Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The best-selling author of The Black Swan shares philosophical insights into how adversity and chaos can bring out the best in individuals and communities, drawing on multiple disciplines to consider such topics as the superiority of city states over nation states, the drawbacks of debt and why modern developments usually fail. 125,000 first printing.

Things That Gain from Disorder

Antifragile

In the author's point of view, a black swan is an 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. 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'.

The Black Swan

Contends that randomness and probability have a large impact on life, claims that people regularly fail to recognize that role, and tells how to differentiate between randomness in general and the financial markets in particular.

The Hidden Role Of Chance In Life And In The Markets

Fooled By Randomness

The Thrills and Logic of Risk Taking

Skin in the Game

Presents the author's aphorism that touch on the ideas about the hubris of modern society presented in such earlier works as "The Black Swan" and "Fooled by Randomness."

Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms

The Bed of Procrustes

Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s landmark Incerto series is an investigation of luck, uncertainty, probability, opacity, human error, risk, disorder, and decision-making in a world we don’t understand, in nonoverlapping and standalone books. All four volumes—Antifragile, The Black Swan, Fooled by Randomness, and the expanded edition of The Bed of Procrustes, updated with more than 50 percent new material—are now together in one ebook bundle. ANTIFRAGILE “Startling . . . richly crammed with insights, stories, fine phrases and intriguing asides.”—The Wall Street Journal Just as human bones get stronger when subjected to stress and tension, many things in life benefit from disorder, volatility, and turmoil. What Taleb has identified and calls “antifragile” is that category of things that not only gain from chaos but need it in order to survive and flourish. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better and better. What is crucial is that the antifragile loves errors, as it incurs small harm and large benefits from them. Spanning politics, urban planning, war, personal finance, economic systems, and medicine in an interdisciplinary and erudite style, Antifragile is a blueprint for living in a Black Swan world. THE BLACK SWAN “[A book] that altered modern thinking.”—The Times (London) 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. The astonishing success of Google was a black swan; so was 9/11. In this groundbreaking and prophetic book, Taleb shows that black swan events underlie almost everything about our world, from the rise of religions to events in our own personal lives, and yet we—especially the experts—are blind to them. FOOLED BY RANDOMNESS “[Fooled by Randomness] is to conventional Wall Street wisdom approximately what Martin Luther’s ninety-five theses were to the Catholic Church.”—Malcolm Gladwell, The New Yorker Are we capable of distinguishing the fortunate charlatan from the genuine visionary? Must we always try to uncover nonexistent messages in random events? Fooled by Randomness is about luck: more precisely, about how we perceive luck in our personal and professional experiences. Set against the backdrop of the most conspicuous forum in which luck is mistaken for skill—the markets—Fooled by Randomness is an irreverent, eye-opening, and endlessly entertaining exploration of one of the least understood forces in our lives. THE BED OF PROCRUSTES “Taleb’s crystalline nuggets of thought stand alone like esoteric poems.”—Financial Times This collection of aphorisms and meditations expresses Taleb’s major ideas in ways you least expect. The Bed of Procrustes takes its title from Greek mythology: the story of a man who made his visitors fit his bed to perfection by either stretching them or cutting their limbs. With a rare combination of pointed wit and potent wisdom, Taleb plows through human illusions, contrasting the classical views of courage, elegance, and erudition against the modern diseases of nerdiness, philistinism, and phoniness.

Fooled by Randomness, The Black Swan, The Bed of Procrustes, Antifragile

Incerto 4-Book Bundle

Destined to become a market classic, Dynamic Hedging is the only practical reference in exotic options hedgingand arbitrage for professional traders and money managers Watch the professionals. From central banks to brokerages to multinationals, institutional investors are flocking to a new generation of exotic and complex options contracts and derivatives. But the promise of ever larger profits also creates the potential for catastrophic trading losses. Now more than ever, the key to trading derivatives lies in implementing preventive risk management techniques that plan for and avoid these appalling downturns. Unlike other books that offer risk management for corporate treasurers, Dynamic Hedging targets the real-world needs of professional traders and money managers. Written by a leading options trader and derivatives risk advisor to global banks and exchanges, this book provides a practical, real-world methodology for monitoring and managing all the risks associated with portfolio management. Nassim Nicholas Taleb is the founder of Empirica Capital LLC, a hedge fund operator, and a fellow at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences of New York University. He has held a variety of senior derivative trading positions in New York and London and worked as an independent floor trader in Chicago. Dr. Taleb was inducted in February 2001 in the Derivatives Strategy Hall of Fame. He received an MBA from the Wharton School and a Ph.D. from University Paris-Dauphine.

