The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
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List Price: $26.95
Our Price: $17.79
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Manufacturer: Random House
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Average Customer Rating:   
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Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 003.54
EAN: 9781400063512
ISBN: 1400063515
Label: Random House
Manufacturer: Random House
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 400
Publication Date: 2007-04-17
Publisher: Random House
Release Date: 2007-04-17
Studio: Random House
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Editorial Reviews:
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A black swan is a highly improbable event with three principal characteristics: It is unpredictable; it carries a massive impact; and, after the fact, we concoct an explanation that makes it appear less random, and more predictable, than it was. The astonishing success of Google was a black swan; so was 9/11. For Nassim Nicholas Taleb, black swans underlie almost everything about our world, from the rise of religions to events in our own personal lives.
Why do we not acknowledge the phenomenon of black swans until after they occur? Part of the answer, according to Taleb, is that humans are hardwired to learn specifics when they should be focused on generalities. We concentrate on things we already know and time and time again fail to take into consideration what we don’t know. We are, therefore, unable to truly estimate opportunities, too vulnerable to the impulse to simplify, narrate, and categorize, and not open enough to rewarding those who can imagine the “impossible.”
For years, Taleb has studied how we fool ourselves into thinking we know more than we actually do. We restrict our thinking to the irrelevant and inconsequential, while large events continue to surprise us and shape our world. Now, in this revelatory book, Taleb explains everything we know about what we don’t know. He offers surprisingly simple tricks for dealing with black swans and benefiting from them.
Elegant, startling, and universal in its applications The Black Swan will change the way you look at the world. Taleb is a vastly entertaining writer, with wit, irreverence, and unusual stories to tell. He has a polymathic command of subjects ranging from cognitive science to business to probability theory. The Black Swan is a landmark book–itself a black swan.
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: Fantastic perspectives that increase your own horizons
Comment: Loved it. Great thinking, fantastic perspectives..like this gem referring to Umberto Eco's library "He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with "Wow! Signore professore dottore Eco, what a library you have! How many of these books have you read?" and the others -- a very small minority -- who get the point that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market will allow you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books."..
And that is just one example. See the wealth of other reviews here for more. If you even think you might be interested, don't hesitate!
Customer Rating:
Summary: The author seems to fall into ludic fallacy(page 182) which he wants to dispel
Comment: page 14: I still do not understand why the author thinks that an educated person is supposed to guess better than a layman about the outcome of a war. In fact any person is as much expert in that endeavor as any other.
page 21: I still can not see the relationship between war and finance in the context.
for a philosopher examining problems in induction the boundary between true/false is not well drawn.
page 44: I wonder if he is naive. What does he expect in finance business, all reasonable people?. It is finances, it is almost expected that some people take unreasonable risks(with diabolical intentions sometimes) out of greed or out of wishful thinking. These factors are often excluded from his analysis.
I guess he also confuses the word "actuarial science" with "science". He frequently uses the word "science" for "finance" that has no roots in any of pure sciences, nor there are any independent mechanisms connecting the past and present.
From a person guarding against certainty it is ironical to see evolutionary psychology in use on page 53.
page 56: While talking about negative empiricism Taleb says "If I see someone kill I can be practically certain that he is a criminal". No, by no definition of "criminal/crime", killing necessarily implies crime (e.g. self-defense), all the while ignoring the gender bias. I do not want to be a killjoy here, but when accusing people of faulty logic in one paragraph, one can not afford to make an incorrect implication right in the next paragraph.
It is weird for a self-declared skeptical empiricist to resort to psychology while attacking mathematicians.
The references are not cited in the text, though listed in bibliography, which means its not clarified which piece is taken from which reference.
When the author generally ridiculed "fitting equations to something happened in the past" he swept all of cosmology into irrelevance with one stroke of pen.
page 87: We are social animals; hell is other people. // Nice quote
page 97: Got it wrong about hippo campus. This is where short term memory is translated into long term one.
He wants to attack actuarial mathematicians most of the time but ends up generalizing to all mathematicians. As a self-declared skeptical empiricist he is skeptical about truth in mathematics, what he does not understand is that even pure mathematics has engineering applications (e.g. control of hard drive motor). Nature does, to some extent, follow mathematics. This shows lack of depth in analysis.
page 107: Taleb criticizes "hardened by the gulag": The report is probably talking about psychological hardening which is supported by a neurobiological process described in "In search of Memory" by Eric Kandel. The author assumes it to be physiological hardening and refutes it with the rat example. In the next paragraph he calls himself philosopher.
page 129: In what Taleb describes "scientific mentality that is arrogantly called Enlightenment" agrees with Samuel Huntington's claims in The Clash of Civilizations that "the orthodox people do not share with the West the principles of Enlightenment".
page 129: He shouts "Life stands outside Platonic fold". No. pretty much all of engineering and many of pure sciences lie within and are verifiable and/or testable at the same time. These fields pretty much changed the society/culture for almost a century now.
page 154: Towards the end of the page - the author's question has geography in it and it is not surprising that the answers had that too, yet he complains about it.
page 182: He wanted to dispel Ludic fallacy and here is one instance he falls right into it. Talking about left and right handedness of people he brings Plato into picture, ridicules him and then says that the left and right handedness of molecules (stereo isomerism) matters considerably in this. There is no known evidence that stereo isomerism plays a role in this and he does not present any.
