Nassim Nicholas Taleb

ABOUT THIS BOOK

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.

the impact of the highly improbable

The black swan

Timeo Williams

Excellent book, that covers a wide variety of topics outside black swans. 

Black swan - an highly improbable event. 

I enjoyed Taleb's commentary on bankers, finance professors, the Nobel Prize, economists, ext. because it truly upsets a lot of theory's that are considered as fact, even today. 

Takeaways - I need to reread this book, after looking deeper into the arguments he mentioned, and comparing modern portfolio theory, ext with a standardized test and comparing the results.

In the author's point of view, a black swan is an 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. 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'.

The Black Swan

I would like to give it more stars, but due to the writing style I cant. One thing is the referencing back and forth in the book as well as repeating himself quite often. I have to mention that I was reading the German version, maybe the original is a bit better.

Nevertheless, Talebs explanation of black swans, our massive lack to forecasting them or the difficulty to change our way of thinking to be better prepared (known unknown) are intriguing topics.

However,  if oneself can implement this way of thinking after reading the book is another topic.

André 

I would like to give it more stars, but due to the writing style I cant. One thing is the referencing back and forth in the book as well as repeating himself quite often. I have to mention that I was reading the German version, maybe the original is a bit better.

Nevertheless, Talebs explanation of black swans, our massive lack to forecasting them or the difficulty to change our way of thinking to be better prepared (known unknown) are intriguing topics.

However,  if oneself can implement this way of thinking after reading the book is another topic.



Tuago

400 pages to make one good point. Unstructured and very repetitive writing. First case where the movie was better.

Bouke van der Bijl

Just like Fooled By Randomness, great read. This book gets more into what you should do with the knowledge that that society is shaped by highly unlikely events. You should basically ignore very long-term forecasts about society or the economy, because they are always wrong. They're basically just for entertainment.

We should also attempt to expose ourselves to positive black swans. If an opportunity comes up to talk to a big shot investor/politician/publisher/museum director, you should drop everything you're doing and take the meeting. It could affect your life in a monumental way, and such an opportunity might never come along again. This is also a good reason to live in a big city. Chance encounters are not going to happen in a small town.

Jimmy Cerone

A must read. Our whole world is crazy, thinking that the average is normal and the extreme is abnormal. In fact, it’s the extreme and unpredictable events that are becoming more and more normal and influential.

The Impact of the Highly Improbable

Keven Wang

Felipe Saldarriaga 

Nassim Taleb es brillantemente amigable para compartir los postulados relacionados a la estadística en nuestra realidad, me llevo por sobretodo el hecho de que desde la realidad le damos sentido a los modelos matemáticos y no al contrario, lo cual nos permite mejorar lo que buscamos desarrollar.

Hans Gerwitz

2 chapters of good content spread across a much longer, self-congratulatory book.

Mounir Bashour

Absolutely brilliant by a fellow Greek Orthodox Lebanese.

Chris Raastad

The Black Swan is probably one of the most intellectually stimulating books I have ever read. It's a must-read for those with interests in markets, politics, prediction, and mathematics. The book is extremely challenging to read, Taleb writes at an incredibly high level of literature and intellect that will require frequent rereading and thinking about WTF he just wrote on the last 2 pages. But it's worth it. You'll learn about black swans, extremistan, and many many other paradoxes and deceptions in our modern world of chaos.

I'm definitely due for a reread, and with the Coronavirus black swan looming its head, you'll definitely want to come back to this one soon.

Donald

Chris Aldrich

I agree almost entirely with large portions of Taleb's work here, but I've got some broad problems with his presentation of the material. I'm sure I'll come back several times over the coming weeks to rewrite portions of this review as it won't come out quite right the first time, so please bear this in mind.

My biggest critique of the work is the poor writing style and layout of his overarching arguments. It could have stood to have a stronger editor (or any editor at all??), though my supposition is that his prior work's success has allowed him the unfortunate position to either eschew an editor or dismiss any advise dispensed by one. As a result, he writes a bit too cryptically and leaves out far too much for the audience he's trying to reach. Most won't have read as widely or as deeply as he has and he could stand to include a lot more background for the interested reader.

He has a very non-linear style of writing and is constantly referring either forward or backward within the work to other sections rather than laying out his present argument in the moment. This makes for spotty reading and comprehension for the majority of readers who are not prone to do all the back-and-forth required to get his full arguments. Similarly the layout of the footnotes and the endnotes doesn't do as much as they might for the lay reader and couldn't be said to be good even for the academic community. 

Fortunately he provides a semblance of a glossary, but his definitions read like those of a 17th century dictionary rather than the clear and concise definitions he might have provided otherwise. This does little to help clarify his points.

Given the diversity of his background, he leaves something to be desired in his overall viewpoint and splits a happy middle ground between that of a philosopher and that of a mathematician. I'm interested to read a more mathematical driven version of his thinking, but nothing in his presentation here gives me much hope that his mathematical exposition will live up what a pure mathematician would expect from a text. Naturally, here in writing for a more broad public, he completely leaves out any real mathematics in favor for higher book sales. He's left then primarily with a more philosophic viewpoint which is reasonably established and laid out, but which still suffers from a lack of clarity even for someone well-versed in the field and who agrees with much of (or even all of) what he's saying.

I was much more impressed with the material that was added afterwards in the second edition (which I read). It was far more logically presented and written, I only wish the original part had been so well thought out and laid out. 

