' 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 YorkerĪre 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.

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. The astonishing success of Google was a black swan so was 9/11. ' A book] that altered modern thinking.'- The Times (London)Ī 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. 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. What is crucial is that the antifragile loves errors, as it incurs small harm and large benefits from them.

The resilient resists shocks and stays the same the antifragile gets better and better. 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. Just as human bones get stronger when subjected to stress and tension, many things in life benefit from disorder, volatility, and turmoil.

richly crammed with insights, stories, fine phrases and intriguing asides.' -The Wall Street Journal 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 boxed set. 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.

Incerto fooled by randomness