What he fails to realize is that for people money is not the most important aspect of life. It is important but only after family and relationships, so even if his analysis is right(I think it is) his calls may go unheeded.
He also does not realize that people, whatever profession they are in are partly there due to financial security and not always to do their jobs perfectly. If the system is staying afloat with Guassian approach they would not need to change it. If they are shown tangible benefits with some results of the fractal analysis they may listen to the author. After all, at least some are after money.
chapter 18: He complains why philosophers are not questioning financial experts when they invest their money. A philosopher's job is not about figuring out details of finance, it is about figuring out details in philosophy which may or may not interfere with finance. A philosopher need not necessarily act upon his/her own arguments.
page 296: If what the author says about uncertainty is assumed to be truth about uncertainty(I do), even then in the authors own words towards the end of book, people may not necessarily heed his advice, especially as author says he put lots of things like culture, before truth, let alone acting on the truth.
As the author puts earlier, the Black Swan helps in getting rid of a big player and benefiting masses; so why fight (even negative) Black Swan in the first place, (for nationalists) as long the money stays within the country.
The author really does not make it clear early in the book the boundary between what he is attacking and what he is defending. Since the author mentions Richard Dawkins' book The Blind Watchmaker, he can take a cue from Dawkins' books about defining the boundary strictly and at the beginning so that the reader stays focused during the reading. Only after reading half the book was the boundary clear to me.
He claims himself to be humble at times but there are times where he delivers unreasonable and unfair criticism, sometimes just jumping to conclusions, like the on page 107.
By generalizing his attacks on Platonic ideas including mathematics, Taleb ignores much of physics. Mathematics still is useful in physics, the most rigorous science.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Black Swan
Comment: Whether you risk manage for a living or just want to open your mind to all possibility this is a great read.
Customer Rating:
Summary: fun and interesting yet uneven
Comment: Let me put it this way: I enjoyed some chapters more than others. The first two thirds of the book is an excellent introduction into epistemology and the problem of induction. To the lay reader without experience in such matters, epistemological issues will be brought forward in a highly entertaining and relevant manner. Many questions and ideas that I (and I assume most readers) have sometimes pondered (though not as eloquently) are articulated by Taleb here. For instance, our modern day categories appear to be arbitrary: for instance, why is that most pro-choice people are also anti-strong military? These ideas seem to have nothing to do with one another yest there is a strong tendency for these and other beliefs to be held together. What this illustrates is our innate desire to reduce complexity - and that is our problem; that is why we persistently ignore, forget, or underestimate about Black Swan events.
Taleb frequently speaks in parables. The most prominent being his differentiation between Mediocristan (governed by Gaussian probability) and Extremistan (where Black Swans flourish).
Since I know nothing about business and economics, I was surprised to learn that much of the economic modeling and predicting is based on Gaussian probability which of course is ridiculous. Taleb chooses to constantly mock the financial 'experts' for this reason. The author comes down so hard on Gaussian statistics that the casual reader may think such methods are fundamentally flawed (or an 'intellectual fraud' to use the heavy handed languae of Taleb). However the domain in which Gaussian statistics is OK is still large and important to learn. Possibly this is not the case for finance though.
The weak part of the book I found to be at the end where Gray Swans are discussed - these are events that are near to Black Swans but we have some mathematics to get some understanding of them. I found the transition from talking about White and Blacks Swans to Gray Swans to be poor. He should have spent more time on Gray Swans.
I expected some discussion of Pascal wagering but was disappointed to see only a small paragraph or two on it in which Taleb appears to misunderstand Pascal's point.
Overall, a good book to read. This has sparked my interest in the subject.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Food for your brains
Comment: This book is good. Maybe I don't even understand how good it is. The way Taleb is writing gets to your ego; he feels so cocky. But, yes, man has a point. I started to laugh to myself and to my capabilities of "estimating" and even "thinking" while reading this book. Taleb has interesting view point to life; don't try to predict it, or forecast it, life will fool you anyway, sucker! Don't believe in your most valued economic forecasters, they don't know much, unfortunate... for them. Expose your self to "black swans", positive ones hopefully, try to make negative black swans to be gray swans for you, if it is grey one you have prepared yourself well for future. These swans are rare events in life, which take place even we would not like them to happen. Even one event can make a difference, and most likely a shocking difference.
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