Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #513 in Books
• Published on: 2008-02-28
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 400 pages

Review
Great fun … brash, stubborn, entertaining, opinionated, curious, cajoling (Freakonomics )

An idiosyncratically brilliant new book (Sunday Telegraph )

A fascinating study of how we are regularly taken for suckers by the unexpected (Guardian )

Like the conversation of a raconteur ... hugely enjoyable - compelling (Financial Times )

Confirms his status as a guru for every would-be Damien Hirst, George Soros and aspirant despot (Sunday Times )

In the tradition of The Wisdom of Crowds and The Tipping Point (Time )

John Kay, Financial Times
`Hugely enjoyable - compelling'

Niall Ferguson, Sunday Telegraph
`Idiosyncratically brilliant'

Customer Reviews

right, interesting, but extremely irritating
Taleb has one good idea, a great idea even, and an infinite number of ways of talking about it. It is essentially the same idea as his last book, Fooled by Randomness: namely that life does not behave with regularity. Those who think it does, he says, will always be tripped up by the unexpected. Black Swan extends that idea, beyond the financial markets he concentrated on in Randomness, to just about all walks of life. He is a magpie for anecdote and stray pieces of supporting evidence wherever he can find them. He calls all this 'skeptical empiricism'.
The qualification is that his big idea is not original, though his numerous examples do help bring home its ubiquity. More problematically, he overstates its usefulness. For when it comes to calling your next move, the unpredictable and the unexpected are, by definition, not things we can anticipate. And though he is right that in the long run there will undoubtedly by high impact improbably events, it is also true, as Keynes said, that in the long run we are all dead: organising your life on the principle that something radical might come along doesn't solve the everyday problem of what to next.
In short, he exaggerates his own insight and the authority it gives him. That's a wicked irony, for the chief target of his ire is those with an exaggerated sense of insight and control over their lives.
Oh, and the tone... Taleb wants to be seen as a radical iconoclast. Every sentence drips righteousness and often irritation. He is the strutting, impatient sage, the rest of us blinkered morons. Apparently he doesn't like his editors trying to change this. A word of advice to the author: if you want your advice heeded, don't shout and sneer at your audience. For this reason, an interesting thesis, but in the end a wearisome read.

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?

enjoyable but sometimes irritating
This book is for most part engagingly written and full of entertaining stories and provocative ideas. It makes you reconsider things you take for granted in life and reevaluate your own perspective of the future. But at times I couldn't help feeling that the author was just too full of himself, too pleased with his own ideas and too disparaging towards other people's. Not only does this create a negative feeling but it also works against the book's objectivity. How can a theory be impartial and objective when its author is so in love with himself and his own ideas? Nevertheless this book is a very rewarding read.