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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: £14.47
You Save: £3.12 (18%)
Used (9) from £14.47
Avg. Customer Rating:  80 reviews
Sales Rank: 138921
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
Shipping: International shipping available
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| Customer Reviews: Read 75 more reviews...
 Strangest reading experience of my life December 3, 2008
I originally bought this book last year, I read about half of it but gave up in disgust at the general pretentiousness and repetition.
I picked it up again this year after the credit crunch had hit and it seemed to be a different book, funny with some insight into current market turmoil! Assuming the book hadn't changed while on my shelf, presumably I had.
The core idea is very simple, Gaussian (Normal/ bell curves) distributions are overused in finance and they critically underestimate the chances of high impact relatively rare events which are best modelled as Power laws (see the The Long Tail: How Endless Choice is Creating Unlimited Demand for another take). Taleb covers the slightly strange beat where finance/ statistics/ epistemology (Philosophy of Knowledge) meet. The only other writer I know that covers this ground is Soros. They both admire Karl Popper, although Taleb insists on calling him 'Herr Doctor Professor' Popper which just gets annoying after a while.
Worth a read if you can get past the writer's grating style, just read the last three chapters (the meat of the argument) if you really find him to irritating to bear. Perhaps you need to witness a Black Swan to really appreciate the argument.
 Tiresome and Unoriginal November 25, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
As a statistician, the book and its premise struck me as an interesting read, but it is clear after a few chapters that the book itself is meandering nowhere. What is worse is that the evidence is always second hand philosophy and the book is peppered with uninteresting self promotion. If your idea of a good read is to re-read Bertrand Russell or to move towards a footnote where the author feels it important to tell you he doesnt wear a tie in meetings then, please, feel free to lap this up and all the sixth form anarchy that it attempts to promote.
As for the statistics, it is amateur stuff. The Black Swan itself is an improbable event on which the author places far too much emphasis. It soon becomes confused and contradictory. Originally boldly stating that bell curve analysis is all Information (or is it Intellectual?) fraud, in later chapters the author then splits outcomes up into factions, some of which are affected by the black swan and some that are not. It then becomes apparent that the author has taken five chapters to split outcomes into normal and non-normal. Ground breaking stuff, that has, errm, been around for centuries. Essentially this book ends up elaborating on the phrase 'Picking pennies in front of a steam roller' which is so familiar to all that, well, there is a phrase for it. This book is an irrelevance to statisticians. I cannot comment on the philosophy side, but, as far as I can see, there isnt a viewpoint that hasnt been borrowed from someone more famous. In short, this book is a huge disappointment.
It should also be noted that this book is unduly aggressive and self opinionated. I assume that this is to add gravitas to the subject. On this point it fails miserably. Instead it makes the author appear narcissistic, unbalanced, and, yes, a bit stupid. Its likely that many people who start this book will lack the desire to finish it. And that, sad to say, isnt a bad thing.
 Partial plagiarism of his central thesis? November 2, 2008
4 out of 6 found this review helpful
Reading these reviews leads me immediately to the realisation that this work may possibly be little better than plagiarism. Simeon-Denis Poisson first examined the statistical modelling of low-probability events in 1838, within a much wider corpus of scientific research in pure and applied natural and social sciences. One immediate conclusion is that the probability of low-odds events occurring (where there is no impedement to frequent possible events) is much higher than normal binomial probability suggests. As this is the heart of Taleb's thesis, he's at best reinvented the wheel.
On the basis of his introduction, examining the work of Umberto Eco, I suspect he falls into a trap of his own pretentiousness, insofar as Professor Eco sometimes espouses hermetic doctrines in his fictional works established long before our days by the Vatican and other similar bodies. His is not the work of a freelance research student, but of an acolyte, affirmed by his other publications of a non-fictional character, displaying the formation of his mentation. It is not therefore appropriate to suggest that there is much of a serendipitous nature about his well-researched, yet doctrinally conformist, theses, and that disables Taleb's first shuffle.
I therefore conclude that as both foundations to his thesis, namely his starting point and the incremental progression thenceforward, appear to be weak, this may not arrive at any logically coherent conclusions at all. Those of a religious disposition might choose to develop that objection further, insofar as the inexplicable Poisson anomaly has sometimes been argued as a scientifically-rigourous case for a non-bounded ontological eidos (or in plain language, "there are more things in heaven and earth, Nicholas, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."), but each to his own: at the very least, he is not doing fresh research by a very long way, as this was very old hat in our market modelling in the 1980s.
 Scintillating October 25, 2008
1 out of 3 found this review helpful
One of the most intelligent pieces of writing I have come across in my reading career.
It opens up some many new ways of viewing life and its events. Delivered with a delightful touch of arrogance, sudden humour, and iconoclastic precision - the book unearths a paradigm which is so overarchingly pervasive yet consciously ignored by people.
The author's tribute to, and coverage of Benoit Mandelbrot, along with the pooh-poohing of the 'normal' model of reality is a salient highlight, and should not be missed by any serious empiricist.
The book is a black swan.
Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition... October 21, 2008
7 out of 8 found this review helpful
This book is a black swan because against all the odds it got published. It has one idea swollen unappealingly to almost 400 pages. It is full of stereotypes, rich in "imaginative" anecdotes and insufferably pompous. If you want to read about chance and probability then try Ian Stewart; for Chance and Necessity read Jacques Monod (1972).
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