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The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
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List Price: $27.00
Our Price: $17.82
Your Save: $ 9.18 ( 34% )
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: Random House
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Average Customer Rating:   
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Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 003.54
EAN: 9781400063512
ISBN: 1400063515
Label: Random House
Manufacturer: Random House
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 400
Publication Date: 2007-04-17
Publisher: Random House
Release Date: 2007-04-17
Studio: Random House
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Editorial Reviews:
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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.
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.”
For years, Taleb has studied how we fool ourselves into thinking we know more than we actually do. We restrict our thinking to the irrelevant and inconsequential, while large events continue to surprise us and shape our world. Now, in this revelatory book, Taleb explains everything we know about what we don’t know. He offers surprisingly simple tricks for dealing with black swans and benefiting from them.
Elegant, startling, and universal in its applications The Black Swan will change the way you look at the world. Taleb is a vastly entertaining writer, with wit, irreverence, and unusual stories to tell. He has a polymathic command of subjects ranging from cognitive science to business to probability theory. The Black Swan is a landmark book–itself a black swan.
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: Not a history of black swan events
Comment: I think I expected something different, like a presentation of various black swan type events. The author, comments and speaks and comments in an essay style which I found dissapointing. Same valid for his other book: Fooled by Randomness.I think readers will get a better deal if they read "Extraordinary Illusions and Madness of the Crowds" as well as most of the shareholder letters posted on gurufocus.com.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Open your mind
Comment: I must recognize that through the easy and entertaining Mr Taleb's style, I have adquired a wider vision of how we, as human beings, mostly and unreasonably make predictions.
300 pages would have been enough (it has 400, at least in spanish edition).
Nevertheless, I highly recommend this book. Open you mind and have fun!
Customer Rating:
Summary: Interesting...if you can get past his enormous ego
Comment: It's too bad Taleb's ego is louder than his thesis. While he puts forth many interesting and insightful concepts and thoughts, the price one must pay to find them amongst the egocentric drivel that fills most of the pages makes this read hardly worth the effort. I can't help but think that the basic arguments from such a pretentious elitist could only be hot air. It's hard to take him seriously.
Customer Rating:
Summary: How compare to author's "Fooled by Randomness"?
Comment: The author has also written "Fooled by Randomness". Both books deal with the same matter; how low risk/chance events can have a major impact more often that realised. The book earns five stars because it forces the reader to think about a very important issue.
Which of the author's books should you buy?
1. What a big font, very easy read? Then go for "Fooled by Randomness"
2. Want a small font, more intellectual read? The go for this book.
There is absolutely no need to read both. Just pick the one the fits your temperament.
Any critique? The book is focusing on just one matter and the author is pushing it a bit too one-sided. However, it doesn't matter if the book isn't balanced. The book gets you thinking. You should expose yourself to the ideas. Stylistically the book is not very good. However, this is not poetry so I would not put much emphasis on this point either.
Who should buy? All social scientists, all people investing in the stock market, and all people involved in planning about the future.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Surprisingly personal diatribe
Comment: I just finished reading the Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
The book is about the disproportionate effect on our world of highly improbable events, and the difficulty of predicting those events. The name comes from David Hume's observation that many generations of Britons' only seeing white swans was not proof that there is no such thing as a black swan (which do, in fact, exist).
I found the book very disappointing. It started out with so much promise; I looked forward to reading all sorts of anecdotal stories of these so-called black swans, and about the disproportionate effect on our world.
Instead, what I got was a 300 page diatribe by one statistician against all the others in the world who disagree with him, punctuated by an occasional gratuitous insult of the French.
After enduring several hundred pages of personal stories about the author's quest to make his statistical theories known (which are not quite as controversial as he would make you believe, by the way), finally in Chapter 15 it seems that he will get to the meat of the matter. Unfortunately, even though the next three chapters were laden with graphs and figures, I encountered no such explanations. Or, if there were any, they were muddled at best.
Even the anecdotes were disappointing. I was excited to start reading about a great vindication of his - the collapse of LTCM in 1998 (which was run by several of his statistical nemeses) - expecting to find a wonderful explanation of what went wrong, and all the financial turmoil which resulted. Instead, he simply stated "it went bust." Duh.
I have no idea why this book has been so highly touted. Perhaps it is because it came on the heels of 9/11, and just before the credit turmoil which started in 2007. But it's not worth your time.
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