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Imserba Webstore - The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
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List Price: $28.00
Our Price: $16.38
Your Save: $ 11.62 ( 42% )
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Manufacturer: Random House
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Average Customer Rating:   
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Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 003.54
EAN: 9781400063512
Feature: ISBN13: 9781400063512
ISBN: 1400063515
Label: Random House
Manufacturer: Random House
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 366
Publication Date: 2007-04-17
Publisher: Random House
Release Date: 2007-04-17
Studio: Random House
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Editorial Reviews:
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A black swan is a highly improbable event with three principal characteristics: It is unpredictable; it carries a massive impact; and, after the fact, we concoct an explanation that makes it appear less random, and more predictable, than it was. The astonishing success of Google was a black swan; so was 9/11. For Nassim Nicholas Taleb, black swans underlie almost everything about our world, from the rise of religions to events in our own personal lives.
Why do we not acknowledge the phenomenon of black swans until after they occur? Part of the answer, according to Taleb, is that humans are hardwired to learn specifics when they should be focused on generalities. We concentrate on things we already know and time and time again fail to take into consideration what we don’t know. We are, therefore, unable to truly estimate opportunities, too vulnerable to the impulse to simplify, narrate, and categorize, and not open enough to rewarding those who can imagine the “impossible.”
For years, Taleb has studied how we fool ourselves into thinking we know more than we actually do. We restrict our thinking to the irrelevant and inconsequential, while large events continue to surprise us and shape our world. Now, in this revelatory book, Taleb explains everything we know about what we don’t know. He offers surprisingly simple tricks for dealing with black swans and benefiting from them.
Elegant, startling, and universal in its applications The Black Swan will change the way you look at the world. Taleb is a vastly entertaining writer, with wit, irreverence, and unusual stories to tell. He has a polymathic command of subjects ranging from cognitive science to business to probability theory. The Black Swan is a landmark book–itself a black swan.
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: ALLRIGHT ALLREADY
Comment: FIRST PART OF THE BOOK WAS VERBOSE BUT INTERESTING
SECOND PART OF THE BOOK WAS VERBOSE AND BORING
Customer Rating:
Summary: The Impact of the Highly Imbecelic
Comment: At first this book lulls you into a sense of something important. The writer talks about the ways our minds react to great and shocking events in history. First there's surprise. Then there's a processing and afterwards we fool ourselves into believing that we knew it was coming all along. His examples include 9/11, the Lebanese war, the great stock market crash of 1987 and WWI. His biographical material about living in Lebanon when it was a paragon of stability is particularly fascinating.
However, the book doesn't really say much of anything besides the fact that people are usually shocked by the big events. Well, they really wouldn't be the big events if they didn't shock everyone. And his biographical material about taking trading jobs that offer him a chance at sabbaticals seems like he's still advertising himself - as if it's not enough that we bought the book - he's still trying to convince us that he's a smart philosopher. He even gives himself props for predicting the 1987 crash when he predicted that S--- Happens.
Sadly, once he gets to a biography of an innovative writer who wrote philosophical novels with the dialogue in different languages and a real distaste for modern creative writing programs, he crashes into the brick wall of inanity. The biography is basically about an unknown but stubborn writer who gets a lot of notes from editors and agents about what she should change. But she's not going to change anything because she's that stubborn. Then she posts it on a Web site and a small press publisher decides to make her an offer. Then the book breaks through the zeitgeist and causes a sensation and changes everything. This is his example of a Black Swan in literary circles.
This example is irritating for many reasons.
First, she's a fictional character. Some of the story aspects mirror his career but a lot of that is wishful thinking.
Second, philosophical novels are nothing new. Aldous Huxley, Simone Beauvoir and Ayn Rand wrote them and they only wrote them. They are without a doubt some of the most tedious excuses for fiction in the world. I would sooner read a romance novel where the word "hunk" is used without irony than another page of After Many a Summer Dies the Swan.
Third, that awful little story is the same story that every hack writer tells him or herself. They aren't getting published because they are too good and too innovative and ONE DAY, their awful little book will find a publisher and make everyone a ton of money. I've read enough slush for Teddy Bear Cannibal Massacre to know that most writers are simply bad. Encouraging writers with this crap keeps the Vanity Presses hopping but it offers nothing to the literary world.
