The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

This author is probably the first to make shout and scream at a book! The prose is rambling and arrogant, swerving from philosophy to mathematics, economics, his personal life history and psychology and back again. Taleb is constantly at pains to show us just how wonderfully well read he is quoting from as many and varied sources as he can muster form his memory be it literary or (pseudo)scientific. The analogies he presents are sometimes just downright wrong e.g. his examples of swimmers' bodies and Gulag survivers regarding the fact that we only see the "survivors" or successes and not the failures. The fact that he takes chapters to explain some of these basic concepts that pretty much everybody is already aware of throws into sharp relief just how nebulous his narrative is. I have a suggestion for Taleb, summarize / distill his "idea" (which isn't actually a new idea at all) into a book an quarter of the size and i might read it on the toilet if i have the time. Short summary: this book is a complete and utter waste, of effort on the part of the reader and of paper on which it is printed.

After about 150 pages, I am still deciding if I should invest more time on it. Some ideas are quite interesting but it seems to me quite disperse, there is no line I can follow easily. The author clearly knows what he is talking about, but sometimes gets lost in references to what others said or wrote about this and that. If I was the editor I would cut half of it and rewrite it so it can catch the reader's attention easily. Overall it is not a bad book to read, but I wonder what clear message or ideas would I get from it.

This twerp thinks that Richard Dawkins is a charlatan - which is proof that Taleb himself is a charlatan. The rest is just pop politics, guff economics and pomposity.

There are enough other 1-star reviews here, making lots of criticisms, and I agree with almost all of it. I have a general principle that once I start to read a book I like to give it a chance and finish it, even if it is initially not very promising. In this case, I would have done well to abandon my principle. This was a book that started badly, and got worse. I should have know better from my initial instincts. It started badly because, early on, there were statements that were poorly presented, in a pompous tone, and with attempts at humour that were just not funny. It got worse because the insights I was hoping would eventually appear never did, and the bad aspects just got worse. The core message of "expect the unexpected" is reasonable enough, but could have been epxressed more clearly and a lot more concisely. The one thing I did like about the book was how it pointed out how academics and others sometimes make claims without providing good evidence to back it up, and that we should be sceptical of such claims. (If that is something that interests you, buy "Bad Science" by Ben Goldacre instead). As a general rule I agree that less fawning reverence should be accorded to professors, and the book contributes to achieving that. Don't bother reading this book, and certainly don't spend money buying it.

I found this book a breath of fresh air. We tend to read in an echo chamber of books that confirm our world view. Black Swan is not like this. Telab dismantles our inbuilt pretensions and invites us to live with the mystery of not knowing jack all about the world, the future and knowledge in general. This book is a treasure trove of caustic wit and sharp intelligent insights; from the problem of induction (but in the real world), to the phoney Nobel laureate scam jobs, pseudo geniuses selling mumbo jumbo and other economic modelling idiocies and philosophical paradoxes that have never occurred to me before. Thus this book really got my mind racing. Taleb is a very clever man for sure and he lets us know it. He believes himself to have made great discoveries concerning the stupidity of the bellied up beast we call capitalism and why things generally tend to cock up in unexpected ways. Oh, and he shows why experts don't know as much as you and I, which I find very worrying! Thus this book is well worth the read, just to swim inside the mind of a true intellectual. And not one of those pop intellectuals who grave our culture (and populate the philosophy book shelves at my local Waterstones)! Taleb then is on hand to tell you how it is. He has experience working in the `machine', he's made lots of money and so he's in a good position to insult the map and kick the territory; which he does with venom. He has plenty of funny venomous asides aimed at philosophers and `experts'. Though I'm not qualified (or clever enough) to comment on the guys massive ego (it really is huge!), he just puts his ideas out in a crystal clear and provocative way which I find irresistible. He writes with confidence you see and so he seems to know what he is talking about. So if you can stomach the man's genius complex, you may well start finding him a charming and somewhat very funny character (as I did). What Taleb has to say he says it really well and so his book is a joy to read and well worth your time. Though it can be challenging in places (you won't finish it in one sitting), you will put it down and so that you can process what you have just read. I'm therefore bemused by all the negative reviews for this book. Ok, for sure, Taleb does ramble on a bit and he struggles with his punch-lines (get to the point man!) but, I reckon anyway, clever people should be allowed to ramble with impunity, as long as their position is strong and they have something to say. So if you're smart, ignore all the negative winging and whining about Talebs arrogance. God, these days you can buy a book for the price of a Big Mac (I bought this one for $2) and Black Swan is a very digestible read indeed. So just give this book go and stop moaning that Taleb needs an editor and digest the man's ideas instead.

