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Jun 23, 2011

Nina rated it:

It took a lot of willpower to not put this book down. This guy could have written a very interesting 5-page essay on his main idea, which is that people overestimate their ability to predict the future and that unexpected, extraordinary events - of whose occurrence we do not even know the probability, since the event is usually outside the realm of what we think is possible - are in the end what really matter. Instead, he took this solid (and unoriginal, I might add) idea, gave it a clever nam More...

7 comments like (61 people liked it)

Sep 24, 2011

rmn rated it:

I can summarize this book in two words: Shit happens.

Actually, I should be more fair since the author spent 300 pages laying out his beliefs and arguing his conclusions. The real summary of this book should be: Shit happens more often than you think.

The author, Taleb, rails against economics, most philosophers, and the way we incorporate news to allow us to make sense of events and everyday happenings. He wants us to unlearn the way we think and learn, while destroying More...

2 comments like (10 people liked it)

Aug 11, 2008

Nick rated it:

This is a great book. And, to take a page from Taleb, anyone who doesn't think so is wrong.

No, no, there are a number of problems with the book. A bit bloated, a bit repetitive. And NNT does make the misstep every once and a while. To take a very small instance, Taleb bases a short section of the book upon the idea that to be "hardened by the Gulag" means to become "harder" or "stronger" rather than its true meaning of someone who has become inured to ce More...

4 comments like (18 people liked it)

Jun 11, 2008

Aaron rated it:

This is a book that raises a number of very important questions, but chief among them is definitely the question of how the interplay between a good idea and an insufferable author combine to effect the reading experience?

This author is an a-hole. Full stop. He's dismissive, chronically insecure, unstructured and hostile towards his detractors. He engages in what may be the lowest form of rhetoric by pre-emptively attacking any critics (even before they've had the chance to come More...

2 comments like (23 people liked it)

Aug 22, 2007

Adih rated it:

Black Swan, huge-impact improbable events (the success of google, attack of 9/11, invention of internet), shows that social sciences fail to predict various events (behaviors inculuded) by,and so far by merely , usingGaussian "bell curve" approach. The use of mathematics in social sciences overestimates what we know (observed past events)and underestimates what we don't (probable future events): too little science papers succeeded to make (near) accurate predictions; and successful inv More...

1 comment like (5 people liked it)

Aug 29, 2008

Greg rated it:

This book has diminishing returns on the time spent reading it. Taleb's jeremiad is directed against - well - everyone who is not as enlightened as he is. I trudged through this book because - well - everyone is reading it and enlightened people should know how to comment on it. There, I did it. Now I can look down on all those people out there who aren't enlightened like Taleb. And now, me.

Taleb is actually on to something important if you can tolerate his self-importance enoug More...

1 comment like (10 people liked it)

Dec 20, 2011

Dolly rated it:

This is an interesting book. I like the idea of empirical skepticism, but I'm not sure that I will ever be able to embrace it wholly. I am not afraid to admit that I like patterns, I like predictability, I like stability...I understand so much more now about our erroneous desire to make things fit Gaussian bell curves, even when its inappropriate to do so. I will never read a mutual fund prospectus or annual report the same way again nor will I ever trust an economic forecast. But I think th More...

1 comment like (3 people liked it)

Aug 08, 2008

Will rated it:

This review will be comprised of two parts: a review of the ideas presented and a review of the way in which it is written

(A) The ideas

There is no question here, Taleb is an erudite and intelligent scholar. His take on epistomology and the scientific method breathe fresh air into the subject and gloss it with some 21st century context.

It would be difficult for me to overstate the importance of the black swan problem in modern life and the degree to which we a More...

0 comments like (6 people liked it)

Mar 13, 2011

Todd rated it:

I only read the first 13 pages of this book, plus the prologue, but that was enough. In the first few pages he name-drops people like Umberto Eco and Nabokov, tells us about people who were rather unknown five years ago (but forgets to tell us that they are still rather unknown now), and compares himself to people in history who are/were actually influential. For a man who claims he is not writing an autobiography, he really works hard to impress the reader. He adds little bits of information in More...

10 comments like (4 people liked it)

Mar 01, 2009

nanto added it

nyari buku hegel malah dapat buku ini yang terjemahannya. ada beberapa kalimatnya yang menggelitik maka tertarik deh.:D

*sampe bab 1*
Ide buku ini menarik.