I'm glad his work is popular enough that despite his ability to present his ideas and thoughts that they still manage to sell as many copies and reach as broad an audience as they do. We certainly need more of his viewpoint in the world, I just wish that he was a far better communicator of his ideas to help them stick in the minds of others better. 

He does a reasonably good job of showing where he's coming from, though I find myself wondering if he's delved into the broader writings of researchers in the complexity theory community. I know he's spoken of those in information theory subsequent to this work, but suspect that his reading into information theory and complexity theory has come after he's written this work. I suspect that he'll go further and farther in his theories once he has. 

I find myself thinking of Taleb as a "Big Historian", but one who doesn't realize that the field exists yet. Those who are aware of it will find his writing and analysis very intriguing.

Given his presentation, I find myself most pleased with is analogies of economics, stability, and conceptualization of robustness with those of evolutionary theory (or "mother nature" as he tends to term things.) Most evolutionary theorists will have his reading of economics and probability in their bones already. I wish that more business people and government officials took these viewpoints more readily.

In all, I'd recommend this book and some of his other works to nearly everyone, but again, I wish for better clarity and easier adoption of his viewpoint that the book was better laid out and written in its overarching arguments. I fear that far too many will have purchased it and either not ended up reading it or not fully understood the depth of his arguments properly as a result.

For substance and importance, I'd rate it 5 stars, but for style and clarity I'd have to punish it with a possibly over-generous 2.5 stars out of 5. Alternately, as a thinker he gets full marks, but leaves much to be desired as a communicator of his thought.

Nikolay Bachiyski

Спокойно можеше да е 20 пъти по-къса, но това не променя факта, че ми промени мисленето поне малко. А това се случва рядко в последно време.

里森

Taleb's real accomplishment is the popularization of robust statistical reasoning, which before "The Black Swan" was confined to the relatively narrow circle of (applied) statisticians and other people regularly employing statistical techniques. Robust statistical techniques have still not found the widespread adoption they deserve, and Taleb's distinction between different types of uncertainty is stimulating even outside the context of mathematical and applied statistics. Highlighting the vulnerability of the classical estimators of mean and location to deviations from normality is an honorable undertaking, but the book could do with substantially fewer pages. In fact, a TED Talk would have sufficed to get the most important points across. Taleb's characteristic narrative of superiority – he is convinced all finance practitioners are ignorant of the limits of statistical techniques and financial models and only he knows better – soon becomes very tiring. While the material is stimulating and I support Taleb's agenda, the delivery is often unnecessarily arrogant and wordy. Reading a few published reviews of the book will, in fact, deliver the same amount of information.

Dinda

Keseluruhan dari buku ini adalah mengajak kita untuk menjadi seorang empiris ekstrim, hahaha. Black Swan adalah representasi dari suatu kejadian tidak biasa yang bisa mematahkan teori kalau semua angsa itu putih. Sesuatu bisa terjadi di luar kebiasaan. Jadi ini buku aliran empirisme sebenarnya, juga banyak ditemukan kritik terhadap rasionalisme. Kalau di buku ini disebut dengan platonifikasi. Bedanya dengan membaca buku Francis Bacon misalnya, contoh-contoh yang ditunjukkan relate sama apa yang ada di sekitar kita, gak perlu kembali ke abad 16. 

(view spoiler)[Penulis menunjukkan bukti-bukti kesalahan pada penarikan kesimpulan yang masih terjadi di masa sekarang. Seperti seorang bankers yang meramal perekonomian dengan sangat yakin, jurnalis yang menulis berita dengan teknik penarikan kesimpulan yang cepat (sehingga memicu kesalahan naratif), atau para ilmuwan yang menulis di jurnal ilmiah tapi masih secara tidak sadar menggunakan teknik apriori (mencocokkan hasil dengan asumsi). Bahkan alat ilmiah terkenal yang selalu kita banggakan yaitu Distribusi Normal juga dikritik. Banyak lagi contohnya, buku ini padat, menyita pikiran dan waktu, kadang kamu merasa ditampar-tampar, tapi tetap worth it.

Kenapa kubilang ekstrim? Karena buku ini mengajak kita untuk jangan percaya, sekalipun sama pakar. Diajak untuk menjadi seseorang yang skeptis, mempertanyakan segala hal, mengedepankan pengalaman. Katanya, kebanyakan kita merasa tahu lebih banyak daripada yang sebenarnya kita tahu. Katanya, kita juga ahli dalam mengaitkan kejadian-kejadian yang belum tentu berkaitan. Katanya, kita dahsyat dalam urusan penjelasan dan otak kita lebih suka narasi daripada eksperimen. Baca buku ini disarankan (tapi gak diwajibkan), supaya bisa selalu tawadhu, tidak cepat mengambil kesimpulan, dan nggak ngototan. (hide spoiler)]

Doan Tran Minh Thanh

Sven Schmidt

Luca Stromann

What have the invention of the wheel, Pompeii, the Wall Street Crash, Harry Potter and the internet got in common? Why are all forecasters con-artists? What can Catherine the Great's lovers tell us about probability? Why should you never run for a train or read a newspaper? This book is all about Black Swans: the random events that underlie our lives, from bestsellers to world disasters. Their impact is huge; they're impossible to predict; yet after they happen we always try to rationalize them. A rallying cry to ignore the 'experts', The Black Swan shows us how to stop trying to predict everything - and take advantage of uncertainty.

The black swan the impact of the highly improbable

Reviews