Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #84218 in Books
• Published on: 2007-05-03
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 400 pages

International Herald Tribune
'Taleb's book deserves our attention, and our thanks'

Niall Ferguson, Sunday Telegraph
'An idiosyncratically brilliant new book'

Chris Anderson, Editor-in-Chief of Wired and author of The Long Tail
'Mindblowing ... A masterpiece'

Customer Reviews

surprise: the ego trips a fuse
Never before have I felt the urge to advise amazon buyers not to buy a book. But there's a first time for everything. Sadly, this book is an intellectual and stylistic mess.
In contrast to Mr Taleb's previous book (Fooled by Randomness) Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Marketswhich I rate as a five star buy this book has nothing new and isn't even funny.
The basic argument is apparent from the title: just because you've never seen it before doesn't mean you won't see it tomorrow. Swans were assumed to be always white, until the discovery of black swans in Australia.
There are lessons to be drawn from this critique of what philosophers call the problem of induction, but not enough to fill a book. Instead, the author lets off a scattershot at several bats in a belfry.
First in the firing line is Plato. (Perhaps it's neo-Platonists, but an argument constructed on terms such as "What I call Platonicity" makes it hard to tell. The level of debate has already descended to the sophistication of a coconut shy.)
Second is the normal distribution. True, a roll of the die shows you one to six with equal probability. But two dice? Now we're talking a bell curve. The author seems to think that noone has wrestled before with the problem of extreme odds-against results, but's that's the future for you: hard to predict. A 95% confidence level is just that: once about every twenty times you're going to get an unexpected result. Surprise? Often. It is argued that these unusual unwelcome results are discounted from conventional thinking, and that the catastrophic consequence makes the tail of the distribution disproportionately important. Very true, but not new. Mountaineers and medical researchers (to name but two) have been confronting this problem for a century.
Not quite argued (but implied) is that all statistics is balderdash. Well, it's a branch of mathematics that deals with uncertainty, so we can't be sure.
Stylistically the book is all over the place. Reminiscence of the author's time as a "quant" (a statistical analyst of financial markets) elbow aside pseudo philosophical discussion, only to give place to some boasting about conferences he's addressed on the strength of his previous book. In between we get some noveletish stuff about "Fat Tony", "Yevgenia" (author of a bestseller that sounds unreadable), and a "fictional" character called Tulip. (Who is surely a direct descendant of Lupin, Mr Pooter's son in diary of a Nobody.)
We just can't predict, is the sum of all this. Indeed not, but we can bet that this book will be out of print just as soon as financial bestsellers go from "whoever would have thought it?" to next year's conspiracy theories.
The author thanks his editor, a certain Will Murphy. Mr Murphy, you didn't do your job, did you?

TERRIBLE
Not good: will I finish it? Won't I? Guess I'll have to if I want to assess fairly, but it'll be hard work. Arrogance seeps through every word and, at the end of the day, he's repeatedly hammering home one point that anyone with a degree of critical thinking will be aware of anyway.

No, I'm not going to bother finishing. Won't put myself through it and I'd recommend that you don't bother either.

Not what I hoped
I made assumptions when I bought this book that it was about the current "Black Swan" event of the credit crunch. Instead it is more about how people do not expect the unexpected and details instances of when it has happened. I have to be honest, I was disappointed and skimmed through the book without reading it fully. The bits I read I had seen before in other publications. Maybe it got to the current events but I had already lost interest.