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The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable | 
 enlarge | Author: Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Publisher: Random House
Category: Book
List Price: $26.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  321 reviews
Sales Rank: 199
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 400
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.5
Dimensions (in): 9.4 x 6.5 x 1.4
ISBN: 1400063515
Dewey Decimal Number: 003.54
EAN: 9781400063512
ASIN: 1400063515
Publication Date: April 17, 2007
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Amazon.com
Bestselling author Nassim Nicholas Taleb continues his exploration of randomness in his fascinating new book, The Black Swan, in which he examines the influence of highly improbable and unpredictable events that have massive impact. Engaging and enlightening, The Black Swan is a book that may change the way you think about the world, a book that Chris Anderson calls, "a delightful romp through history, economics, and the frailties of human nature." See Anderson's entire guest review below.
Guest Reviewer: Chris Anderson
 Chris Anderson is editor-in-chief of Wired magazine and the author of The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More.
Four hundred years ago, Francis Bacon warned that our minds are wired to deceive us. "Beware the fallacies into which undisciplined thinkers most easily fall--they are the real distorting prisms of human nature." Chief among them: "Assuming more order than exists in chaotic nature." Now consider the typical stock market report: "Today investors bid shares down out of concern over Iranian oil production." Sigh. We're still doing it.
Our brains are wired for narrative, not statistical uncertainty. And so we tell ourselves simple stories to explain complex thing we don't--and, most importantly, can't--know. The truth is that we have no idea why stock markets go up or down on any given day, and whatever reason we give is sure to be grossly simplified, if not flat out wrong.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb first made this argument in Fooled by Randomness, an engaging look at the history and reasons for our predilection for self-deception when it comes to statistics. Now, in The Black Swan: the Impact of the Highly Improbable, he focuses on that most dismal of sciences, predicting the future. Forecasting is not just at the heart of Wall Street, but it's something each of us does every time we make an insurance payment or strap on a seat belt.
The problem, Nassim explains, is that we place too much weight on the odds that past events will repeat (diligently trying to follow the path of the "millionaire next door," when unrepeatable chance is a better explanation). Instead, the really important events are rare and unpredictable. He calls them Black Swans, which is a reference to a 17th century philosophical thought experiment. In Europe all anyone had ever seen were white swans; indeed, "all swans are white" had long been used as the standard example of a scientific truth. So what was the chance of seeing a black one? Impossible to calculate, or at least they were until 1697, when explorers found Cygnus atratus in Australia.
Nassim argues that most of the really big events in our world are rare and unpredictable, and thus trying to extract generalizable stories to explain them may be emotionally satisfying, but it's practically useless. September 11th is one such example, and stock market crashes are another. Or, as he puts it, "History does not crawl, it jumps." Our assumptions grow out of the bell-curve predictability of what he calls "Mediocristan," while our world is really shaped by the wild powerlaw swings of "Extremistan."
In full disclosure, I'm a long admirer of Taleb's work and a few of my comments on drafts found their way into the book. I, too, look at the world through the powerlaw lens, and I too find that it reveals how many of our assumptions are wrong. But Taleb takes this to a new level with a delightful romp through history, economics, and the frailties of human nature. --Chris Anderson
Product Description
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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| Customer Reviews: Read 316 more reviews...
 Good info, good ideas, but got bored and couldn't finish it... August 21, 2008
As far as I got, it all seemed to make sense. The bell-curve IS inadequate. Ok, that's fine. And there are some great examples. There are plenty of reviews here that will give you all the goodies.
But all in all I have to say that there was a lot of clutter. If you're going to buy this book READ THE PREFACE, everything just clicks better.
Still many things seem irrelevant, or perhaps the connection was not explained enough. Lots of repetition. My overall sense is that it could have been shorter and to the point.
Needless to say, I liked as far as I got. I just felt that I had enough information and that reading the rest would just be repeating the beginning. Still, I'm happy I bought it and got as far as I did. The insight is good, and useful. So if the subject interests you, give it a try and hopefully you'll make it ot the end.
 Disaster Planning for Black Swans August 18, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I have found Mr. Taleb's book to be a very interesting and thought provoking read. As an experienced emergency management professional and instructor, I find it calls into question the whole process of risk and hazard analysis. While the book is certainly intellectually stimulating and should cause one to be very careful with planning assumptions, I question its value in any direct application. While looking in the rear view mirror we don't know how many Black Swan's were prevented by well conducted risk and hazard analyses based on historical occurrences. As Mr. Taleb points out, history has overlooked the successful interventions and un-occurred disasters.
