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Liked It3 of 3 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 It6 of 6 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 » |
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“Most important book in a long time”
Rafe F wrote this review 5 days ago. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No
“Nassim Nicholas Taleb has brought in a different flavor to the book stand through his book “The Black Swan” as this does not fall under standard categories like fiction, management or history. Being a mathematician and owing to my love for probability and statistics this book caught my attention. The entire book is well structured with pertinent examples and simple language. Scores of reviews on this book abound in all media, and what I undertake is to bring in some relevance to the current context of the IT industry that I belong to. According to the author, black swan is defined as a surprise event that has a major impact and subsequent to the event it is rationalized through hindsight as if it had been expected. This distortion, called the hindsight bias, prevents us from adequately learning from the past. The Indian corporate world was taken aback by the shocking revelation of the then CEO of Satyam Computers, Ramalinga Raju on the 7th of January 2009. This was an unexpected and highly disruptive event in the history of the corporate India. As per Nassim’s definition, this would qualify as a Black Swan. Some might disagree with me and claim that Satyam is not a black swan because such corporate frauds have happened at CA and Enron in the past. Having said that, for the entire customer and investor community Satyam was indeed a black swan!
Kishan wrote this review Sunday, November 22 2009. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No
Human beings in general are good at constructing interesting stories to explain things after they sight the black swan. During the last 10 months I was involved in a lot of discussions internally, friends, peers and with a lot of external agencies like CBI, SEBI, SFIO, CB CID, ROC, IT, etc about the Satyam Black Swan. I have heard atleast a dozen different views on how the Satyam Black Swan could have been averted. Human beings generally overestimate what they know and underestimate what they don't know. Human beings also tend to look for things that reaffirm their beliefs as opposed to contradict them.
There are more black swans around us if we really start looking out for them. But then why would we overlook them? As per Nassim, the normal is often irrelevant because it is quite predictable and almost everything studied about social life focuses on normal. Moreover we strongly believe that it is not at all likely that an additional observation will impact the sum of all observations in any significant way. Besides the normal distribution curve ignores large deviations. Everything in social life is produced by rare and consequential shocks and jumps. This is certainly a conscious incompetency that knowing that a bell curve cannot handle large deviations yet makes us confident that we have tamed certainty!
If someone narrowly escapes being eaten by a tiger in a cave, then he/she learns to avoid that cave. The 9/11 twin towers tragedy taught us a lot about the airport and airline security, baggage screening, limitations, etc. The 26/11 Mumbai attacks have taught us to screen visitors, customers, etc when they enter the hotels, shopping malls and any other public place. In my opinion, details of the past event may help us avoid similar future tragedies. But they do not necessarily eliminate the fact that there are some more black swans around us that can cause irreparable damage to us in the future. Vicious black swans by definition do not repeat themselves. We cannot learn from them easily. Don’t you think NOW is the time for the corporate world to understand the outliers better and prepare for the same?
One thing I personally feel is that this book completely fails to address ‘How to handle the data outside the normal distribution curve’. So in my opinion this book is not really a management book where we can apply the management techniques to mitigate the risks or avoid the black swans but rather an eye opener or provides a different perspective with respect to the outliers.”
“This is one of the most enlightening books I've ever read, more philosophy than finance it challenges us to embrace a wholly-counterintuitive worldview. ”
Carljoe J wrote this review Wednesday, November 18 2009. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No
“Interesting concept but unclear how the ideas within can be put in practice.”
Captain Zero wrote this review Wednesday, November 11 2009. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No
“Excellent concept and simple language. Examples are very good..Though i think the book could have been made slightly shorter as there is a lot of repetition.”
tpananth wrote this review Wednesday, November 11 2009. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No
“A very angry and thought-provoking book that I think a lot of people would benefit from reading. I particularly liked the author's knowledge of continental European (especially French) culture in addition to the expected Anglo-Saxon viewpoint, so misunderstood by the English speaking world.
Cryonica wrote this review Tuesday, November 10 2009. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No
Taleb reminds us that WE DON'T KNOW ANYTHING FOR SURE and should stop kidding ourselves and others that we do. A piece of wisdom as old as wisdom itself that yet needs to be repeated to each generation as it is so easily forgotten and covered up by the latest in ideological fashion, the latest "model of explanation", as fiercely believed by one generation as it is proven wrong and dismissed by the next. Above all, Taleb insists that we must be most careful when making predictions as we tend to all but forget how uncertain the future is and how much is affected by events we did not expect at all, that make nonsense of our forecasts, without, and this is the strange thing, discouraging us from continuing to make forecasts, often believing that the unexpected event was in fact one we foresaw, or at least that next time we will be prepared for it. It is this sort of event that is a black swan.”
“It's hard to disagree with Taleb's central arguments--that our world is shaped by high-impact, extremely rare events that escape our models that rely on past data to yield future predictive value--but it's not hard to disagree with his writing style. A worthwhile read if you can accept Taleb's self-congratulatory style that attacks the "nerds", "idiots", and "fools" who are economists, statisticians, and financial experts.”
Brian Reitz wrote this review Sunday, November 8 2009. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No“A very sophisticated book written by a very sophisticated guy.
Mykyta V wrote this review Monday, October 26 2009. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No
"Narrative fallacy" stuff was very revealing.
I want to meet him and ask him a few more questions.
One of the best books I have ever read.”“An excellent book which explains the economic events of our times.”
Patrick Oheron wrote this review Tuesday, October 20 2009. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No
