Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #75 in Books
• Published on: 2008-02-28
• Binding: Paperback
• 400 pages

Stephen J. Dubner, author of Freakonomics
`Great fun ... brash, stubborn, entertaining, opinionated, curious,

John Kay, Financial Times
`Hugely enjoyable - compelling'

Niall Ferguson, Sunday Telegraph
`Idiosyncratically brilliant'

Customer Reviews

Fantastic book
A great read, engagingly written. He is a little arrogant and clearly likes to demonstrate his intelligence however recovers his humility with a wonderful sign off to the book. Enjoy.

Black Swan, Dying Duck
This book was actually an enjoyable read. It is witty and humorous, though, as other reviewers point out, Taleb is basically infatuated with himself. But in spite of enjoying the intellectual challenges he throws at you throughout the book, I have to say that there is little real substance here. Why? Because his black swan is a dying duck. He argues that there is such a class of events as black swans - that is to say totally unpredicted events. But that "class" of events doesn't exist. Each one event that is unpredicted is a unique event and shares no common features with other such events apart from unexpectedness. He argues that the future can't be predicted accurately (well we all know that, and all too well, often from bitter experience). So, he argues, planning is virtually futile, because plans can't take account of the totally unexpected. Nothing new there, but applying his own technique of reverse-logic, if a plan is blown off course after 6 years, by an unexpected event, we can say that the plan was accurate enough to work from for 6 years. Is 6 years of workable planning worthless because in the 7th year the plan comes unstuck?

If his message only boils down to a warning not to assume that forecasts will be highly accurate for an indefinite period, then there is nothing new here - how many of us trust the weather forecast for the day after tomorrow? For those readers interested in economics Tony Lawson has done a much more thorough explanation of why economic forecasting is futile (if we expect forecasts to turn out to be accurate). According to Lawson, attempting to forecast is a highly valuable way of learning something about the economic forces that are at work in society, even when the forecasts go wrong. And Taleb's bias against governments and government plans is ridiculous. Governments don't need to know everything about everything in order to plan to build a bridge or a hospital.

A good hard read
I picked this up in a train station as it was top of the best sellers in Smiths and it seemed to be advertised everywhere. After the first few pages I was surprised that such a book was as popular as it is a paper on philosophy and mathematics. However, Taleb's writing is interesting and I was drawn in with the personal accounts, his anger at the bell shaped curve and disgust at those that seek false risk protection from equations they don't understand.

Although my background is not economics this book still relates to the management of risks and specifically changing the way you think about that pile of numbers on the spreadsheet. This is the point of the book as well, not to present the one solution to manage Black Swans (highly improbable events), but to look at your environment and be aware that there are other risks out there and to deal with them in a practicable way.

Above all the book is interesting for exploring the logic of his idea and although he worships a certain Mandelbrot, B the book is actually quite funny in places.