The Black Swan : the impact of the highly improbable / Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Contents

PART ONE: Umberto Eco's antilibrary, or how we seek validation.
Chapter 1: The apprenticeship of an empirical skeptic
Chapter 2: Yevgenia's black swan
Chapter 3: The speculator and the prostitute
Chapter 4: One thousand and one days, or how not to be a sucker
Chapter 5: Confirmation shmonfirmation!
Chapter 6: The narrative fallacy
Chapter 7: Living in the antechamber of hope
Chapter 8: Giacomo Casanova's unfailing luck : the problem of silent evidence
Chapter 9: The Ludic fallacy, or the uncertainty of the nerd

PART TWO: We just can't predict.
Chapter 10: The scandal of prediction
Chapter 11: How to look for bird poop
Chapter 12: Epistemocracy, a dream
Chapter 13: Appelles the Painter, or what do you do if you cannot predict?

PART THREE: Those gray swans of Extremistan.
Chapter 14: From Mediocristan to Extremistan and back
Chapter 15: The bell curve, that great intellectual fraud
Chapter 16: The aesthetics of randomness
Chapter 17: Locke's madmen, or bell curves in the wrong places
Chapter 18: The uncertainty of the phony

PART FOUR: The end.
Chapter 19: Half and half, or how to get even with the black swan
Epilogue : Yevgenia's white swans

Postscript essay: on robustness and fragility, deeper philosophical and empirical reflections