Black Swan adalah sebuah metafora yang pertama saya pahami dari kajian filsafat ilmu dulu sewaktu kuliah. Karl Raimund Poper menggunakan metafora itu untuk menjelaskan konsepsinya tentang falsifikasi. Di dunia ini, manusia cenderung percaya untuk mengatakan angsa putih adalah kebenaran. Keguncangan pada kebenaran it More...

0 comments like (6 people liked it)

Mar 17, 2011

Bonnie rated it:

This felt like it was trying to be the next The Tipping Point or Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything and just failed spectacularly, on all counts. Most importantly, perhaps, was that it was dull and a chore to read. In the little footnotes suggesting a chapter was unneccessary for a nontechnical reader and could be skipped (read: you are too dumb to understand this chapter, so don't even bother), like Chapter 15, I gladly took his advice because it meant one l More...

0 comments like (3 people liked it)

Apr 08, 2008

Ben rated it:

If you skipped your Systems, Statistics, or Random Variables classes in college, or if you think you know more than everyone else on Wall Street, then read this book. It will reaffirm what you already know. To the rest of you: this book will reaffirm what you thought you knew when you were 5 or 6...with an updated vocabulary.

I put this book down after the first chapter, but thought I would give it another chance, that I was being unfair. When I read the second chapter (which is More...

8 comments like (6 people liked it)

Nov 26, 2007

Sabrina rated it:

Perhaps the problem was that I began with high expectations.

Taleb, who I presume can understand Arabic at its most elementary level, regularly refers to Muslims as \"Moslems,\" which irritates me to no end.

The book became tedious and self-contradictory at times, and I felt that it had an engrossing theory, yes, but it was poorly executed. The prose did not capture my interest, and his examples seemed to imitate (badly) the anecdotal style of Blink or Freakonomi More...

0 comments like (3 people liked it)

May 27, 2007

todd rated it:

The Black Swan

This is one of those “must read” books that many more people will claim to have read than will actually slog through. Like with Fooled by Randomness, Taleb takes many more pages than necessary to get his important points across. Those points are that we have incredibly poor skills at estimating extreme events, we regularly abuse historical statistics in ways that set us up to fail miserably, and we should have a great distrust of most planning processes. The ultimate More...

1 comment like (2 people liked it)

Dec 28, 2007

Misha rated it:

This book is a weird mix of novel ideas, bragging, and pseudo-science.

Taleb makes a strong case for his theory of black swans. It's an interesting and valuable theory but it's also one that could be communicated in a short conversation and does not need a whole book to contain it.

Taleb fills the rest of the pages by bragging about his own success and ridiculing established philosophers, economists, and anyone else he can think of. I'm not in any position to judge his More...

1 comment like (2 people liked it)

Jan 13, 2009

Bernard rated it:

This was my first encounter with Nassim Taleb. The writing has a hint of condescension that would be more irritating if his points weren't so interesting. This guy is either great to have at dinner or an arrogant ass. Probably both on the same night.

The basic idea behind the book is that the observational methods that underpin science can't prove the non-existence of an object/event. To make matters worse, human cognition is driven by heuristics instead of perfect memorization of More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Aug 23, 2008

Daniel rated it:

I stopped reading this because the author is so pompous and annoying.

0 comments like (7 people liked it)

Apr 13, 2011

Loyd rated it:

No, it has nothing to do with the Natalie Portman movie. Researcher Nassim Nicholas Taleb's The Black Swan is a study of how unexpected, often tragic or shocking circumstances are the catalyst for positive change in the world. Here's the premise: an unexpected occurrence (like the discovery of an actual black swan in nature when none were thought to exist) jogs our thought processes, thus opening our eyes to a different future, for better or worse. I'm not sure every example in the book accurate More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jun 18, 2008

Paula rated it:

Have you read a book recently that blew your mind every other page? Because that's what "Black Swan" did to me. Basically, Taleb takes everything you learned in Econ and Statistics 101 and throws it out the window (which made me feel better, because I didn't do so well in Stats).

There's only one main idea in this book: events in society are becoming increasingly random and unpredictable. We've moved from a world of averages to a world of extremes, and we have no way of gue More...

