The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable: Amazon.co.uk: Nassim Nicholas Taleb: Books

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Product Description

International Herald Tribune

'Taleb's book deserves our attention, and our thanks'

Niall Ferguson, Sunday Telegraph

'An idiosyncratically brilliant new book'

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Inside This Book (Learn More)

First Sentence
This is not an autobiography, so I will skip the scenes of war. Read the first page

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Customer Reviews

170 Reviews

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3.2 out of 5 stars (170 customer reviews)

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431 of 457 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars right, interesting, but extremely irritating, 28 Nov 2007

By

Dean Swift (Hertfordshire) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (Hardcover)

Taleb has one good idea, a great idea even, and an infinite number of ways of talking about it. It is essentially the same idea as his last book, Fooled by Randomness: namely that life does not behave with regularity. Those who think it does, he says, will always be tripped up by the unexpected. Black Swan extends that idea, beyond the financial markets he concentrated on in Randomness, to just about all walks of life. He is a magpie for anecdote and stray pieces of supporting evidence wherever he can find them. He calls all this 'skeptical empiricism'.
The qualification is that his big idea is not original, though his numerous examples do help bring home its ubiquity. More problematically, he overstates its usefulness. For when it comes to calling your next move, the unpredictable and the unexpected are, by definition, not things we can anticipate. And though he is right that in the long run there will undoubtedly by high impact improbably events, it is also true, as Keynes said, that in the long run we are all dead: organising your life on the principle that something radical might come along doesn't solve the everyday problem of what to next.
In short, he exaggerates his own insight and the authority it gives him. That's a wicked irony, for the chief target of his ire is those with an exaggerated sense of insight and control over their lives.
Oh, and the tone... Taleb wants to be seen as a radical iconoclast. Every sentence drips righteousness and often irritation. He is the strutting, impatient sage, the rest of us blinkered morons. Apparently he doesn't like his editors trying to change this. A word of advice to the author: if you want your advice heeded, don't shout and sneer at your audience. For this reason, an interesting thesis, but in the end a wearisome read.

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136 of 144 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars In a nutshell: insightful but rambling, 19 Jun 2009

By

A. Schaffer "theschaff" (London) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)

This review is from: The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (Paperback)

There are many reviews here already, so I'll keep this short:

- Content: makes insightful points on limitations of our knowledge, human temptation to identify false trends and narratives, follow herd mentality, blindly follow 'experts', and so forth. He calls this 'skeptical empiricism'.

- Style: long-winded and rambling, skipping from personal stories from Lebanon, to parables intended to represent the author, to dull discussions on history of mathematics. I didn't mind it, but some readers hate it.

- Author: massively arrogant and up himself. Thinks he's had the best idea since sliced bread. He's got a good idea, but he's not the first or the only one, just the one with the biggest mouth.

- Other reads: there are better books out there on similar subjects. John Kay (of the FT) writes essays from a similar position, much more concisely and more to the point.

Hope that helps!

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49 of 53 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars An excellent book somewhat spoiled by the tone of the author, 29 May 2008

By

David Barton (London) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (Paperback)

I must admit that I approached reading this book with some trepidation. I had read Taleb's earlier book "Fooled By Randomness" and whilst I found that book very interesting I also found it very exasperating. This book was the same, only more so.

The central theme of the book is that unexpected random events are much more likely to have far greater impact than is presumed by traditional statistics . In contrast he shows that there are domains where extreme events or values are more frequent and dominate overall. Taleb's arguments are convincing and he also shows why prediction in general is very difficult and describes human being's desires to post-rationalise events. Because prediction is thus impossible and because the impact of these extreme random events (the 'Black Swans') is so large his argument is that this makes a mockery of much of history, economics and financial theory.

The main problem with the book is the tone of the author. Taleb clearly does not suffer fools gladly and it seems that he considers most people in economics, finance, statistics and academia as fools. He comes across as believing that he is the only one who really gets these ideas. His constant attacks on the 'dark suits' and academics (not to mention several strange jibes at the French) become very wearing. Also his dismissal of the normal distribution is overdone since there are clearly areas where it works well.

All in all a very good book but I wish he would overcome his arrogance before the next one.

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