| Prologue | | xvii | |
| On the Plumage of Birds | | xvii | |
| What you Do Not Know | | xix | |
| Experts and ``Empty Suits'' | | xx | |
| Learning to Learn | | xxi | |
| A New Kind of Ingratitude | | xxii | |
| Life Is Very Unusual | | xxiv | |
| Plato and the Nerd | | xxv | |
| Too Dull to Write About | | xxvi | |
| The Bottom Line | | xxvii | |
| Chapters Map | | xxviii | |
| PART ONE: UMBERTO ECO'S ANTILIBRARY, OR HOW WE SEEK VALIDATION |
| | 1 | |
| The Apprenticeship of an Empirical Skeptic |
| | 3 | |
| | 3 | |
| | 6 | |
| | 7 | |
| | 7 | |
| History and the Triplet of Opacity |
| | 8 | |
| Nobody Knows What's Going On |
| | 9 | |
| History Does Not Crawl, It Jumps |
| | 10 | |
| Dear Diary: On History Running Backward |
| | 12 | |
| | 14 | |
| | 15 | |
| | 17 | |
| | 18 | |
| The Four-Letter Word of Independence |
| | 20 | |
| | 21 | |
| | 23 | |
| The Speculator and the Prostitute |
| | 26 | |
| | 26 | |
| | 28 | |
| The Advent of Scalability |
| | 29 | |
| Scalability and Globalization |
| | 31 | |
| Travels Inside Mediocristan |
| | 32 | |
| The Strange Country of Extremistan |
| | 33 | |
| Extremistan and Knowledge |
| | 34 | |
| | 35 | |
| The Tyranny of the Accident |
| | 35 | |
| One Thousand and One Days, or How Not to Be a Sucker |
| | 38 | |
| How to Learn from the Turkey |
| | 40 | |
| | 43 | |
| A Black Swan Is Relative to Knowledge |
| | 44 | |
| A Brief History of the Black Swan Problem |
| | 45 | |
| Sextus the (Alas) Empirical |
| | 46 | |
| | 47 | |
| The Skeptic, Friend of Religion |
| | 48 | |
| I Don't Want to Be a Turkey |
| | 49 | |
| They Want to Live in Mediocristan |
| | 49 | |
| Confirmation Shmonfirmation! |
| | 51 | |
| Zoogles Are Not All Boogles |
| | 53 | |
| | 55 | |
| | 56 | |
| | 58 | |
| | 59 | |
| | 60 | |
| | 61 | |
| | 62 | |
| On the Causes of My Rejection of Causes |
| | 62 | |
| | 64 | |
| | 67 | |
| Andrey Nikolayevich's Rule |
| | 68 | |
| | 70 | |
| Remembrance of Things Not Quite Past |
| | 70 | |
| | 71 | |
| | 73 | |
| To Be Wrong with Infinite Precision |
| | 74 | |
| | 75 | |
| The Sensational and the Black Swan |
| | 76 | |
| | 77 | |
| The Pull of the Sensational |
| | 79 | |
| | 81 | |
| | 82 | |
| How to Avert the Narrative Fallac |
| | 83 | |
| Living in the Antechamber of Hope |
| | 85 | |
| | 86 | |
| Where the Relevant Is the Sensational |
| | 87 | |
| | 88 | |
| | 89 | |
| Human Nature, Happiness, and Lumpy Rewards |
| | 91 | |
| | 92 | |
| | 92 | |
| The Sweet Trap of Anticipation |
| | 93 | |
| When You Need the Bastiani Fortress |
| | 94 | |
| El desierto de los tartaros |
| | 94 | |
| | 96 | |
| Giacomo Casanova's Unfailing Luck: The Problem of Silent Evidence |
| | 100 | |
| The Story of the Drowned Worshippers |
| | 100 | |
| | 102 | |
| How to Become a Millionaire in Ten Steps |
| | 105 | |
| | 107 | |
| | 108 | |
| | 108 | |
| The Evolution of the Swimmer's Body |
| | 109 | |
| What You See and What You Don't See |
| | 110 | |
| | 112 | |
| The Teflon-style Protection of Giacomo Casanova |
| | 112 | |
| | 115 | |
| I Am a Black Swan: The Anthropic Bias |
| | 117 | |
| | 119 | |
| The Ludic Fallacy, or The Uncertainty of the Nerd |
| | 122 | |
| | 122 | |
| | 123 | |
| | 125 | |
| The Uncertainly of the Nerd |
| | 127 | |
| Gambling with the Wrong Dice |
| | 129 | |
| | 131 | |
| The Cosmetic Rises to the Surface |
| | 131 | |
| | 132 | |
| PART TWO: WE JUST CAN'T PREDICT |
| | 135 | |
| From Yogi Berra to Henri Poincare |
| | 136 | |
| The Scandal of Prediction |
| | 137 | |
| On the Vagueness of Catherine's Lover Count |
| | 138 | |
| Black Swan Blindness Redux |
| | 141 | |
| | 142 | |
| Information Is Bad for Knowledge |
| | 142 | |
| The Expert Problem, or the Tragedy of the Empty Suit |
| | 145 | |
| What Moves and What Does Not Move |
| | 145 | |
| How to Have the Last Laugh |
