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| The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable | 
 enlarge | Author: Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Publisher: Allen Lane
Category: Book
Buy New: £19.00
Avg. Customer Rating:  37 reviews
Sales Rank: 232387
Media: Paperback
Edition: Australian Ed
Pages: 400
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.1
ISBN: 1846140455
EAN: 9781846140457
ASIN: 1846140455
Publication Date: May 18, 2007
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
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| Customer Reviews:
 Heavy going for banal insights February 9, 2008
4 out of 6 found this review helpful
It may not be fun for forecasters to admit it, but NNT (his abbreviation) is onto something: those of us in the business (I spent many years as a stock analyst) are often doing little but making up stories (what NNT stigmatises as "narratives"). Indeed it is the business of a good analyst to weave a story out of recent price movements, valuation anomalies and other news, as well as estimates of future earnings. As NNT stresses, the last of these is the most unknowable. Surprises catch us out. NNT is onto something else as well: his "Black Swan" concept, the unlikely event with extreme consequences, is not captured by the bell curve of normal distribution underlying much investment theory.
But we have to plough through a heck of a lot of anecdote, self-serving reminiscence and repetition to learn that there isn't much more to NNT's book than these two--not desperately startling--points; and that his approach to the consequences of his insights is so banal as to recommend that we avoid big risks and put ourselves in the way of big rewards. It is also inherent in NNT's view of these things that the tiny amount of maths presented is offered in such a tentative spirit as to make it completely unhelpful.
This does not make the book useless. It is always a useful corrective for those of us in the business to remind ourselves that our tools for forecasting complexity are flawed. And perhaps other authors will build on NNT's work to incorporate his thinking into the apparatus of investment theory, though NNT seems so much to relish his self-assumed role as gadfly that I guess he would be horrified at the idea!
Meanwhile, I was left with the sense that NNT himself wrote the book at least as much as a showcase for his quirky personality (not to say his consultancy business, mentioned several times), as a serious essay on the limits of forecasting. This is a shame as forecasting is worth doing and worth doing better; deliberately or not, NNT makes his contribution to the latter.
Rock solid logic, pointless bile February 7, 2008
2 out of 4 found this review helpful
Though this books contains a few real gems, for most of this book I felt that NNT was not only pointing out the obvious: he was beating it to death. Being neither an economist, nor an American, however, I'm clearly not his target audience - I don't see too much that is ground-breaking in the book, and it could have been a lot shorter.
Whilst recognising that the logic is rock solid, the bile surrounding it is sprayed around to the point of unacceptability. Social groupings, ranging from statisticians to taxi-drivers, are generalised about and insulted in a quite blatant way; and whilst NNT insists in the book that national identitities do not exist, he proceeds to make assumptions about, and criticise, most nationalities in one way or another - if you're French, gird your loins before trying to read this. These comments may be part of the quirky humour that NNT is trying to use and that I just don't get; but for me he goes too far.
 Annoying--but fascinating nonetheless January 30, 2008
1 out of 5 found this review helpful
I have a lot of respect for Taleb having read his first book Fooled by Randomness (2001) to which I gave an enthusiastic, if critical, review. But this book is so self-indulgent and so breezily written that I just want to throw up my hands and say, "Get an editor that has the ability to edit you!"
What has happened--and this happens frequently--is that Professor Taleb, still basking in the success of Fooled by Randomness, has gotten so arrogant that he believes he can just write what comes into his head and presto! it's a work of art and erudition, and so obviously a fine guide to right thinking that we should all applaud. Because of his prior success his editor spares the blue pencil even though Taleb is verbose, repetitive and digressive to the point of exasperation, and seemingly unaware that some of his pearls of wisdom are pinto beans. The irony is that this book's sales will easily exceed those of Fooled by Randomness, and his editors and publishers will think this is a better book when it is not.
I think what he was trying to achieve is a style that he credits to one of his heroes, Henri Poincare. Taleb eulogizes, "The grand master wrote these wonders as serialized articles and composed them like extemporaneous speeches. As in every masterpiece, you see a mixture of repetitions, digressions, everything a 'me too' editor with a prepackaged mind would condemn--but these make his text even more readable owing to an iron consistency of thought." (p. 174)
I think in Taleb's case it is an iron redundancy. But then on the other hand I found in his unorthodox expression ideas that wondrously tense the mind and make for an interesting read, so that on balance I have to say the book is definitely worth reading.
In my review of Fooled by Randomness I wrote:
"The central image of this interesting, erudite and somewhat self-indulgent book is the "black swan," a metaphor for both the rare event that eventually will happen, and for the fact that you can't prove a negative (the problem of induction) because no matter how many white swans you count, you do not prove that the next one won't be black."