 Nothing useful that anyone in a scientific field would benefit from August 16, 2008
1 out of 3 found this review helpful
Talebs point is painfully simple. For some reason he seems to think that it is very unique and it is almost laughable that he thinks people in academia are so near sighted as to not realize much of what he presents.
He fails to provide any new model for evaluating risk... It's obvious that we can't predict the future, yes markets could collapse if a nuke hit america... or some other "Black Swan" occurrence happened. But the fact is we can't really practically use any of these events to model risk.
One example I found to be pretty stupid was when he talked about the banking crisis (where South American countries all simultaneously defaulted on their loans) ... and implied that this meant that "bankers were not conservative". His basic vice is that many strategies produce very little volatility yet still contain chaotic possibility of an extremely large loss. Unfortunately he never offered a practical alternative to what conservative should be defined as. Humans have limited tools to evaluate risk, I think everyone realizes that our models aren't perfect (yet unfortunately Taleb seems to think that he is the only one that has had this insight). This pattern occurs throughout the book -- Taleb chastising people for wrongly evaluating future occurrences without offering any practical alternative.
I didn't buy a book simply be told that ... "well...humans aren't oracles they can't predict stuff...sometimes crazy stuff goes down... here are some examples... oh yeah and some advice: Be open minded"... which in essence is what this book wastes 400 pages doing.
What a bloated and wasted work August 15, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
I got interested in this book in part because the topic interested me and in part because I have seen far too many random people including boston cab drivers and random passerby reading this book. I am uncertain why this book ever caught on, as it is written without any style and with long rambling bits as well as poorly executed stylistic techniques. It seems to me at least, that the success of this book is in and of itself a very negative black swan.
First, I want to take intellectual umbrage with some of the events Mr. Taleb describes as unpredictable. The book got of to a bad start by immediately sighting 9-11 as an unpredictable event. Unfortunately, this is clearly not the factual case as there were many precedents in the realm of plane high jackings and much evidence including the bin laden determined to strike the U.S memo of August 2001 to suggest an imminent attack. The problems with our intelligence communities were quite many including information sharing flaws and execution errors especially in collaboration, but the threats we faced were never completely unpredictable. Of course, Taleb is correct when he says that conventional thinking was at fault for many of our intelligence mistakes, however, the problem at least in regard to national security ( a field Taleb claims to respect later in the book) is that we mostly deal with limited resources to respond to near infinite quantities of threats. Moreover, the conventional and probable ( the assassination of JFK in Dallas) has just as much impact as the highly improbable. This is not exactly the black swan situation Taleb speaks of and it seems that at least when it comes to policy direction, his theory is lacking.
Stylistically, this book is filled with poor choices such as the french baiting so in vogue when this book came out which now is just utterly irritating, the use of hypothetical or imaginary cases rather than interesting real world example, the continuous referral back to past chapters through the use of their numbers, as if Taleb expects his tome to be judiciously memorized, a curious portion in which Taleb practically gushes about specific philosophers or mathematicians such as mandelbrot ( very awkward) and the continuous assertions of the author that he is different and unique from everyone around. The content of this book gets lost in a muddled layer of arrogance and repetition. The point of this book could much more easily be told with concrete examples and less narcissism and redundancy.
 A philosophy from statistics August 14, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This is a very fun book to read. Taleb is one of those polymath writers who are totally unashamed to bloviate and utterly convinced he's right (and is willing to call Nobel laureates frauds!). And I give him credit for making statistics engaging to read and a philosophy to boot.
My one criticism is his chapter on narrative fallacies. One of Taleb's arguments is that we should avoid seeing patterns in the past and that the past is almost entirely unexplainable and irreducible with respect to causation. He then applies this to history. I think Taleb's dead wrong here. It is absurd to think of history without thinking about causation and narrative. History is not naked chronology, as Taleb seems to think, but understanding reasons, causes. People don't want to know what happened, but why it happened. This is a valid question! IMHO, Taleb's argument about randomness and skepticism applies only to economic variables. And it's a good point. In sum, I thought Taleb's romp through the world of economics and forecasting was fun and thought-provoking!
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