Sign in with Facebooktodd's Reviews > The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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 message is positive, however, since there are general guidelines on how we can do better (set yourself up for good extreme events while protecting the downside).
The style will either excite or turn off the reader. 90% of the parenthetical phrases and footnotes add little except Taleb’s (often snarky) editorials. Traders are sometimes described as people for whom the only thing worse than losing money themselves, is watching others make money. Taleb writes as if the only thing worse than him not getting adequate attention for his ideas is watching others get lauded. He clearly wants this book to be considered scholarly as he has 19 pages of notes and a 28 page bibliography designed to demonstrate the depth of his own reading. Segmenting the personal prose from its academic foundation may have the effect of improving the accessibility to the ideas within, but the reader should be cautioned. Any author who, in the acknowledgements, states “…[the book] just wrote itself,” and then thanks his editor for protecting him from “the intrusions of the standardizing editors,” has probably produced a verbose, tangent driven effort rather than the perfect prose he imagines.
If the style excites you, great. If it turns you off, try to work through it. The world is full of decision makers who rely on experts, statistics and intricate models that are built on soft sand. The risks they take affect all of us, and while this behavior will probably never stop, we can take steps to minimize the impact of their folly. Anyone who has been visited by a negative Black Swan will understand this implicitly. For the rest of us, the cost of this book will be a much lower tuition than we might have to pay learning the lessons first hand.
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 message is positive, however, since there are general guidelines on how we can do better (set yourself up for good extreme events while protecting the downside).
The style will either excite or turn off the reader. 90% of the parenthetical phrases and footnotes add little except Taleb’s (often snarky) editorials. Traders are sometimes described as people for whom the only thing worse than losing money themselves, is watching others make money. Taleb writes as if the only thing worse than him not getting adequate attention for his ideas is watching others get lauded. He clearly wants this book to be considered scholarly as he has 19 pages of notes and a 28 page bibliography designed to demonstrate the depth of his own reading. Segmenting the personal prose from its academic foundation may have the effect of improving the accessibility to the ideas within, but the reader should be cautioned. Any author who, in the acknowledgements, states “…[the book] just wrote itself,” and then thanks his editor for protecting him from “the intrusions of the standardizing editors,” has probably produced a verbose, tangent driven effort rather than the perfect prose he imagines.
If the style excites you, great. If it turns you off, try to work through it. The world is full of decision makers who rely on experts, statistics and intricate models that are built on soft sand. The risks they take affect all of us, and while this behavior will probably never stop, we can take steps to minimize the impact of their folly. Anyone who has been visited by a negative Black Swan will understand this implicitly. For the rest of us, the cost of this book will be a much lower tuition than we might have to pay learning the lessons first hand.
Sign into Goodreads to see if any of your friends have read The Black Swan.
sign in »
Exactly. I had to read it for work. Every word. And the this-didn't-need-to-be-edited style drove me mad.