertainty can be eliminated, Taleb asks how systems, institutions, and individuals might survive volatility without collapsing under it. The book can occasionally feel repetitive, and Taleb’s persona sometimes threatens to overpower the argument, but the underlying ideas remain unusually influential because they alter the reader’s perception of certainty itself. After reading it, many forms of confidence—economic, political, statistical, even personal—begin to look more contingent than they first appear. It’s less a book of forecasts than a sustained critique of humanity’s tendency to confuse explanation with understanding.
Review: Irreverent Romp - What We Don't Know, Why We Can't Know it, and How to Get By Anyway - Taleb's romp through the land of what we do not know, what we cannot know, and how we deceive ourselves into thinking we know so very much more than we actually do is both fun and insightful. He takes observations that he made as a trader and uses them as a launching platform into the many pitfalls and traps we fall into in considering any problem. I bought this book with Mandelbrot's Behavior of Markets, and for the same purpose. I wanted to get a strong intuitive understanding of the consequences of the difference between the actual behavior (power-law) and the assumed behavior (Gaussian) of markets. I wanted to know what the power-law relationships were, so that I could build my own statistical models. And I wanted an analysis of real data showing that, in fact, markets in question do follow power-law relationships. Were I to rate this book solely on its ability to deliver on these expectations, I would have to give it two stars; for this book has nothing to do with the actual empirical facts. It is, instead, a highly rhetorical appeal to us to use empirical facts in making decisions about the market while it nevertheless manages to completely dodge the task of presenting any real market data. The inquiry here is much broader. Taleb is painstaking, almost encyclopedic, in his enumeration of ways in which our understanding of information breaks down. He draws on ideas from Greek, Roman, Arab, French, and English thinkers spanning more than two millennia. He also draws from the fine work of contemporaries Kahneman and Tversky which demonstrates how - when guessing about things - we all systematically underestimate our probability of being wrong by about a factor of twenty. He asserts that people with MBA's and those running large financial institutions do so a great deal more than, say, taxicab drivers and trash collectors. He visits physical models which prove that we cannot know much about the physical world, such as the three-body problem. The point is that when even physical systems that can be described very exactly in mathematical equations cannot be predicted with arbitrary accuracy, what's the hope of predicting things for which we don't even know the variables or the math one might use in describing them? Here he misses some opportunities by needlessly scoffing at the uncertainty principle, and by failing to include comments by one towering physicist of the twentieth century, probably Von Karman*, about how no physical phenomenon seemed spookier - i.e. more difficult to describe accurately using mathematics - than turbulent flow in fluids. This is an unfortunate omission since Mandelbrot actually uses the term "turbulence" to describe the fluctuations in market prices of goods and securities. One reaction to Taleb's arguments about how little we can ultimately know and on what shaky ground our beliefs lie is to stand, like a deer in the headlights, waiting for better information. Taleb argues that this is a mistake. It might be a bit better to proceed, looking for evidence that would prove one's course of action wrong, then modify one's model of reality and repeat the process. Doing this has the advantage that one can learn quite quickly about how any problem is bounded, and get some sense for the shape of the space inside. He quotes Warren Buffet: it is a great deal better to be approximately right than it is to be precisely wrong. And when choosing among things to believe, he advises us to rank beliefs not by their implausibility but by the harm they might cause. Although there are robust methods that draw on both judgments, this is generally very sound advice. The book is highly irreverent. In financial circles it is seen as blasphemous, not just because it flies in the face of conventional wisdom, but because the author has so much fun demolishing revered ideas. Anyone who can take it seriously and follow its advice ought to be much better at evaluating information and making decisions. This quality gives you a much better chance of becoming rich and famous like Taleb - though as Taleb might explain, there is still a vanishingly small chance of this happening. The down side is that following Taleb's advice is likely to make one a great deal less promotable (especially in financial firms) because - according to Taleb - reaching high levels of a company depends almost exclusively on making others believe you know things about which you are actually completely clueless; and only sociopaths and very self-deluded people do this convincingly. This suggests that one would read the book for the sole joy of knowing that you're the only person in the room who is sane enough to understand how little you actually know about pretty much anything. Good Reading --- *Taleb makes great use of footnotes, and I recommend reading them all. Some of the best material in the book is in them. Van Karman is most famous, perhaps, for his role in adjudicating what to do after the collapse of the Tacoma Narrows bridge - arguably a Black Swan event. One day not long after this long suspension bridge was erected, it began twisting and oscillating in a 50 MPH wind. Some minutes later it collapsed. Von Karman was called in to evaluate what happened. He told the town council that the vortex shedding frequency of the bridge in a 50 MPH wind happened to closely match the natural vibrational frequency of the bridge. The bridge had gone into harmonic oscillation which created stresses that were much higher than those created by static loads for which it was designed, and this was why it failed. Although it is to avoid collapsing bridges via harmonic oscillation that British soldiers fell out of step when crossing bridges over several centuries prior, the town council had never heard of anything like this happening before. They declared "It was a very well-built bridge" and therefore "we shall build it exactly as it was before." To which Von Karman replied "If you build it exactly as it was before, it shall collapse exactly as it did before." To their credit, they had the bridge re-designed.

