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Liked It4 of 4 members found this review helpful “According to critic Harold Bloom, Hamlet's predicament is not "that he thinks too much" but rather that "he thinks too well," being ultimately "unable to rest in illusions of any kind." The same could be said for philosopher, essayist and trader Nassim Nicholas Taleb, who finds something rotten...” see full review » see other reviews » |
Didn’t Like It7 of 9 members found this review helpful “Taleb is too full of himself to make reading this book at all pleasurable.” see full review » see other reviews » |
Newest Reviews
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“Taleb is witty, funny, engaging and generally convincing of his thesis that the course of events is dominated by high impact, unexpected events, rather than by predictably, normally distributed ones. Sounds like a simple argument, but the implications are wide ranging. He covers the impact of black swans on defense, finance, business, research and many other sectors. To be robust to negative black swans and expose ourselves to positive black swans is his sage advice. Full of interesting case studies and short histories, particularly in the world of finance. A really great read. One of few books that I would consider reading twice. ”
Don Wood wrote this review 7 hours ago. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No
“I cannot finish reading this book. I think the author tries too much to just raise awareness. Just like I don't quite get the idea of chaos theory and nonlinear dynamical systems. It feels like all they do is to point out how a simple problem can be so difficult to analyze. But what can we do? Should we give up all analysis and simply let the world go into chaos?”
Zhi Han wrote this review 3 days ago. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No“Re-reading a very good book. ”
Jeff Hebert wrote this review 6 days ago. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No“Makes you a bit of a contrarian.....which can be a good thing.”
Jay Lutz wrote this review 7 days ago. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No“Part profound, part baffling. I appreciate Nassim's recommendations to skip technical sections but I'm worried I'll miss something. His insights into the market crash of 2008 seem profound although hindsight is always 20/20. I love Nassim's disdain for economic "science". I pray somehow the world would see sense and limit capatilsms obscene excesses.”
Adam Feldman wrote this review 3 days ago. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No“File Under: Extreme-istan v. Mediore-istan”
Andrew Sebastian wrote this review 13 days ago. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No“So boring I did not finish it, which is not a habit of mine. There is just not enough valuable information in the book to fill so many pages.”
GUY COEN wrote this review 13 days ago. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No“The author has a good sense of humor but is very long-winded and often goes off rambling. That alone made the book a slog and it detracted from the core concept which is very intriguing. You are better off reading one of the hundreds of summaries posted on various blogs. Here are some quotes from the book for your entertainment and thought: - Nobody Knows What's Going On - We don't learn rules, just facts. We tend to learn the precise, not the general. - The Platonic fold is the explosive boundary where the Platonic mindset enters in contact with the messy reality, where the gap between what you know and what you think you know becomes dangerously wide. - Ideas come and go - stories stay. Metaphors and stories are far more potent (alas) than ideas; they are easier to remember and more fun to read. - We tend to treat our knowledge as personal property to be protected and defended. - Categorizing always produces reduction in true complexity - There is nothing interesting about the details of the business world, which is inelegant, dull, pompous, greedy, un-intellectual, selfish and boring -The great strength of the free- market system is the fact that company executives don't need to know what's going on. -Most [financial] traders are picking pennies in front of a steamroller - exposing themselves to the high-impact rare event yet sleeping like babies, unaware of it. -Organize yourself to do intense work, never attend business meetings, avoid the company of achievers and people in suits who don't read books. -America is currently far more creative than these nations of museum goers and equation solvers. It is also far more tolerant of bottom-up tinkering and undirected trial and error. -Mediocristan is where we must endure the tyranny of the collective, the routine, the obvious and the predicted; Extremistan is where we are subjected to the tyranny of the singular, the accidently, the unseen .. -For their lending business, dull banks hire people and train them to be even more dull. -We harbor a dislike for the abstract. -The media seem to want to be wrong with