1 comment like (4 people liked it)

Jul 27, 2007

Beth (M) rated it:

This is a long discussion of why human events are so unpredictable. The Black Swan represents an extremely unlikely event (a black swan being thought of as genetically impossible) such as 9/11. The more unpredictable it is, the greater its consequences. The author grew up in Lebanon during its 15 year civil war and did a lot of reading while staying alive in basements ("war is extreme monotony punctuated by extreme terror") and it's understandable that he became devoted to the study o More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Mar 15, 2009

Atif rated it:

the books takes you on a very complex journey but at the end, brings you down to point one. One would say, why the hell did i went through the entire journey when I what I wanted to see could be verbally explained in one line...this book even though has some good things in parts but on the whole it portrays that all the theories of science, economics, business studies are rubbish and we should only focus on the so called greatest subject of philosophy.

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Dec 04, 2007

David rated it:

Nassim Taleb's earlier book "Fooled by Randomness" was enormously successful - deservedly so, in my opinion. Unfortunately, this second book is a complete disappointment. Despite its length, it adds very little of interest to the material in the first book. Much of it is a rambling and indulgent rehash of ideas already developed adequately in the first book. If you are looking for fresh insight, spare your money.

Taleb is a very smart guy. In the first book, he wrote fluidly More...

2 comments like (2 people liked it)

Nov 23, 2009

Barnaby rated it:

This useful book contains some key insights, but they are excessively watered down by Taleb's self-indulgent and too-clever-by-half yarn spinning.

Somewhere in his development someone obviously convinced him that he could only get his point across by telling stories, and this simplistic rule of thumb has gotten the better of him. The abstractions he represents are really not as complicated as all that, and are well-represented in our zeitgeist by prominent writers in fields ranging f More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Dec 25, 2010

Sarah rated it:

Actually picked this up recently, and am trying to make it past the first few chapters. My biggest problem at this point is feeling like reading the whole book is really necessary when I feel like it sums itself up well enough in the beginning, pointing out what in sta...tistics is a generally well known principle (and is the basis for his whole theory) that the outliers will have the biggest impact and f-up your entire analysis of the stats you are working with. Economic gurus know this, of cou More...

2 comments like (1 person liked it)

Dec 16, 2009

Tracy rated it:

this book is causing quite the stir among economics departments and business school finance faculties (and money managers). it's like they have a visceral reaction to critiques of their professional assumptions. anyway, the feedback i got from an mit prof was that there's nothing actionable in his recommendations. as a complit person, what i found hardest to swallow was the rejection of narrative and how humans make the random universe reasonable. while taleb's argument on randomness and bla More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Sep 14, 2011

Wael Al-alwani rated it:

The book has a great philosophical and a little mind-twisting information about uncertainty and the improbable. It discusses how rare events have high impacts and that we are controlled by them, calling these events the Black Swans. The way we consider historic data to make decisions and forecasts is highly vulnerable to both the factors we cannot predict, and the factors we cannot measure. I was heavily involved in forecasting techniques and building basic/advanced mathematical models for forec More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Dec 20, 2011

Ahmed rated it:

Black Swan logic makes what you don’t know far more relevant than what you do know. Consider that many Black Swans can be caused and exacerbated by their being unexpected.

Think of the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001: had the risk been reasonably conceivable on September 10, it would not have happened. If such a possibility were deemed worthy of attention, fighter planes would have circled the sky above the twin towers, airplanes would have had locked bulletproof doors, and the More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Aug 04, 2011

Orr added it

Taleb's Black Swan has its fair share of problems. Quite a few parts of this book tend to step into the wrong side of personal, and its length is not equally balanced by its scope. To make matters worse Taleb spends the first 80 pages of this book stating the problem of induction. The books main problem though could be ascribed to something Taleb never actually puts into words but rather into style – the attribution of this book to the genre of 'Popular Science'. Economists jokes aside, this is More...

0 comments like

Aug 03, 2011

Ben added it

As i read this book a feeling grew in me that simply expressed the fact that i had been waiting for this book for all my post childhood life. Despite being on a subject that technically sounds dry and boring it is in fact the opposite especially as told by Nick N Taleb whom i wish to meet under whatever circumstances chance would give me, as his great personality and individual view point shine through every sentence of this book. It is a debunking book, of 'scientific' and 'mathematical' theori More...

0 comments like

Mar 26, 2009

Neil rated it:

Okay, let's see if I got it straight...

An anti-academic academic weaves a non-narrative narrative about predicting the unpredictable into the theory that rigid theories are bad.

Oh, and count on things you can't conceive of happening happening.

Something like that.

Taleb's observations on the expectations and biases we hold, especially when estimating risk or uncertainty, are pretty dead on.

His key practical point is about the need for a More...

0 comments like (3 people liked it)

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