| | 148 | |
| | 149 | |
| | 150 | |
| | 151 | |
| | 154 | |
| ``Other Than That,'' It Was Okay |
| | 156 | |
| The Beauty of Technology: Excel Spreadsheets |
| | 158 | |
| The Character of Prediction Errors |
| | 159 | |
| Don't Cross a River if It Is (on Average) Four Feet Deep |
| | 160 | |
| | 163 | |
| | 163 | |
| How to Look for Bird Poop |
| | 165 | |
| How to Look for Bird Poop |
| | 165 | |
| | 166 | |
| A Solution Waiting for a Problem |
| | 169 | |
| | 170 | |
| How to Predict Your Predictions! |
| | 171 | |
| | 174 | |
| Third Republic-Style Decorum |
| | 174 | |
| | 176 | |
| | 179 | |
| | 181 | |
| | 183 | |
| | 183 | |
| | 185 | |
| That Great Anticipation Machine |
| | 189 | |
| | 190 | |
| Monsieur de Montaigne, Epistemocrat |
| | 191 | |
| | 192 | |
| The Past's Past, and the Past's Future |
| | 193 | |
| Prediction, Misprediction, and Happiness |
| | 194 | |
| Helenus and the Reverse Prophecies |
| | 195 | |
| | 196 | |
| Once Again, Incomplete Information |
| | 197 | |
| | 198 | |
| Appelles the Painter, or What Do You Do if You Cannot Predict? |
| | 201 | |
| Advice Is Cheap, Very Cheap |
| | 201 | |
| Being a Fool in the Right Places |
| | 203 | |
| | 203 | |
| The Idea of Positive Accident |
| | 203 | |
| Volatility and Risk of Black Swan |
| | 204 | |
| | 205 | |
| ``Nobody Knows Anything'' |
| | 206 | |
| | 210 | |
| PART THREE: THOSE GRAY SWANS OF EXTREMISTAN |
| | 213 | |
| From Mediocristan to Extremistan, and Back |
| | 215 | |
| | 215 | |
| | 216 | |
| | 218 | |
| | 220 | |
| Nobody Is Safe in Extremistan |
| | 220 | |
| | 221 | |
| | 223 | |
| | 225 | |
| Reversals Away from Extremistan |
| | 227 | |
| The Bell Curve, That Great Intellectual Fraud |
| | 229 | |
| The Gaussian and the Mandelbrotian |
| | 229 | |
| The Increase in the Decrease |
| | 231 | |
| | 232 | |
| | 234 | |
| | 234 | |
| Extremistan and the 80/20 Rule |
| | 235 | |
| | 236 | |
| How Coffee Drinking Can Be Safe |
| | 237 | |
| | 239 | |
| How to Cause Catastrophes |
| | 240 | |
| Quetelet's Average Monster |
| | 240 | |
| | 241 | |
| | 242 | |
| | 243 | |
| Eliminating Unfair Influence |
| | 243 | |
| ``The Greeks Would Have Deified It'' |
| | 244 | |
| | 244 | |
| A (Literary) Thought Experiment on Where the Bell Curve Comes From |
| | 245 | |
| Those Comforting Assumptions |
| | 250 | |
| ``The Ubiquity of the Gaussian'' |
| | 251 | |
| The Aesthetics of Randomness |
| | 253 | |
| | 253 | |
| The Platonicity of Triangles |
| | 256 | |
| | 256 | |
| | 257 | |
| A Visual Approach to Extremistan/Mediocristan |
| | 259 | |
| | 260 | |
| The Logic of Fractal Randomness (with a Warning) |
| | 262 | |
| The Problem of the Upper Bound |
| | 266 | |
| | 266 | |
| The Water Puddle Revisited |
| | 267 | |
| From Representation to Reality |
| | 268 | |
| Once Again, Beware the Forecasters |
| | 270 | |
| Once Again, a Happy Solution |
| | 270 | |
| | 272 | |
| Locke's Madmen, or Bell Curves in the Wrong Places |
| | 274 | |
| | 275 | |
| | 275 | |
| Anyone Can Become President |
| | 277 | |
| | 278 | |
| | 281 | |
| | 281 | |
| | 282 | |
| The Uncertainty of the Phony |
| | 286 | |
| | 286 | |
| | 287 | |
| Can Philosophers Be Dangerous to Society? |
| | 288 | |
| | 289 | |
| How Many Wittgensteins Can Dance on the Head of a Pin? |
| | 289 | |
| Where Is Popper When You Need Him? |
| | 290 | |
| The Bishop and the Analyst |
| | 291 | |
| Easier Than You Think: The Problem of Decision Under Skepticism |
| | 292 | |
| | 293 | |
| Half and Half, or How to Get Even with the Black Swan |
| | 295 | |
| When Missing a Train Is Painless |
| | 297 | |
| | 297 | |
| Epilogue: Yevgenia's White Swans | | 299 | |
| Acknowledgments | | 301 | |
| Glossary | | 307 | |
| Notes | | 311 | |
| Bibliography | | 331 | |
| Index | | 359 | |
$ 28.00 (Come calcoliamo i 