Black swan is a good concept, which explains how a small but yet unforeseen event can change what we know about something till date. However, the language of the book is very terse and often quite boring. It seemed to me that author could have written the whole book in more concise manner but didn't - may be just to increase number of pages. The book is a tiresome reading. You can get the synopsis of the subject by reading about the book in Wikipedia.

Perhaps you cannot judge a book by it's cover, but howabout a sentence ... "Whenever you hear a snotty (and Frustrated) European middlebrow presenting his sterotypes about Americans, he will often describe them as 'uncultured', 'unintellectual' and 'poor in math' because, unlike his peers, Americans are not into equation drills and the constructions that middlebrows call 'high culture' - like knowledge of Goethe's inspirational (and central) trip to Italy, or familiarity with the Delft school of painting." Amazing that a single sentence can offend both Americans and Europeans and betray the author's pompous view of the world. That was on page 31. It goes on and on. The central theme behind the book is that unusual events are, well, unusual and can distort any estimations based upon assuming some kind of a Normal (in the mathematical sense) distribution. None of this is in the least bit suprising to anyone who's cracked open a Maths text-book. This is why mathematicians understand the difference between "average" and "modal" and (oh by the way) there are other distributions out there apart from the Gaussian ditribution. Note to self: do not buy any more of these "business books" whilst rushing though airport terminals!!

I came to this book amid its broad popular reception, expecting at least something by way of an original thesis. I'm afraid I was left disappointed. First of all I should say, unlike some other reviewers, that I liked Taleb's personality, and didn't find it overly pompous. He's wryly funny at times, and not afraid to mete out blunt (perhaps childish) criticisms of 'the Man': bankers, academic scholars and so on. What wasn't so enjoyable was the interminable rambling to which he subjects the reader. And it's all for nought! I've read a lot of modern 'philosophy' and critical theory, so I'm used to self-preening repetition, but I was left astonished that after some five chapters I'd still found no real exploration of the otherwise rather platitudinous premise of the book (surprises happen, we are hardwired not to predict them). In this respect, the book reminded me of a kind of Slavoj Zizek-lite. The fusion of popular culture and anecdote with obscure, largely forgotten philosophers, certainly tends in that direction. As does the flow of the book (one argument - illustrated ad nauseum). Of course, illustration in different contexts can be enlightening, but in this case I was left asking, 'yes, and...?', 'so what?'. I just don't find anything remotely new about Taleb's Black Swan, and can only surmise that the economic crash has furnished the book with a false sense of relevance. Zizek only really wrote one good book, his first - The Sublime Object of Ideology. He then proceeded to regurgitate the same argument across his next handful of books. Let's hope that Taleb gives up the ghost now and spares us any further analysis of the Black Swan.