## Technical Specifications

| Specification | Value |
|---------------|-------|
| Best Sellers Rank | #5,010 in Books ( See Top 100 in Books ) #2 in Developmental Biology (Books) #3 in Sociology Research & Measurement #55 in Business Management (Books) |
| Customer Reviews | 4.4 out of 5 stars 8,160 Reviews |

## Images

![The Black Swan, Second Edition - Image 1](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/61NFGAAbwlL.jpg)

## Customer Reviews

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Brilliant, Provocative, and Deeply Unsettling
*by D***S on May 12, 2026*

The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable is ultimately a book about the limits of human prediction and the uncomfortable extent to which modern life is shaped by events people failed to imagine beforehand. Taleb argues that history, finance, politics, technology, and even personal lives are driven less by steady linear progression than by rare, high-impact events that only appear explainable in retrospect. What stands out most is the force of Taleb’s central insight: human beings are deeply uncomfortable with randomness, and so they construct narratives that create the illusion of understanding after uncertainty has already passed. The book repeatedly exposes how fragile many expert systems become when they mistake confidence for knowledge. Taleb writes with a distinctive mix of philosophy, probability, memoir, skepticism, and provocation. At times the tone is abrasive or deliberately confrontational, but beneath that intensity is a serious intellectual challenge to conventional thinking about forecasting, risk, and certainty. The sections on fragility and robustness are especially compelling because they shift the conversation away from prediction itself and toward resilience. Rather than pretending uncertainty can be eliminated, Taleb asks how systems, institutions, and individuals might survive volatility without collapsing under it. The book can occasionally feel repetitive, and Taleb’s persona sometimes threatens to overpower the argument, but the underlying ideas remain unusually influential because they alter the reader’s perception of certainty itself. After reading it, many forms of confidence—economic, political, statistical, even personal—begin to look more contingent than they first appear. It’s less a book of forecasts than a sustained critique of humanity’s tendency to confuse explanation with understanding.

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Irreverent Romp - What We Don't Know, Why We Can't Know it, and How to Get By Anyway
*by M***E on July 16, 2014*

Taleb's romp through the land of what we do not know, what we cannot know, and how we deceive ourselves into thinking we know so very much more than we actually do is both fun and insightful. He takes observations that he made as a trader and uses them as a launching platform into the many pitfalls and traps we fall into in considering any problem. I bought this book with Mandelbrot's Behavior of Markets, and for the same purpose. I wanted to get a strong intuitive understanding of the consequences of the difference between the actual behavior (power-law) and the assumed behavior (Gaussian) of markets. I wanted to know what the power-law relationships were, so that I could build my own statistical models. And I wanted an analysis of real data showing that, in fact, markets in question do follow power-law relationships. Were I to rate this book solely on its ability to deliver on these expectations, I would have to give it two stars; for this book has nothing to do with the actual empirical facts. It is, instead, a highly rhetorical appeal to us to use empirical facts in making decisions about the market while it nevertheless manages to completely dodge the task of presenting any real market data. The inquiry here is much broader. Taleb is painstaking, almost encyclopedic, in his enumeration of ways in which our understanding of information breaks down. He draws on ideas from Greek, Roman, Arab, French, and English thinkers spanning more than two millennia. He also draws from the fine work of contemporaries Kahneman and Tversky which demonstrates how - when guessing about things - we all systematically underestimate our probability of being wrong by about a factor of twenty. He asserts that people with MBA's and those running large financial institutions do so a great deal more than, say, taxicab drivers and trash collectors. He visits physical models which prove that we cannot know much about the physical world, such as the three-body problem. The point is that when even physical systems that can be described very exactly in mathematical equations cannot be predicted with arbitrary accuracy, what's the hope of predicting things for which we don't even know the variables or the math one might use in describing them? Here he misses some opportunities by needlessly scoffing at the uncertainty principle, and by failing to include comments by one towering physicist of the twentieth century, probably Von Karman*, about how no physical phenomenon seemed spookier - i.e. more difficult to describe accurately using mathematics - than turbulent flow in fluids. This is an unfortunate omission since Mandelbrot actually uses the term "turbulence" to describe the fluctuations in market prices of goods and securities. One reaction to Taleb's arguments about how little we can ultimately know and on what shaky ground our beliefs lie is to stand, like a deer in the headlights, waiting for better information. Taleb argues that this is a mistake. It might be a bit better to proceed, looking for evidence that would prove one's course of action wrong, then modify one's model of reality and repeat the process. Doing this has the advantage that one can learn quite quickly about how any problem is bounded, and get some sense for the shape of the space inside. He quotes Warren Buffet: it is a great deal better to be approximately right than it is to be precisely wrong. And when choosing among things to believe, he advises us to rank beliefs not by their implausibility but by the harm they might cause. Although there are robust methods that draw on both judgments, this is generally very sound advice. The book is highly irreverent. In financial circles it is seen as blasphemous, not just because it flies in the face of conventional wisdom, but because the author has so much fun demolishing revered ideas. Anyone who can take it seriously and follow its advice ought to be much better at evaluating information and making decisions. This quality gives you a much better chance of becoming rich and famous like Taleb - though as Taleb might explain, there is still a vanishingly small chance of this happening. The down side is that following Taleb's advice is likely to make one a great deal less promotable (especially in financial firms) because - according to Taleb - reaching high levels of a company depends almost exclusively on making others believe you know things about which you are actually completely clueless; and only sociopaths and very self-deluded people do this convincingly. This suggests that one would read the book for the sole joy of knowing that you're the only person in the room who is sane enough to understand how little you actually know about pretty much anything. Good Reading --- *Taleb makes great use of footnotes, and I recommend reading them all. Some of the best material in the book is in them. Van Karman is most famous, perhaps, for his role in adjudicating what to do after the collapse of the Tacoma Narrows bridge - arguably a Black Swan event. One day not long after this long suspension bridge was erected, it began twisting and oscillating in a 50 MPH wind. Some minutes later it collapsed. Von Karman was called in to evaluate what happened. He told the town council that the vortex shedding frequency of the bridge in a 50 MPH wind happened to closely match the natural vibrational frequency of the bridge. The bridge had gone into harmonic oscillation which created stresses that were much higher than those created by static loads for which it was designed, and this was why it failed. Although it is to avoid collapsing bridges via harmonic oscillation that British soldiers fell out of step when crossing bridges over several centuries prior, the town council had never heard of anything like this happening before. They declared "It was a very well-built bridge" and therefore "we shall build it exactly as it was before." To which Von Karman replied "If you build it exactly as it was before, it shall collapse exactly as it did before." To their credit, they had the bridge re-designed.

