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| The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable | 
 enlarge | Author: Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Publisher: Random House
Category: Book
List Price: £17.59
Buy Used: £15.30
You Save: £2.29 (13%)
Avg. Customer Rating:  80 reviews
Sales Rank: 54819
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 400
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.5
Dimensions (in): 9.4 x 6.5 x 1.4
ISBN: 1400063515
Dewey Decimal Number: 003.54
EAN: 9781400063512
ASIN: 1400063515
Publication Date: April 17, 2007
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
Condition: Brand New, Perfect Condition, Please allow 4-14 business days for delivery. 100% Money Back Guarantee, Over 1,000,000 customers served.
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| Customer Reviews:
 The Black Swan September 28, 2008
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
A one sentence summary of The Black Swan would be 'The future is unwritten, at least in Bell Curves'. Taleb ponders the random events that arrive unseen and yet cause a huge impact on the world around us for example:
Positive black swans: penicillin, cellular phone, micro-processor, worldwide web, Macintosh, the iPod
Negative black swans: Altamont,Watergate, the 1973 oil crisis, July 7 public transport bombings
The book has received the most publicity around the role that it plays debunking many of the 'scientific' theorems that run the financial markets. He exposes the limitations of scientific models employed by bankers and demonstrated how analysts and journalists retrofit event explanations around events that they don't really understand.
However, more important from my perspective as someone interested in technology (in its widest sense) is Taleb's ideas on positive black swans.
Developments that make the most impact creep on us over time. I wouldn't have thought when I was in school at the launch of UK mobile phone networks Vodafone and Cellnet that just about everyone in the UK would have their own mobile telephone. Yet now, it feels so strange to watch films like Bullit, where a large amount of the plot feels odd because Steve McQueen isn't packing a mobile phone.
Taleb writes in an engaging manner explaining that in order to be better prepared for these unforseen events, we need to think outside the box and learn to be open enough to recognise and embrace the positive black swans before they are too mainstream.
 strong character, strong book September 26, 2008
1 out of 4 found this review helpful
I just read the book whilst in Colombia a bit more than a week ago. Though it shines through that Nassim Nicholas Taleb is an opinionated man (in all positivity) with a rather big than small ego, it certainly needs a character like this to be able to step back from common (dis-)believe and make a critical point can has the potential to smash many of our assumptions about nothing less than life itself. Looking at rare phenomena from an economic and philosophical point of view, he (if his numbers are right) makes a strong point against the industry of predictability for the least. Reading from his experience and research, it makes me think of when I first read Stephen Johnson's 'Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities and Software', John Gray's 'Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals, or Naomi Klein's 'The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism'. All those books, written in the last few years show how we are slave of our own misconception about our own history, decisions, believe in the power of prediction and generally our 'greatness' as a species.
It is very sobering to see that we still keep getting things wrong most of the time, despite the claim of being part of any of the many groups of 'a chosen people' or the more secular view of having 'progressed' into something better, higher (whatever that might be). Despite all our knowledge, we now have scientists as the new scriptwriters and painters of how armageddon looks like (see 100 years ahead predictions of rising sea-levels and the 5 billion deaths it's supposed to cost us). But maybe armageddon is the only Black Swan we can't fully imagine but we been predicting long enough to get one of the many dates right.
Essential reading, definitely get's you away from the craziness that is London commuting.
 Not an easy read September 22, 2008
5 out of 11 found this review helpful
I was expecting this book to hold my attention and I'd be unable to stop reading till the end. Gave up at the end of chapter 2 and only read the odd other chapter that looked interesting.
The discussion on the Bell Curve was very poor and ill informed.
As other reviewers have pointed out, this persons ego needs a resize!
Read it! September 13, 2008
11 out of 14 found this review helpful
Black Swan is a book about the unpredictable and the folly of trying to predict it. That it has found a market in these volatile, credit-crunched times is not surprising. If, eighteen months ago, you had predicted that the international banking system would be heading for meltdown within a year, your friends would have laughed before returning to their spreadsheets and hyperactive blackberries. Today, anything - up to and including the second coming - goes.
Black Swan is simultaneously enjoyable - it is well and humourously written - and uncomfortable. The central premise is that all the suits out there within the accounting and other financial disciplines are hopelessly trapped in a world that creates around it an illusion of stability. Whether you are predicting growth that is slow, rapid or negative is irrelevant because the biggest impact will always come from factors that are exogenous to your model. You know a lot, but it's all pretty useless when you come up against the Black Swan of the title.
This is uncomfortable because, if you extrapolate the line of thought, there is probably not much point in doing anything. CEOs who swallow the Black Swan theory, will spend more time on the golf course. We'll all stop reading magazines and newspapers (and maybe even follow-up books to the Black Swan), whilst we await the next tsunami. It's not a book that you want to give your son or daughter, just graduating from university and seeking to impress a potential employer in Canary Wharf. ("Just what we need - a nihilist philosopher!"). But it is definitely worth reading, especially if you're one of those people who remarks at the bar "I have never seen anything like this before".
In my own opinion, the Black Swans currently muddying up the lake only turned black quite recently - like monsters in an old-fashioned horror flick - and they have their origins in the accounting world. Mark to market accounting, off-balance sheet accounting, pension fund accounting, all introduced in balmier economic climates, were all well-intentioned. Like everything emanating from the bodies that make these rules, no-one notices them until the flames started lapping up the walls. In retrospect, they have acted like accelerants in a firebomb. If you're marking to market and the market collapses, you're dead. When the market recovers, you'll still be dead. Did anyone test the accounting standards against the sort of market conditions we're experiencing now? My guess is probably not.
 Like what he says, but not how he says it September 3, 2008
4 out of 8 found this review helpful
I think the reviews here probably sum this book up quite well. There is a realtively simple, and as far as I can see, valid point being made, but the book is written in a long-winded, verbose style, which I found very off-putting. I agree with the reviewers who point out that the strongest message to emerge is that the author considers himself to be very, very clever.
For instance, there is a lot of space devoted to discussion of the bell-shaped curve, or normal distribution, which forms the basis for many types of statistics. Some variables, such as height and weight are normally distributed. However, other variables, such as personal wealth, and many things related to economics, have a very skewed distribution, hence sayings like the 80/20 rule. Even the most basic course in statistics will tell you that assuming scores are normally distributed, when they are not, will give you misleading and incorrect results. NNT tells you that here also, but does so by using an analogy of lands called Mediocristan (the normal distribution) and Extremistan (non-normal distribution). Why make up terms for something where perfectly adequate terminology already exists? I do not take issue with what he had to say, but I do think there is a much more simple, and clear, way of saying it.
Consequently, I ended up skimming through a great deal of this book because it was taking far too long to get to the point, and a constant feeling of irritation seriously hindered my reading pleasure.
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