Well, I could write exactly the same thing in a review of this book. The Black Swan is an elaboration on his previous book. What is different about this book is the number of (fictional) stories he uses to make his points. This is somewhat ironic since he dismisses what he calls the "narrative fallacy." (But I'm sure the nimble Dr. Taleb has an explanation.) This book has more characters than some Russian novels including Fat Tony, Nero, the author himself ("NNT"), Casanova, "Yevgenia Krasnova" (who apparently exists but not by that name), the nerdish "Dr. John," etc.
A notable addition is his notion of "Mediocristan" and "Extremistan." The former is a fairly predictable place. Two examples are casino games and human life expectancies. There is no possibility of black swans. In Extremistan, however, where there exist stock markets, politics/war and other highly complex real world entities, black swans are always lurking, ready to fly into your face with complete capriciousness.
Some high (or low) lights:
On page 155 Taleb claims that the "practitioners of something called game theory...are no better at predicting than university students." No doubt he has some reference in mind, but I couldn't find it in the endnotes--which brings me to another problem, the endnotes themselves. They are in a bizarre form without page or text reference. They are arranged by chapters, but there is no way to tell which page the note refers to. Taleb explains "I separate topics thematically; so general references will mostly be found in the chapter in which they first occur. I prefer to use a logical sequence here rather than stick to chapter division." But what I think happened is that he just didn't bother to keep track of his references and when he was told by his publishers that he needed them, he came up with this dodge. Annoying.
A nice take on complexity is this billiard ball example from page 178: The first impact is fairly easy to access with enough information about the balls, the table, the force of the cue ball, etc. The second is more difficult, but "to correctly compute the ninth impact, you need to take into account the gravitational pull of someone standing next to the table." (!)
Taleb sees "nerd knowledge" or the overestimation of our understanding as a disease "severely ingrained in our institutions. It is why I fear governments and large corporations--it is hard to distinguish between them." (p. 180)
"...[L]anguages grow organically; grammar is something people without anything more exciting to do in their lives codify into a book." (p. 182)
Perhaps part of the genius of Taleb's intent is to write wildly while insulting lots of people, especially anyone wearing a suit or having a corporate address, and especially anyone working on Wall Street. This way you invite not just book chat comment but the slings and arrows of outrageous indignation and affrontiveness. People write nasty reviews, people become incensed, Taleb replies in kind, etc., and the sales totals rise and book biz execs take notice.
An addendum on induction: the reason we cannot put black swans neatly into the bell shape curve that Taleb so rails against or assign a probability to their occurrence is that we don't know the denominator. We know for example that a certain event--say a 10k-wide or bigger meteor hitting the earth--is very rare, the last one perhaps hit the earth 65 million years ago. So we know the numerator (a small number, maybe even only 1), but we have no idea what the universe of possibilities might be. The denominator is obviously a large number, but HOW large? We don't know.
 U won't regret it!! December 19, 2007
4 out of 11 found this review helpful
THE BLACK SWAN is a highly acclaimed piece of work from the writer of the stellar FOOLED BY RANDOMNES. Taleb is a philosopher of randomness, and before becoming a writer he worked on Wall Street as a senior trader. This book explores our inherent yet primerily ignored relationship with Black Swan theory, first concieved by David Hume. I encourage anyone who is remotely intersted in society, philosophy, politics or discussion to pick up this book and they won't regret it!! I'd also recommend reading the mesmerising and highly evocative novel The Fates by Tino Georgiou.
right, interesting, but extremely irritating November 28, 2007
50 out of 53 found this review helpful
Taleb has one good idea, a great idea even, and an infinite number of ways of talking about it. It is essentially the same idea as his last book, Fooled by Randomness: namely that life does not behave with regularity. Those who think it does, he says, will always be tripped up by the unexpected. Black Swan extends that idea, beyond the financial markets he concentrated on in Randomness, to just about all walks of life. He is a magpie for anecdote and stray pieces of supporting evidence wherever he can find them. He calls all this 'skeptical empiricism'.
The qualification is that his big idea is not original, though his numerous examples do help bring home its ubiquity. More problematically, he overstates its usefulness. For when it comes to calling your next move, the unpredictable and the unexpected are, by definition, not things we can anticipate. And though he is right that in the long run there will undoubtedly by high impact improbably events, it is also true, as Keynes said, that in the long run we are all dead: organising your life on the principle that something radical might come along doesn't solve the everyday problem of what to next.
In short, he exaggerates his own insight and the authority it gives him. That's a wicked irony, for the chief target of his ire is those with an exaggerated sense of insight and control over their lives.
Oh, and the tone... Taleb wants to be seen as a radical iconoclast. Every sentence drips righteousness and often irritation. He is the strutting, impatient sage, the rest of us blinkered morons. Apparently he doesn't like his editors trying to change this. A word of advice to the author: if you want your advice heeded, don't shout and sneer at your audience. For this reason, an interesting thesis, but in the end a wearisome read.
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