- Paperback: 480 pages
- Publisher: Random House Trade; 2 edition (11 May 2010)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 081297381X
- ISBN-13: 978-0812973815
- Product Dimensions: 13.2 x 2.5 x 20.2 cm
- Average Customer Review: 2.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
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Amazon Bestsellers Rank:
9,891 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #4 in Books > Business, Finance & Law > Professional Finance > Forecasting
- #37 in Books > Science & Nature > Mathematics > Popular Maths
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More About the Author
Product Description
Product Description
A black swan is an event, positive or negative, that is deemed improbable yet causes massive consequences. In this groundbreaking and prophetic book, Taleb shows in a playful way that Black Swan events explain almost everything about our world, and yet we—especially the experts—are blind to them. In this second edition, Taleb has added a new essay, On Robustness and Fragility, which offers tools to navigate and exploit a Black Swan world.
*2nd Edition, With a new essay: "On Robustness and Fragility"
Inside This Book
(Learn More)
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
6 of 8 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
You may think modern technology would avoid this, but if you buy this book today (November 2010), you get a 2.5 year old edition, and not the May 2010 updated version with the new chapter... Very disappointing...
3 of 5 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
After reading the Black Swan I'm not really sure what just happened. At first I wasn't sure I was going to get through the whole thing. The prose is very different for a non-fiction-science-and-probability book. At least not what I was expecting. The book has small parts of memoir woven throughout, some of which seem to fit, others seem like filler, and others yet are probably over my head and just add to the confusion.
In the 3rd chapter Taleb tells a story about an obscure, unpublished novelist Yevgenia Krasnova and how the success of her novel was a highly improbable event—a Black Swan. Not having heard of this unique success story I put down my book and went to Amazon for more info. After a few minutes of unsuccessful searching in circles I kept reading only to find a footnote at the beginning of Chapter 3 telling me that Yevgenia is fictional.
This didn't sit well with me, especially because my internet search behaviour was predicted and footnoted on the very next page. I began to wonder what other sorts of liberties Taleb was going to take but I kept going because I didn't want to be the type of 'Sucker' Taleb talks about. (Yevgenia's character comes up again and I'm curious how purely fictional or perhaps partially autobiographical her character is.)
Taleb is clearly a very well read and studied man and is not shy about letting you know it. But through this self confidence (possibly arrogance) comes a very lively and passionate dissection of economics as a science and those in it's business, specifically market and economic theorists, traders, investment bankers, portfolio managers, etc.
It's great to read Taleb call out the Economics Nobel Prize committee. One section titled "More Horror" starts:
"Things got a lot worse in 1997. The Swedish academy gave another round of Gaussian-based Nobel Prizes to Myron Scholes and Robert C. Merton, who had improved on an old mathematical formula and made it compatible with the existing grand Gaussian general financial equilibrium theories—hence acceptable to the economics establishment."
It's not the easiest book to read through (the philosophical references come fast and furious) and Taleb's style is sometimes discontinuous, sometimes wordy, and sometimes longwinded, however, there are some great ideas in this book.
7 of 10 (which rounds down to 3 stars)
I'll definitely be reading Taleb's earlier book, Fooled by Randomness.
In the 3rd chapter Taleb tells a story about an obscure, unpublished novelist Yevgenia Krasnova and how the success of her novel was a highly improbable event—a Black Swan. Not having heard of this unique success story I put down my book and went to Amazon for more info. After a few minutes of unsuccessful searching in circles I kept reading only to find a footnote at the beginning of Chapter 3 telling me that Yevgenia is fictional.
This didn't sit well with me, especially because my internet search behaviour was predicted and footnoted on the very next page. I began to wonder what other sorts of liberties Taleb was going to take but I kept going because I didn't want to be the type of 'Sucker' Taleb talks about. (Yevgenia's character comes up again and I'm curious how purely fictional or perhaps partially autobiographical her character is.)
Taleb is clearly a very well read and studied man and is not shy about letting you know it. But through this self confidence (possibly arrogance) comes a very lively and passionate dissection of economics as a science and those in it's business, specifically market and economic theorists, traders, investment bankers, portfolio managers, etc.
It's great to read Taleb call out the Economics Nobel Prize committee. One section titled "More Horror" starts:
"Things got a lot worse in 1997. The Swedish academy gave another round of Gaussian-based Nobel Prizes to Myron Scholes and Robert C. Merton, who had improved on an old mathematical formula and made it compatible with the existing grand Gaussian general financial equilibrium theories—hence acceptable to the economics establishment."
It's not the easiest book to read through (the philosophical references come fast and furious) and Taleb's style is sometimes discontinuous, sometimes wordy, and sometimes longwinded, however, there are some great ideas in this book.
7 of 10 (which rounds down to 3 stars)
I'll definitely be reading Taleb's earlier book, Fooled by Randomness.
1 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Not finished this yet, but it's shaping up nicely with some interesting ideas about how the improbable may be less so ....
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