The Black Swan by Nassim Taleb

[volatile]

Has anyone else read Nassim Taleb's The Black Swan - The Impact of the Highly Improbable (Wiki? I've just started reading it today and it starts on a really interesting premise...

 

[blobru]

I almost bought a copy last fall. The jacket caught my eye so I sat down with it for a couple of hours in the store. I liked the black swan metaphor: the danger of confusing synthetic propositions like "all swans are white" with analytic propositions like "all bachelors are unmarried"; suggested reasons we do this, think we know more than we do: stories, stats and graphs, the illusion that all facts fit certain narratives or maps; but paging deeper into it I didn't see any deeper analysis: beneath the nice metaphor is the uncontroversial claim that you can't predict the unpredictable (in detail), but you can expect the unexpected (in principle); unexpected events are high impact: better diversify to mute catastrophe (black swans into grey) and exploit opportunity (betting on black horses). His tone towards his colleagues struck me as a bit cranky, as if to underline the rarity of his insight, and the chapters devoted to the fictional author making it big with her offbeat book (stand-in for the author himself) also seemed pointlessly self-congratulatory.

So there's a browser's half-year-old impression. I'll be interested to see readers' full reports. It was a close call, but after mulling it over I bought a book on the Spanish Inquisition instead.

 

[volatile]

Interesting. Thanks for that. The reason I only said it had an interesting premise is because I have had a few niggles of those sorts already, and am hoping for the payoff or justification, especially on things like calling the bell curve "the Great Intellectual Fraud".

If what you say is true, then maybe I'm out of luck, but I shall persevere.

 

[blobru]

Interesting. Thanks for that. The reason I only said it had an interesting premise is because I have had a few niggles of those sorts already, and am hoping for the payoff or justification, especially on things like calling the bell curve "the Great Intellectual Fraud".

If what you say is true, then maybe I'm out of luck, but I shall persevere.

By all means. Am curious to get your final impressions.

As I said, I was right on the edge of buying because of the book's many intellectual teasers, like the 'bell-curve fraud'. Because the bell curve itself is fascinating: how all distributions tend to it!? There's a fair subject for a curious epistemologist. However, I couldn't see anything more to this author's complaint than that graphs make it easy to forget our information is incomplete (blur induction and deduction). Ok, good point, but...

But my criticism shouldn't be a spoiler. There was plenty of meat I ignored just rifling for aroma. My memory's unreliable too. And even if there's no big payoff, the black swan idea is still not a bad thought starter. Fallacies of statistical logic don't seem to get as much attention as their dialectical cousins, though they're probably as common. Maybe more academic treatments of the "black swan fallacy", if it merits them, will follow.

 

[boooeee]

I just finished it. Overall, I was pretty disappointed. He spends WAY too much time in the first part of the book belaboring the same, rather obvious, point (Predictions are hard). And he's not nearly as funny as he thinks he is.

Also, like blobru said, he comes off a bit cranky in his assessment of his colleagues. His repeated jabs at the Nobel prize seem like sour grapes.

The book picks up at the end when he starts discussing the Bell Curve and Power Laws. And he does have some good advice (reality isn't a game with well defined rules; don't fall in love with mathematically pristine models).

 

[Dunstan]

I read his previous book, Fooled By Randomness and found it somewhat interesting, but there were enough irritating quirks that I decided I'd had enough of Mr. Taleb. In particular, he seems to really really want you to know that:

1. He's really smart and successful.
2. Most of those other people who you think are smart and successful have actually just been lucky.
3. Economists are really stupid. (And there was plenty of strawmanning involved there)

It sounds like he hasn't changed much.

 

[Francesca R]

I've read it. I wasn't too keen on it and waa rather irked by the tone of arrogance. I think he is smart and an investor to learn from, but it grates. I don't think I will buy another of his books.

I preferred the "heavier" book by Benoit Mandelbrot "The (Mis) behaviour of Markets", whose author Taleb draws on a lot for his stuff