The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
Book Review: A fine antidote to gullibility
Summary: 5 Stars
According to critic Harold Bloom, Hamlet's predicament is not "that he thinks too much" but rather that "he thinks too well," being ultimately "unable to rest in illusions of any kind." The same could be said for philosopher, essayist and trader Nassim Nicholas Taleb, who finds something rotten in misguided yet supremely confident investment gurus, traders, hedge fund managers, Wall Street bankers, M.B.A.s, CEOs, Nobel-winning economists and others who claim that they can predict the future and explain the past. Like everyone else, says Taleb, these so-called "experts" fail to appreciate "black swans": highly consequential but unlikely events that render predictions and standard explanations worse than worthless. Taleb's style is personal and literary, but his heterodox insights are rigorous (if sometimes jolted by authorial filigree). This combination makes for a thrilling, disturbing, contentious and unforgettable book on chance and randomness. While Taleb offers strong medicine some readers may find too bitter at times, we prescribe it to anyone who wants a powerful inoculation against gullibility.Book Review: Thinking Person's Book
Summary: 5 Stars
"The Black Swan" forces you think in new ways and makes you realize that seeming anomalies in life highlight the importance of random events. Those events such as the appearance of one black swan can invalidate the statement "all swans are white."
Taleb successfully makes a rational presentation of his ideas though at times it does get somewhat scholarly for the average reader. Still he has a way of incorporating humour into his writing style.
His previous book "Fooled by Randomness" is also good though the ideas in that book are less developed than in this book. I highly recommend "The Black Swan" and for a random book outside this field try "Nexus: A Neo Novel." I loved it for its psychological and spiritual insights.
Book Review: Most Revelatory Book
Summary: 5 Stars
Nassim Nicholas Taleb's "Like the Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable" is clearly a revelatory book.
In reading this book I was most highly impressed with Taleb's ideas about unexpected events in life, and about the value of thinking outside of the box.
Taleb's symbol for the highly improbable in life is the black swan. Further, he links three aspects as central components in a highly improbable event; the three components being that firstly an event is unpredictable, secondly that it carries a massive impact, and thirdly that it is not consciously acknowledged until after the fact.
Written in the format of a psychological, spiritual fiction adventure is another book that I highly recommend if you found "The Black Swan" interesting; and this book is "Nexus: A Neo Novel"
In NEXUS by Deborah Morrison and Arvind Singh, the main character Logan experiences the 'unexpected' when he coincidentally discovers his lost love Sarah at a spiritual retreat designed to discover the centre of their being. Logan's soul-searching journey with the 'unexpected' and 'thinking outside of the box' is awesome, and demonstrates how the unpredictable if lived out intuitively can have a massive impact on one's life. I was fascinated with some of the parallel themes between NEXUS and " Like the Black Swan"
Book Review: A great feat of modern thinking
Summary: 5 Stars
THE BLACK SWAN is a highly acclaimed piece of work from the writer of the stellar FOOLED BY RANDOMNES. Taleb is a philosopher of randomness, and before becoming a writer he worked on Wall Street as a senior trader. This book explores our inherent yet primerily ignored relationship with Black Swan theory, first concieved by David Hume. I encourage anyone who is remotely intersted in society, philosophy, politics or discussion to pick up this book and they won't regret it.
Book Review: Beware the Forecasters
Summary: 5 Stars
The author Nassim Nicholas Taleb has produced a most extraordinary piece of literary diacritic exposition. His principal endeavour is exposing and explaining our blindness to predicting the `Big Events', Taleb's `Black Swans', which have the unerring ability to blindside us on almost every occasion. He refers to this prescient inaptitude as the `scandal of prediction'. How can we possibly figure out properties of the infinite unknown, based on the finite known? Good point, well put.
The book inquires into the reasons for such blindness. Principal amongst them is what the author refers to as `epistemic arrogance', our hubris concerning the extent of our knowledge. He claims that as our knowledge of the world around us grows, with ever-increasing quantities of data, it is accompanied by a corresponding increase in confusion, ignorance and conceit. This arises because we humans have an innate tendency to overestimate our deductive abilities based on knowledge, while at the same time grossly underestimate uncertainty.
We have a need, and are hard-wired, to fit a story or pattern to all this data, whether connected or otherwise - the `narrative fallacy'. And how do we assuage this need? By artificially reducing the `problem space', limiting the bounds of uncertainty, in a vainglorious attempt to tame the Black Swans. Statisticians smugly assign probabilities to events, putting our faith in Taleb's bête noire: the Gaussian bell curve.
Our misuse of the Gaussian is legendary, indeed it can be catastrophic; we create illusions of certainty where, in reality, no such thing exists. We are blinded by the bell curve, that "Great Intellectual Fraud". It is the application of what Taleb refers to as the `ludic fallacy' - basing studies of chance on the limited world of games and dice - to randomness. Unfortunately, such randomness does not resemble randomness in real life. Hence the existence of Black Swans. Frighteningly, risk assessors and bankers amongst others, employ the bell curve as a risk-measurement tool. On a bell curve, the odds of a deviation reduce exponentially as you move away from the average. These `outliers' can therefore, as the argument goes, be safely ignored. So the probability of say, two passenger aircraft flying into adjacent downtown city skyscrapers at practically the same time is judged to effectively be zero. Tragically, we now know this is not the case. But, you argue, how can we possibly ever hope to predict such improbable events? The simple answer is we cannot. However, the author suggests fascinating strategies to prepare for such events and mitigate the effects of our notorious inability to predict the unpredictable.
This is a fascinating and mindset-changing book. It takes you outside the box. Taleb's arguments are very persuasive, if sometimes a touch too academic. For example, I found Chapter 15, very hard work. Admittedly, he suggests the non-technical reader skip this chapter, but I always feel somewhat disenfranchised at such comments, especially here since it contains important material. Sentences such as "the speed of the decrease here remains constant or does not decline" induces a sort of rabbit-in-the-headlights effect on my brain.
On the other hand, the concluding chapters 17, 18 and 19 are wonderful, and tie up the preceding material beautifully. The last chapter, entitled "The End", is a short personal approach to life by the author, which includes such pearls of wisdom as "missing a train is only painful if you run after it".
Judging by the attacks Taleb has received from the `establishment', including economists, academics, statisticians, and philosophers, one can only assume he must be doing something right. Someone who has a self-professed allergy to economists who "wear suits and spin theories", and "strained businessmen", can't be all bad.
I recommend this book wholeheartedly to everyone. Five very well deserved stars.