+ This is an important book. All intellectual people should read it. It should be a set text - certainly for all business school students. The trouble is that business schools would have trouble accepting much of what he has to say. Furthermore, Mr Taleb is unrestrainedly outspoken, so that he almost seems offensive. In the first half of the book, I wondered what kind of egomaniac was keeping me company. BUT his erudition and his arguments (and his rough charm) gradually and firmly win through. By the end of the book, I simply have to admit that he is correct. To admit that he is correct is intellectually like an earthquake, since it shakes down the towers of many things taught in our conventional education, not least business school itself. If you accept he is correct and then go on with your life as normal, then you have not fully accepted that he is correct. I personally realise that I have not internalised his messages and changed my way of thinking and my way of life. I am somewhat confused about the far-reaching implications of his arguments. I will have to read it again and contemplate, and then implement some changes. This almost sounds like a religious book! So what is it about? A `Black Swan' is his label for a highly improbable, but high impact event. It is an outlier; something beyond our regular expectations. So we do not think about a `black swan' event much. We may not even know it exists. Our experience gives us no clue that it exists. We take a thousand balls out of a bag and find they are all white. Why would we expect a black ball? Our statistics, whether Pascalian or Bayesian, will not alert us to the possibility of a black ball. Then one day we draw out a black ball. All our previous experience is vitiated. Mr Taleb's metaphor comes from Europeans seeing only white swans, and being astonished to discover black swans in Australia. The metaphors of swans or balls in a bag do not capture well his other key point here. The `black swans' have a high impact. Think of history. 9/11 was unexpected and had high impact. The First World War has unexpected and had high impact - to put it mildly. Or think of your own life, and the unforeseen key events that changed your life for ever. They were not planned, but once they happened, everything changed. The person you met and married. The job you applied for and got, and the job you suddenly lost. Specifically I think of going to work in Japan, something not remotely contemplated 12 months before I arrived there. I also think of the thunderbolt of being diagnosed with Polycythaemia in 1994; or the stroke that might suddenly floor me as a result. If you think in personal terms, the significance of `black swans' comes home. Mr Taleb says forecasting is impossible in many circumstances. Planning often turns out to be futile. I would have been astounded to be told in 1978, as an English student at Oxford, that I would turn out to be a financial markets trainer in 2008 (having the effrontery to teach physics graduates financial maths!). Mr Taleb seems to wander over all kinds of ground in this book, and you wonder sometimes what the relevance and point is. But it all comes together by the end of the book. For instance, he discusses fame at several stages of the book. We tend to idolise the famous. But how did they become famous? Are they really worthy of our adulation? Maybe they were just lucky. Maybe they just happened to be a touch ahead in talent, but then were swept up in the many `winner takes all' processes of modern life. Are the footballers earning £10 million really 500 times better than a lowly footballer earning £20,000? Is the man on TV being heard by millions of people more worthy to be listened to than a mere teacher in a classroom? Was Admiral Nelson truly the greatest leader in the Royal Navy? And what about those who achieved great things, and have never been heard of? A stunning poem written in a book that is lost forever. A talented composer who never gets published? A man who prevents a terrorist outrage, whose name is never known to the public. What has this to do with infrequent, high impact events? Everything. Many of the fortunate are the products of positive black swan events. Furthermore the luck element, or some self-reinforcing effect like academic peer review, leads to the domination of ideas which are simply weak or misleading - or should be more critically challenged, were they not coming from the mouths of such `famous' people. When he is scathing of Nobel prize winners - especially those who won the Economics Prize - you at first think that Mr Taleb is being very disrespectful. Well he is. And when the scales fall from your eyes, and you see the unfair process by which Nobel prize winners are selected, you realise that Nobel prize are possibly not so worthy of our exaggerated respect. This is well explained by his description of social contagion. Contagion and feedback loops are a large part of social phenomena that set them apart from pure science. He discusses the financial markets in several chapters, and firmly regards them as social phenomena, affected by human emotions and crazes. He rips apart the ideas of efficient markets and portfolio diversification and risk management techniques (all Nobel prize winning topics). He talks a lot about `Mediocristan' and `Extremistan'. He says we have to know which country we are in, and it is fatal to the search for truth and assessing risk to mix them up. He stores up positive venom for those who misuse the Gaussian normal distribution curve. It is a tool of Mediocristan. It can be rightly applied in the physical sciences and mechanical / chemical engineering fields. But he rages against it being used in the social `sciences'. Banks who assess their `Value at Risk' with the normal distribution curve are telling us about the 99.9% confidence interval, which is actually unimportant. By their methods and actions they ignore the 0.1%, which is the Black Swan that changes everything. So they are not truly measuring risk, let alone thinking about it. Finance is rich with black swans that come out of the 0.1% zone: the 1929 and 1987 stock market crashes; the Latin American Debt crisis of 1981; the collapse of LTCM in 1998; the collapse of Bear Stearns and then Lehman Brothers in 2008. Oh, they are all explained after the event. But we really did not forecast them, and we really did not know the ultimate cause, any more than we really know the cause of the First World War. So we are urged to get away from the toxicity of Gaussian Curve thinking and to face the fact that many important distributions are highly skewed. Take wealth ownership for instance. Independently of this book, I have found statistics saying that 20% people own 83% of the world's wealth. Furthermore an eye-popping 1% of people own 40% of the world's wealth. The winner takes all - or so near to all that it hardly matters. We are talking about Extremistan here.

A most engaging collection of anecdotes serving to illustrate Taleb's central Black Swan contention - that it's the unknowable (minute probability) big impact events that we must bear in mind when thinking about the course of the future (and we should avoid seeing causal patterns where there are none). The back cover has Penguin Books designate this title under Economics, but Psychology would be more appropriate as most of the material deals with human decision-making - citing your favourite Kahneman-Tversky experiments along the way. He makes a big effort to show how his idea is very much bound up with him as a person, so in that respect the autobiographical asides are justified. But towards the end he abandons all sense of modesty when he likens himself to the eminent mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot. Early on, he does explicitly state that he'd like to be considered a philosopher, and sometimes the pit-stop introspections seem out of place. Definitely an intelligent thinker, but a little too eager to show just how well-read he is. His narrative is nicely sign-posted and he does a very good job of chronicling other people's work in light of his own ideas, so it also serves as a nice place to pick up commentary from intellectual figures you might not have previously heard of. Contrary to what Chris Anderson is quoted as saying on the cover, it isn't "mindblowing" or "a masterpiece". You might already be aware of many of its ancillary insights. Others here have commented on the messy style; to be fair it does read like a scrap-book of anecdotes. But I'm glad I read it. I won't remember much of the detail, as he does flit from one story to the next, but the central insights will help me to bear certain things in mind. So it deserves to be read, but you might find yourself rushing through some parts to get to the gist.