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The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

Author: Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Publisher: Allen Lane
Category: Book

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Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

35 reviews
Sales Rank: 3471

Media: Hardcover
Pages: 400
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.7
Dimensions (in): 9.3 x 6.2 x 1.4

ISBN: 0713999950
EAN: 9780713999952
ASIN: 0713999950

Publication Date: May 3, 2007
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Also Available In:

•	Paperback - The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
•	Hardcover - The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
•	Paperback - The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

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Customer Reviews: Read 30 more reviews...

5 out of 5 stars

I'll keep this short... April 9, 2008
2 out of 5 found this review helpful

I am shocked by the number of middling to low reviews this book is getting, so I felt compelled to add my five stars - my first ever Amazon review. While I appreciate the criticisms w.r.t. the peculiar writing style and self-indulgence, this book is superb because of the ideas it puts forth. I have to think anyone who does not like it, simply does not "get it" for whatever reason.

Disliking the book or not understanding it may not be an issue of intelligence, but one of careful reading (or the lack thereof). However, as I suspect is more likely, that to accept the main points of the book would force some people to look negatively back at years and years of their own lives, beliefs and behaviors, which is something most humans simply are not willing to do...and I offer that more as an observation than as a criticism.

5 out of 5 stars

Too clever by 75.987456 per cent March 17, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful

This is a very amusing provocation by perhaps the most subversive philosopher economist since C Northcote Parkinson. He makes a case that is hard to refute that chance and luck play a much bigger role than our narratives might suggest, and that consequent to this/subsequent to it there are always going to be anomolous events that are more or less completely unforseen, which are going to result in money blowing up, amongst other things. At a time of turbulance in global markets, this is an especially entertaining read that lays out a devastating case against conventional wisdom and above all the Bell Curve, while be laugh-out-load funny at the same time. It sets out to humble some undeserving recipients of the Nobel Prize for economics, although it can be argued that this is akin to shooting ducks in a cage.

4 out of 5 stars

Some key insights. Half the length and a quarter of the ego and it's a 5. March 2, 2008
3 out of 4 found this review helpful

This is the archetypal curate's egg tome. A few of the concepts took my breath away. His erudition is unquestionable. No doubt, this man is smarter than me. I thought it worth struggling through.

What, struggle you say? The man would seem to have an enormous ego, enjoys self-promotion (and taking cheap shots at his antagonists). The shame is that it comes through, subtly at first, building and then, with the last chapter, ending in almost a shriek of self-righteousness.

He makes great points only to shoot himself in the foot. An example, yes, the world does over-use the normal curve. And, yes, it does so as, if you can accept "normality" there are a host of mathematical tools. And many just use normal as if it were, well, normal. Contrary to Taleb's assertion that we all use it blindly the statisticians I know all worry about their selection of models and distributions - they don't enter into analysis blindly.

I'm glad I read it. I'm off to hear him lecture. I'll probably buy another book of his. But he needs a more ruthless editor to say, "Nassim, enough, chop those pages."

3 out of 5 stars

Heavy going for banal insights February 9, 2008
4 out of 6 found this review helpful

It may not be fun for forecasters to admit it, but NNT (his abbreviation) is onto something: those of us in the business (I spent many years as a stock analyst) are often doing little but making up stories (what NNT stigmatises as "narratives"). Indeed it is the business of a good analyst to weave a story out of recent price movements, valuation anomalies and other news, as well as estimates of future earnings. As NNT stresses, the last of these is the most unknowable. Surprises catch us out. NNT is onto something else as well: his "Black Swan" concept, the unlikely event with extreme consequences, is not captured by the bell curve of normal distribution underlying much investment theory.

But we have to plough through a heck of a lot of anecdote, self-serving reminiscence and repetition to learn that there isn't much more to NNT's book than these two--not desperately startling--points; and that his approach to the consequences of his insights is so banal as to recommend that we avoid big risks and put ourselves in the way of big rewards. It is also inherent in NNT's view of these things that the tiny amount of maths presented is offered in such a tentative spirit as to make it completely unhelpful.

This does not make the book useless. It is always a useful corrective for those of us in the business to remind ourselves that our tools for forecasting complexity are flawed. And perhaps other authors will build on NNT's work to incorporate his thinking into the apparatus of investment theory, though NNT seems so much to relish his self-assumed role as gadfly that I guess he would be horrified at the idea!

Meanwhile, I was left with the sense that NNT himself wrote the book at least as much as a showcase for his quirky personality (not to say his consultancy business, mentioned several times), as a serious essay on the limits of forecasting. This is a shame as forecasting is worth doing and worth doing better; deliberately or not, NNT makes his contribution to the latter.

3 out of 5 stars

Rock solid logic, pointless bile February 7, 2008
2 out of 4 found this review helpful

Though this books contains a few real gems, for most of this book I felt that NNT was not only pointing out the obvious: he was beating it to death. Being neither an economist, nor an American, however, I'm clearly not his target audience - I don't see too much that is ground-breaking in the book, and it could have been a lot shorter.

Whilst recognising that the logic is rock solid, the bile surrounding it is sprayed around to the point of unacceptability. Social groupings, ranging from statisticians to taxi-drivers, are generalised about and insulted in a quite blatant way; and whilst NNT insists in the book that national identitities do not exist, he proceeds to make assumptions about, and criticise, most nationalities in one way or another - if you're French, gird your loins before trying to read this. These comments may be part of the quirky humour that NNT is trying to use and that I just don't get; but for me he goes too far.