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐ Rethinking the way we perceive the world
*by K***D on September 22, 2025*

This book sat on my shelf for THREE YEARS! Every time I picked it up, I couldn’t get past the prologue. Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s writing style wanders quite a bit and can be dense. I often found myself reading and re-reading entire paragraphs. This month, I decided to buckle down and actually read the darn thing...and I’m glad I did. Once I got past the prologue, it wasn't so bad (yes, still a bit repetitive). and fascinating, filled with keen insights into how we humans try (and often fail) to make sense of randomness, uncertainty, and the flawed reasoning we bring to high-stakes decision-making. At times, it felt like Taleb was chatting with me on a meandering walk...a bit tangential, occasionally smug, but undeniably thought-provoking. I found myself needing to pause after each chapter just to let the ideas sink in. So what’s a Black Swan? A "black swan event" is an unexpected, highly improbable event (from the perspective of the observer) that is nearly impossible to predict but has massive, world-altering consequences. Think 9/11. Think COVID-19. These are just two examples, and Taleb provides many more. Part One defines the concept of a Black Swan and explores the many cognitive biases and perspectives that blind us to the possibility of such events, including our love for narratives and our tendency to fit the past neatly into cause-and-effect stories. Part Two dives into the "fragility of our systems" (e.g., financial, political, social) and how they are deeply vulnerable to the kind of shocks we never see coming. This section is both intriguing and unsettling. especially given current-day events. Part Three offers a more philosophical look at how to live in a world of uncertainty. It’s a sobering treatise on humility in the face of randomness and a call to build systems (and lives) that are more resilient to the unexpected. Part Four serves as a wrap-up and deeper reflection. Taleb revisits the central themes with a slightly more philosophical tone, challenging readers to embrace uncertainty, stop chasing predictability, and become what he calls “empirically skeptical.” It’s less structured than the previous sections but still provides important takeaways, especially around the idea of building robustness (and even antifragility) into our thinking and systems. The Postscript (Second Edition) is a worthwhile read on its own. Written after the 2008 financial crisis (a classic black swan event), Taleb reflects on how the ideas in the book were either misunderstood or vindicated by real-world events. He sharpens his language and emphasizes the importance of practical application. If you’ve ever wondered, “OK, now what do I do with all this?”, the postscript offers some guidance, albeit in Taleb’s usual indirect way. This is not an easy read, and frankly, it’s not for everyone. Taleb’s tone can be grating, and he definitely enjoys showing you how smart he is. But if you're willing to stick with it, *The Black Swan* will challenge your thinking in ways few books do. It’s not just about rare events; it’s a challenge to rethink our assumptions about knowledge, risk, and control. At its core, The Black Swan is about rethinking the way we perceive the world and our place in it.

## Frequently Bought Together

- The Black Swan: Second Edition: The Impact of the Highly Improbable: With a new section: "On Robustness and Fragility" (Incerto)
- Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (Incerto)
- Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life (Incerto)

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*Last updated: 2026-05-26*