Managing Vanilla and Exotic Options

Dynamic Hedging

Il cigno nero. Come l'improbabile governa la nostra vita

Nazan Arıbaş

Siyah kuğu

The book investigates the misapplication of conventional statistical techniques to fat tailed distributions and looks for remedies, when possible. Switching from thin tailed to fat tailed distributions requires more than "changing the color of the dress." Traditional asymptotics deal mainly with either n=1 or n=∞, and the real world is in between, under the "laws of the medium numbers"-which vary widely across specific distributions. Both the law of large numbers and the generalized central limit mechanisms operate in highly idiosyncratic ways outside the standard Gaussian or Levy-Stable basins of convergence. A few examples: - The sample mean is rarely in line with the population mean, with effect on "naïve empiricism," but can be sometimes be estimated via parametric methods. - The "empirical distribution" is rarely empirical. - Parameter uncertainty has compounding effects on statistical metrics. - Dimension reduction (principal components) fails. - Inequality estimators (Gini or quantile contributions) are not additive and produce wrong results. - Many "biases" found in psychology become entirely rational under more sophisticated probability distributions. - Most of the failures of financial economics, econometrics, and behavioral economics can be attributed to using the wrong distributions. This book, the first volume of the Technical Incerto, weaves a narrative around published journal articles.

Real World Preasymptotics, Epistemology, and Applications

Statistical Consequences of Fat Tails

die Macht höchst unwahrscheinlicher Ereignisse

Der schwarze Schwan

COMO SOBREVIVER EM UM MUNDO CHEIO DE INCERTEZAS? DO AUTOR DO BEST-SELLER A LÓGICA DO CISNE NEGRO Nassim Nicholas Taleb complementa o tema do seu livro anterior proclamando a incerteza como algo presente, desejável e necessária para a evolução. Propõe que tornemos nossas empresas, nações e até nossas carreiras mais resistentes ao imponderável, estabelecendo o conceito do antifrágil. No estilo do autor, com muitas informações e uma visão sempre original e iconoclasta do assunto ele conduz a reflexão e investiga várias questões. Por que as cidades-estado são melhores que os estados-nação? Por que o débito é ruim para você? Por que o que chamamos de "eficiência" não é nem um pouco eficiente? Por que as respostas e políticas sociais do governo protegem os fortes e ferem os fracos? Por que você deve escrever sua carta de demissão antes mesmo de começar no emprego? Como o desastre do Titanic salvou vidas? Estas e outras perguntas são respondidas neste livro que engloba análises sobre inovações e melhorias feitas a partir de tentativa e erro, decisões que podem mudar para melhor uma vida inteira, a política, o planejamento urbano, as finanças pessoais, os sistemas econômicos e até a medicina.

Antifrágil

The landmark five-book series--all together in one boxed set The Incerto is an investigation of opacity, luck, uncertainty, probability, human error, risk, and decision making when we don't understand the world, expressed in the form of a personal essay with autobiographical sections, stories, parables, and philosophical, historical, and scientific discussions, in non-overlapping volumes that can be accessed in any order. The main thread is that while there is inordinate uncertainty about what is going on, there is great certainty as to what one should do about it. This boxed set includes: FOOLED BY RANDOMNESS THE BLACK SWAN THE BED OF PROCRUSTES ANTIFRAGILE SKIN IN THE GAME

Fooled by Randomness, The Black Swan, The Bed of Procrustes, Antifragile, Skin in the Game