Fourth, when discussing literature the "black swan" is nothing new. Many authors become "overnight bestsellers" and offer innovative books that change the market dramatically. The literary establishment thrives on these books and is always looking for the next big thing. However, several classics are solidly within the literary market traditions of the time. Wuthering Heights is a gothic romance. The Big Sleep is a murder mystery.
As soon as the author taxes the reader's patience with this garbage story, it's almost impossible to get it back. You know how you meet someone and you think they are the coolest person in the world. And suddenly they do or say one stupid thing and suddenly everything that you thought was cool is really sad and pathetic? That's this book. Suddenly, nothing in the beginning of the book is all that great. And the author talking about circular logic and the way its impossible to predict future events based on past events because logically you are never certain of anything but the negative - I learned all this in Logic 101. Great to see it restated, but I'm not really on a nostalgic kick.
All in all, this is one of those books in the "Duh" school of thought. There's nothing particularly deep or innovative but the prose is convoluted enough to make it sound deep. Once you realize that it's not deep, you realize that you've just wasted your time with a day trader that has too much time on his hands.
Customer Rating:
Summary: The Black Swan
Comment: This book is extremely tedious and repetitious. The central theme is that the Gaussian (Normal) probability law is an inadequate description of economic/financial outcomes. Consequently most of modern economics and quantitative finance are junk science to the extent they are based on the false assumption above. In addition, the book is mathematically dumbed down to the level of a sixth grader. Thus it provides the reader very little insight beyond the obvious. The author has precious little to offer beyond the simple fact stated above.
Great topic. Terrible execution. Don't waste your time with this worthless book.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Quite good but a bit pedantic
Comment: I have downloaded many of his Youtube videos and read his book twice. The videos are good not great, however the book can become boring due to it being turgid. The basic idea is true but the meandering train of thought causes the rereading of many chapters and then you still may not quite get the point. Since he believes in evolution his theories all have a bias that negates many of his conclusions. Still I would recommend reading this book as it probably will cause you to look at data from a totally different viewpoint. Even if you already have this viewpoint it doesn't hurt to be reminded again that there is another viewpoint that most so called experts avoid and because of this are dangerous.
Customer Rating:
Summary: "The Black Swan" is a practical joke
Comment: I'm somewhat suspicious that this book is an elaborate practical joke being played by Taleb. He's obviously a very intelligent man, an excellent and entertaining writer, and has an odd-ball sense of humor that is really appealing. So when I find after having read about 1/3 of the book that I haven't gone more than a few pages in a row without having found something that is factually incorrect or logically absurd I have to think to myself that it's all a joke. For example, even the title of the book is absurd as it relates to the alleged main premises of the book, and even then the main premises of the book are absurd and not born out by the facts. Black Swans are different species than the Swans found in Australia. In fact when they were discovered the concept of species didn't really exist as it does today. There really wasn't any reason why they shouldn't have named the new bird say, Honker, since if they really thought all Swans were white then a black bird would have to be something different. He claims that "Black Swan" events are unpredictable, carry a massive impact, and that after the fact humans construct explanations to make them appear less random. He also claims that these Black Swan events are the prime determinants of human history. In his words `History does not crawl, it jumps'. Then he bolsters his claim by trotting out a bunch of examples, none of which meet all 3 criteria. 9/11 not only was predictable but was predicted, probably will not have what I would consider a massive impact over the long run, and has certainly been explained conclusively as far as I'm concerned, and I don't know what randomness has to do with the explanation. How the hell could anybody call Google a "Black Swan"? It was just the best of a bunch of search engines. In fact it is a better example of the "Lucky Survivor" he likes to talk about elsewhere in the book than some of his other examples. The first 1/3 of the book is full of this nonsense. The one example that really kind of pissed me off is his criticism of the book "The Millionaire Next Door". That book was really intended to be "descriptive" as much as "explanatory" or as an "advice book", and what they found was that the typical person in the U.S. who had amassed assets in excess of 1 million dollars(1996 dollars) did it by spending considerably less than they earned throughout their careers and investing the difference prudently. If they did invest in something "risky" they only invested a small portion of their net worth in it and they made sure it was something that would pay off big if it panned out. In fact they invested their money in a modified version of Taleb's own 85-15 formulation!!! Their having amassed all those assets was not luck, as Taleb "claims". I just can't believe that Taleb made so many obvious absurd claims like this by accident. It must be a joke.
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