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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:
 Great idea, could be explained in a far clearer way August 4, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I wanted to like this book and looked forward to reading it.
Starting with the positive points first. I think that the author's theory is extremely original. He seeks to show (with some success) how many attitudes to risk are based on very dodgy theories which are in themselves premised on totally wrong assumptions. This has very worrying implications for, to take only two examples, pensions and experts in all fields. He argues what we do not know (and as importantly what we do not know we don't know) is important and could well come and bite us!
One the negative side of things, I think the book starts well but then becomes hard to follow. In fact it becomes so hard to follow at points that I'm not sure I followed his arguments in any detail. The author does not show how each chapter follows from the past one and the book loses form (although I recognise that maybe this is a symptom of my `Platonic' thinking). I also found the continual references to various characters in the philosophical world eventually became tiring.
On balance I would recommend reading this book but I think the ideas of the author could have been expressed in a far clearer fashion, and, although I appreciate he is trying to overturn conventional thinking, he should start by using current concepts so his ideas can be followed (i.e. setting out clear chapters etc), then seeking to persuade us to change our ways of thinking.
 enjoyable but sometimes irritating July 31, 2008
43 out of 47 found this review helpful
This book is for most part engagingly written and full of entertaining stories and provocative ideas. It makes you reconsider things you take for granted in life and reevaluate your own perspective of the future. But at times I couldn't help feeling that the author was just too full of himself, too pleased with his own ideas and too disparaging towards other people's. Not only does this create a negative feeling but it also works against the book's objectivity. How can a theory be impartial and objective when its author is so in love with himself and his own ideas? Nevertheless this book is a very rewarding read. I would also recommend Nudge and Making Time - Nudge makes you realise how easy it would be to change human behaviour for the better, while Making Time is full of very provocative and stimulating ideas about how we perceive time and how we can control it in our lives. Making Time: Why Time Seems to Pass at Different Speeds and How to Control It
A great topic in a not so great book July 29, 2008
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
Black swans are highly improbable events, with a large impact that seem explainable after they have happened. In this 300 page book Nassim Nicholas Taleb tries to convince us that black swans are all around us, they have always been and they always will. And as far as I am concerned he has certainly convinced me.
I didn't have very much trouble reading through NNT's arrogance, but some other things annoyed me more. The book is sometimes overly simplistic and very hostile towards people who's daily life revolves around dealing with uncertainty: statisticians, doctors, people in finance ... The study of improbably events is a hard but important aspect of statistics and there is a lot of useful -and practical- things to say about it. NNT doesn't seem to share this oppinion: quote: "forget everything you learned in college statistics". Cognitive science also teaches us a lot about why people underestimate certain probabilities so NNT's explanations are not very new; again, I think very little credit to academics is given here.
Although I got a little bored at times, I think all in all The Black Swan is a decent book which won't change your life.
 don't be arrogant July 24, 2008
1 out of 5 found this review helpful
Let me share with you a book that I'm reading and that has pleased me particularly.
It is "The Black Swan", by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, born in Lebanon in Amioun (which is not irrelevant, as we shall see), survivor of the civil war.
The author's thesis is that the future is completely unpredictable, all the forecasts that we are bombarded with in our day-to-day are nothing more than charlatanry to confusing us, to say the better.
While this statement appears trivial, it is not.
Just think of the forecasts we hear every day, such as:
The oil price will not to rise
Inflation this year will be... (this is used very well by you know who)
Human life will have an average duration more than 150 years in the century XXII
Finally, you see what is my point. And it is not difficult for you to find dozens more in a few minutes.
This inability to predict is innate to humans, to life as it is, and the extreme complexity of the world in which we live.
A consequence of this bad forecast capacity is the application of scientific methods (such as the hard science of physics and mathematics) to the economy, philosophy, history, education (this was by me) and all the social "sciences" in general. They want to be what they can not be, with methods that are not applicable, where they could follow the path of narrative that they followed for a long time with no spectacular results (for the media society in which we live) but much more reasonable and true.
Another curiosity is that the specialists made more mistakes in their forecasts. The author proves that any taxi driver can better predict the progress of the share price than a broker after applying mathematical methods that have the right to Nobel prize, for example.
The author in his book dismantle the academic arrogance, the wisdom of experts and does not it, of course, in a superficial way. It presents data and studies and practical bases its argument in their personal life as it was for many years consultant to financial institutions famous, participating in "task forces" for the U.S. government, having in its curriculum advanced training in mathematics, philosophy and economy and is (or was), in the academic fields.
I mean, he does not speak from above like certain people we know who have commented on teachers and their work, without ever having put their feet the classroom or in a long time not doing so because they have managed to jump-time in that profession that "do not do anything", "have lots of holidays" and whose practitioners are the real culprits of the "state of the nation".
Let me quote an excerpt from the book rather significant about the report that:
... The idea of Popper has to do with the financial constraints at the prediction of historical events and the need to reduce soft areas, as the history and social science at a level slightly above the aesthetics and entertainment, as if for collecting of butterflies or currencies. (Popper and received a Viennese classical education, not reached that far, I, yes. I am of Amioun.) What we are referring here as soft sciences historical studies are dependent on narrative.
The central argument is that of Popper, to provide historical events, it is necessary to provide technological innovation, which is essentially unpredictable.
(...) If I expect to expect something at some point in the future, then I have something in this. (...) If it had succeeded to augur the invention of the wheel, already know their appearance, thus already know build a wheel, or said otherwise, to understand the future down to the point of it, it is necessary to incorporate elements of the future.
Before the Internet, who could predict the future? Such changes were imposed by it? (...) One of the features that pleases me most is how the author clarity presents its arguments, without the fetters of political correctness (the fact that Lebanon is not negligible and may prove to read the book), calling the "horses by the names". And doing it with a fluid written, captivating, but without losing accuracy.
The author is in school empirical skeptical, as opposed to the bench of theoreticians that produce and deliver the biggest nonsense that we see all times in the media. Indeed this is the second Nassim as bad, that he no longer watch TV and read newspapers, since it only contributes to the disinformation, which marries its thesis that the more "informed" by the media are less we have become familiar, though this counter the "common sense".
But what pleased me most was the scene that Taleb reports when, after years of working in a financial company, to present its evaluator, it tears the assessment ahead, even without seeing the result, because it was the author of a second farce, a thing without feet or head, since, at work exerting results depend, and almost exclusively, by chance, of luck, rather than any demonstrable ability in particular, at least the parameters that were used to assess and It seems to exercise theirs functions of day-to-day.
It seems that he was the only crazy by those sides...
This reminds me of anything, and it is clear that I am sorry for not having the financial conditions, the will, the courage to finally do the same. But it may be that until there is also crazy.
It is that from September I will also be put in a vortex of weirdness.
Hugs to all.
PS: Read the book because this review is far from doing justice to its deserved high quality.
Just a rehash of John Stuart Mill July 17, 2008
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
an important time for this book, valuable for businesspeople to read before making decisions. throw away the spreadsheets and open up your minds.
Only worth 3* as most of the work is just a rehash of John Stuart Mill in the 19th Century (who first wrote about Black Swans). The author takes credit for more original thinking than he has actually done..
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