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: It must be me then?
Summary: 1 Stars
I just cannot agree with the reviews giving this 5 stars. I have only given it one star because you can't give it nought. (Amazon please work on that.) I have made it to page 100 and intend reading it to the end just in case it turns a corner. Taleb takes an inordinate length of pages to explain fairly ordinary concepts and pretends that he is being breathtakingly original. He is extremely fond of the sound of his own voice and has a writing style that is childlike in places. I have found Argos catalogues more "scholarly". So far it has not enlightened me one bit. Emperor's new clothes? The content of the 100 pages that I have read so far would barely provide enough material for a brief newspaper article. I would read a few bits from it before I went near it if I were you.Book Review: I like the cover!
Summary: 3 Stars
Like a lot of books that I seem to choose, the subject is interesting, but the ability of most modern authors to precis seems to have been completely lost. Condensed to one or two chapters would have been a better plan.
But, to all idiots that sell deep out of the money puts, this book talks about why you shouldn't do it. Because you obviously need it pointed out to you. One of my university professors, McCosh, his name was, used to call it 'The Y Factor' rather than a Black Swan.
Book Review: Werbose waffle
Summary: 2 Stars
Well, 500 pages to tell you that reality is unpredictable. And he discovered it all on his own, because all the way during the last 10,000 years people thought that they can predict every day.
What was to be said in this book can comfortably fit in 20 pages. Ok, maybe 30 if you really can not control yourself ...
Book Review: No Original Points + Uninteresting + Arrogant
Summary: 1 Stars
Why I didn't like this book:-
- I found the author self indulgent and arrogant. He repeatedly implied he was on a higher level to all other thinkers (yet makes no original points)
- I found the points he did try to make totally disorganised. It was like reading someone's personal random jottings. Not well thought out and constructed like many good popular science books.
- places huge importance on his own irrelevant anecdotes. made the whole book feel like his very subjective viewpoint.
- dismisses existing economic theories as rubbish since they are not always good at predicting extreme events like market crashes. Yet offers no alternative or deeper explanations.
- Repeatedly ridicules users of Gaussian bell curves (which includes much of the scientific world). Does not properly explain to the reader they are a *tool for approximations* and why they are not always useful in economics
Written in the inside cover notes, the author claims to uncover a massively significant new idea - that the world is capable of generating random events that we cant explain. Nothing new here at all!!
If you a much better analysis of science that really changes the world, I'd recommend you try the books -
The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins
Freakonomics by Steven Levit
The Tipping point by Malcolm Gladwell
Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another by Phillip Ball
( after the first few slow chapters of 'Critical Mass', it improves and better explains all the ideas in 'The Black Swan')
Book Review: Applied maths has never been so fascinating...economic and social analysis from celebrated Wall Street dissident
Summary: 4 Stars
Ever wondered why the most significant events in world history are also the most unexpected? From the assassination of Lincoln to the attacks of 9/11, iconoclastic events occur precisely because there was no way they could have been foreseen or prevented.
These events are "black swans" - the unexpected phenomena which give the lie to naive hypotheses, such as "all swans are white". All it takes, says Taleb, is the appearance of one aberration to explode the certainty on which we've been relying and force us to reassess our "truths".
The main point of the book is to persuade humanity to make imaginative estimates about rather than relying on the past to predict the future - at one point even proposing the concept of an anti-resume, or wish-list, as a more reliable guide to an employee's career path and capabilities than the traditional list of examinations and achievements.
Part history, part economic and social analysis, Taleb's book is an absorbing read. With experience as a senior trader on Wall Street as well as a writer and academic, he is intimately familiar with the concepts of mathematical probability and presents his arguments clearly and rationally - although you'll need to keep your wits about you to follow every twist and turn.
He has a novelist's facility for storytelling and a good eye for a juicy metaphor, too, with his fictional countries Extremistan and Mediocristan and imaginary author Yevegenia Krasnova providing much intellectual entertainment.
Witty, irreverent, unusual and compelling, this is a book for anyone who's ever wondered about the fabric of reality or the causal links that hold it together.
as published at Subba-Cultcha.com