infinite precision (instead of accepting being approximately right) -A nerd is simply someone who thinks exceedingly inside the box -Information is BAD for knowledge -When you are employed, hence dependent on other people's judgment, looking busy can help you claim responsibility for the results in a random environment. -News shared with no millions has added value Additional knowledge of the minutiae of daily business can be useless, even actually toxic. -The problem with experts is that they do not know what they do not know. -Discoverers are sleepwalkers stumbling upon results and not realizing what they have in their hands. -We build toys. Some of those toys change the world. a strange activity called the business meeting, in which well-fed, but sedentary, men voluntarily restrict their blood circulation with an expensive device called a necktie. -Don't ask the barber whether you need a haircut and don't ask an academic if what he does is relevant. -Maximize the serendipity around you -American culture encourages the process of failure, unlike the cultures of Europe and Asia where failure is met with stigma and embarrassment. -The electricity blackout experienced in the States in 2003 is a perfect example of what could take place if one of the big banks went under today -In the last 50 years, the ten most extreme days in the financial markets represent half the returns -Worry less about embarrassment than about missing an opportunity -Why do we, scientists or nonscientists, hotshots or regular Joes, tend to see the pennies instead of the dollars? Why do we keep focusing on the minutiae, not the possible significant large events, in spite of the obvious evidence of their huge influence? And, if you follow my argument, why does reading the newspaper actually decrease your knowledge of the world? ”
Paul Winkler wrote this review 2 weeks ago. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No“Not as good as the recommendations that led me to read it.”
Daksha B wrote this review 2 weeks ago. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No“ I liked this books ideas but I thought the way it was presented was messy. He could have boiled down and simplified his writing. Nassim illustrates why we live in a world where improbable events happen all the time and people never expect them. He discusses the nature of the thing that cannot happen. There are a couple really cool ideas here: 1. The silent evidence. When something big happens, everyone points to the one event or person who did it. But people forget there is a graveyard of people and events you don't see. For example, everyone knows about the wright brothers, but nobody realizes that the attempts to fly occurred for 60 years beforehand. Hundreds of people you've never heard of, dozens of designs, lots of events - that is the silent evidence. 2. We have a horrible awareness of the past. With regards to the past, humans like a story. If you can create a story, to tie together events, that becomes "the way it was". For example, the social network is a narration of how Facebook was founded. That story could be way wrong, but it doesn't matter. In reality, events don't follow a story - they are messy. 3. We have a horrible track record of predicting the future. For predicting the future, people try to use the past, with horrible results. For example, ATT&T predicted that there would only be 900,000 phones in existence in 2000. They were 109 million. Many predictions fail because they don't take into account events outside your industry or your perspective. ATT&T can predict their competitor's behavior, but they cannot see 9/11 and how that event will affect cell phone sales. 4. Nassim argues we now live in a world where extreme events happen allot, and they are the events that matter. He calls it extremism. I think of 2011 as a great example of this new world. Every month big things happened. Gabby Gifford's shooting, the Arab spring, the toppling of Gaddafi, the death of Osama Bin Laden, the start of the Occupy movement, the debt ceiling negotiations and the Greek debt crisis. The opposite is where events are constant and small. The opposite is when things are bell curve, adding one more event makes no difference. 5. In this world, Nassim argues we should use heuristics instead of exact methods. Don't follow the system exactly, but be in the right places and know the right people. Be in a spot where, if an unforeseen event happens, you can benefit from it - because unforeseen events happen often. I liked this book, but it was hard to read. It was complex, and needlessly complicated. It was also written for quants and financial people. Also written in 2006, it seemingly did make some spot on predictions about the future. Nassim would not have been surprised by the crash of 2008, the Arab spring, the BP oil disaster, the Japanese Tsunami, the election of Barack Obama, The fall of Lehman brothers. All Black Swans, he said were perfectly plausible. ”
Matt Moynihan wrote this review 2 weeks ago. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No