Incerto

Questo libro offre una nuova visione del mondo. La prospettiva che cambierà le nostre idee sulla società e ispirerà le nostre scelte quotidiane. Ci aiuterà a comprendere come il nostro corpo si protegge dalle malattie e le specie viventi si evolvono, come la libertà d’impresa crea prosperità e il genio si trasforma in innovazione. Ci farà scoprire che se viviamo più a lungo non è la medicina che dobbiamo ringraziare, che meno dati sono disponibili e più un’analisi sarà accurata, e che il naufragio del Titanic ha salvato molte più persone di quante ne abbia fatte annegare. La chiave di tutto è l’antifragilità. Sappiamo che la nostra incapacità di comprendere a fondo i fenomeni umani e naturali ci espone al rischio degli eventi inaspettati. Ma l’incertezza non è solo una fonte di pericoli da cui difendersi: possiamo trarre vantaggio dalla volatilità e dal disordine, persino dagli errori, ed essere quindi antifragili. Il robusto sopporta gli shock e rimane uguale a se stesso, l’antifragile li desidera, e se ne nutre per crescere e migliorare. Medicina, alimentazione, architettura, tecnologia, informazione, politica, economia, gestione dei risparmi: sono solo alcuni dei campi di applicazione pratica in cui Nassim Nicholas Taleb ci accompagna, con l’ironia e la verve polemica che lo hanno reso celebre. Nell’ottica dell’antifragilità, le città-stato funzionano meglio degli stati-nazione, la spontanea confusione dei suk è preferibile all’eleganza formale dei mercati regolati, le grandi corporation sono una minaccia per la società, tanto quanto i piccoli imprenditori ne rappresentano la forza. E per raggiungere un maggior benessere personale e collettivo non è necessario fare sempre di più: meno è meglio. Attingendo da uno sconfinato repertorio di episodi storici, fenomeni biologici e naturali, curiose esperienze personali, unendo la logica matematica alla scettica saggezza degli antichi e allo spirito pratico dell’uomo della strada, Taleb è riuscito nel tentativo di creare una guida eclettica, scanzonata e iconoclasta per orientarsi in un mondo dominato dal caos, il mondo del Cigno nero.

Antifragile. Prosperare nel disordine

Der Zufall ist des Glückes Schmied. Glück oder Zufall sind viel bestimmender in unserem Leben, als wir denken. Wir neigen dazu, unser Glück auf unsere eigenen Fähigkeiten zurückzuführen, den Zufall halten wir für unsere Bestimmung. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, renommierter Statistiker und Erfolgsautor des Bestsellers »Der schwarze Schwan«, entlarvt unsere menschliche Schwäche, dort Zusammenhänge zu suchen, wo keine sind.

Die unterschätzte Rolle des Zufalls in unserem Leben

Narren des Zufalls

Warum wir nur denen vertrauen sollten, die etwas zu verlieren haben Stehen wir für die Risiken ein, die wir verursachen? Zu viele der Menschen, die auf der Welt Macht und Einfluss haben, so Nassim Nicholas Taleb, müssen nicht wirklich den Kopf hinhalten für das, was sie tun und veranlassen. Intellektuelle, Journalisten, Bürokraten, Banker, ihnen vor allem wirft er vor, kein »Skin in the Game« zu haben. Weil sie den Preis nicht bezahlen müssen, wenn sie irren, fällen sie schlechte Entscheidungen. Taleb zeigt anhand vieler Beispiele, wie »Skin in the Game«, ein fundamentales Konzept des Risikomanagements, auf alle Bereiche unseres Lebens übertragen werden kann. Sein neues Buch, so provozierend und bahnbrechend wie »Der Schwarze Schwan«, fordert uns heraus, alles, was wir über Risiko und Verantwortung in Politik, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft zu wissen glauben, neu zu denken.

Das Risiko und sein Preis

el impacto de lo altamente improbable

El cisne negro

¿Qué es un cisne negro? Un hecho improbable, impredecible y de consecuencias imprevisibles. El Cisne Negro del profesor Nassim Nicholas Taleb es best seller en el New York Times y Amazon.com. Un libro que cambiará la visión del mundo. ¿Qué es un cisne negro? Para empezar, es un hecho improbable, sus consecuencias son import antes y todas las explicaciones que se puedan ofrecer a posteriori no tienen en cuenta el azar y sólo buscan encajar lo imprevisible en un modelo perfecto. El éxito de Google y YouTube, y hasta el 11-S, son "cisnes negros". Con ironía, irreverencia y un profundo conocimiento de los caprichos del mundo real, un especialista en incertidumbre y matemático implacable nos conduce por los deliciosos vericuetos de lo improbable.

"The acclaimed author of the influential bestseller The Black Swan, Nicholas Nassim Taleb takes a next big step with a deceptively simple concept: the "antifragile." Like the Greek hydra that grows two heads for each one it loses, people, systems, and institutions that are antifragile not only withstand shocks, they benefit from them. In a modern world dominated by chaos and uncertainty, Antifragile is a revolutionary vision from one of the most subversive and important thinkers of our time"--

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Books

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