The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

The first book that I read in the four-volume "Incerto" set by Nassim Kaleb was "Antifragile," so my reading of "The Black Swan" is out of sequence. However, I am glad that I came to it in its second edition, with footnotes addressing some of the criticisms made of it (tip: flip to the footnote as soon as you come across the symbol identifying it rather reading on to the end of the chapter where they are listed). While highly relevant to the dismal science of economics, it is far from a dismal tome. Some of the anecdotes will have you chuckling or even laughing out loud! It is a highly stimulating and entertaining book and will particularly delight those who enjoy the debunking of wrong-headed purveyors of elaborate academic theories that are not just useless but actually harmful. If this sounds like a book you might enjoy, be aware that the four-volume Incerto series is available as a set, something I found out too late to profit from the knowledge. I intend to purchase the other two volumes and recommend the set. His treatment of the devastating events known as Black Swans ought to be required reading for all who would like to avoid causing or experiencing them.

A must have read. Definitely get the second edition. The "postscript essay" is the most valuable part of the whole book. You have to slog your way through endless invectives in edition one, but the postscript in edition two ties it all together in a tight presentation. Excellent work that I came to through "The Signal and the Noise".

It's an entertaining book although the writing style leaves much to be desired. The main points are the contempt for any other called expert (any but the author who paints himself insufferable) in regards to the a priori information about models of the world and how one can be more open to the notion of outliers.

I bought this book after reading “Fooled by Randomness” from the same author. This book is not very easy to read since the author uses random ideas and thoughts. Also, its not written like a story book but assumes you have an MBA in finance. Still, its a good book for anyone who invests regularly via 401k into the stock market or wants to know about black swan events. This book also teaches how luck plays a major role in life and that there are lot of random things that can happen in life if we just follow gaussian mathematical models. While making risky decisions, remember that what you don’t know can bite you in the as$. You can minimize your downside by reducing the bet size. Also, its better to do nothing, if you don’t know what to do.

I read the second edition (Kindle, $15, but still a bargain) as well as the first,and I could probably read it a third and fourth time, to try to absorb thewealth of information it contains.Some things stick out, in the theme of the surprises life gives us and givesthe experts, ones supposedly hard to surprise. The turkey analogy I'll never forget,as an implied critique of induction: day after day, the bird is fed and coddled bythe farmer, and the fowl assumes that this is what life is like...until Thanksgiving,which is a Black Swan day for him, though not for the farmer.My own past research on indirect sensing / data inversion problems was wellillustrated by Taleb's noting the difference in predicting the puddle from a melting mass of iceversus deriving the original geometry of that mass from knowledge of the puddle.Wonderful book, made a bit less so by the evident ego of the author,although indeed he has much to be proud of.

Taleb's points out over the past few centuries, many attempts have been made to predict various events. As markets and human interaction became increasingly complex, these "expert" predictions were more awash in analysis and monumentally wrong. The author used a story from Cicero to illustrate how people became fooled by events because they had not considered other evidence. Most people have had a hard time accepting the fact that the world remained unpredictable despite all the work that had gone into making predictions. As volatility amplified, human nature had developed the desire for more stability and predictability in the increasingly volatile world. Thus the demand for "experts" came about naturally.The author gave a myriad of examples of what makes humans unique to other animals: the ability for self-delusion. Humans are very prone to self-delusion was not his point, however. Along with this natural tendency, humans have developed brains with the capacity to think outside of innate patterns. Ergo, the premise of the book is to encourage critical thinking and questioning authority, because the truth is most often very obvious whereas misinterpretation requires more experts.P.S. Ironically the popularity of the book was a Black Swan event. The author finished the book after Lehman Bros and eventual financial collapse in 2008. As a result, he gained a reputation of being a soothsayer, a brilliant predictor of future unanticipated events. Total coincidence!

A 'black swan' event is a significant unexpected event that has huge consequences - such as the banking collapse of 2008 or a terrorist attack such as 9/11. There isn't a great deal to say about 'black swan' events once you've defined them - other than that there's not much you can do to prevent them as they are unpredictable. (And if you do manage to prevent one, no one will know you've prevented it because it didn't happen.)In the course of 400 pages, Nassim Taleb discourses amusingly and eruditely on black swans and the human reaction to them, which isn't always logical. The most valuable take-away message is that history does not always prepare us for the future - Taleb uses the example of turkeys and Christmas. For a thousand days, the farmer feeds his turkeys and the turkey think he's a kind man who loves turkeys. So when the day of slaughter comes, they get a rude awakening. (Christmas of course being a black swan event for turkeys.)If you have unlimited time and enjoy philosophical and psychological degressions, and want to know about Taleb's life, you will probably enjoy this book. If your time is limited and you just want to know the essentials about black swans, look elsewhere.

An annoyingly long-winded, insufferably pompous and thoroughly grating account of the disproportionate effects of unforeseen events. Much of the book reads like a self-aggrandizing rant. While there are a few good ideas in the book, it could have easily been cut to a third of its size without losing anything of value. Skip the book and listen to one of Taleb’s lectures instead. Would not recommend.

I read this book because it was mentioned by Daniel Kahneman in 'Thinking fast and slow'. While the central idea is interesting, the way it is presented is just awful. Nassim Nicolas Taleb does not introduce the topic, except through anecdotes, uses terms before he writes what they actually mean and never really explains how his 'theory' works and the whole thing does not have any structure. The book is full of disrespect for anyone else, except for his closest friends, it is a prime example how to bully others in writing. The author judges the quality of books by their smell, I sadly bough the kindle edition, otherwise the stench would have put me off from buying it.

There's probably a point in here, and I learned a little about the levant, but too ranty and roundabout. Didn't motivate me to finish. Still don't know what it's saying apart from "big, unexpected things have big, unexpected consequences"

The book got recommended to me by a colleague I respect at work, so I was looking forward to a great read about human misconception and to learn about applying statistical concepts in the right way - at least that was how this book was sold to me. Looking for a compelling narrative and eye-opening examples, what does this book offer? A whole load of apathic drivel, a confusing narrative loaded with wildly thrown around concepts that make any central theme, should it exist, obsolete. From page one to page 93 when I eventually gave up, a very frustrating read which left me angry over my waste of time with this pulp. So why is this a dissappointing read? It's the continuous introduction of non-convincing concepts like "Mediocristan" and "Extremistan", concepts that try very hard to resemble statistical models, an attempt that fails horribly as they are outlandishly disconnected from reality. It is the introduction of a character named Yevgenia Nikolaayevna Krasnova who doesn't exist bare in the imagination of Taleb, and who contributes nothing to the book, leaving a baffled reader behind as she's cited repeatedly throughout the book. It is the exorbitant use of massive headlines like song titles as part of a chapter like "How to avoid watercoolers - Select your brother in-law - Yevgenia's favourite book - What desserts can and cannot deliver - On the avoidance of hope - El desserto de los tartares - The virtues of slow motion" which build an exepectation of snappy nuggets related to the key argument but which all dissappoint as nothing gets explained convingcly or coherently. It is the use of examples that have nothing to do with the average reader - no Nassim Taleb, no one of us "lives in a cramped apartment in East Village Manhattan" and no one works in a laboratory at the Rockefeller University". This academic fug and narcisstic writing is terrible and a waste of time.