Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #262 in Books
• Published on: 2007-05-03
• Binding: Paperback
• 368 pages

Fortune
'One of the smartest books of all time'

Evening Standard
'An iconoclastic tour de force ... nothing escapes his Exocets'

Financial Times
'Excellent and thought-provoking ... an entertaining book'

Customer Reviews

A superficial guide to randomness
I was looking forward to this book. The topic seemed interesting and the reviews I read were good. It turned out to have been a poor choice. Talking of poor choices Taleb's method is to create an example of where people make a poor choice due to a misunderstanding of basic statistics and philosophy of science. He then continues at length to show why he is perceptive enough to realise why they are wrong with some basic statistics and rudimentary philosophy. His problems are artificial, and I can't believe that many people with a basic grasp of reality would get them wrong in the first place.

Here is a typical example quoted from his book: "What has more value?
(a) a contract that pays you $1 million if the stock market goes down 10% on any given day in the next year; (b)a contract that pays you $1 million if the stock market goes down 10% on any given day in the next year due to a terrorist act. I expect most people to select (b)."

Taleb must hang out with some not to bright people if they go for (b). So if you have an IQ greater than 70 and answered (a) I would advise giving this book a miss. If you answered(b)then you probably need all the help you can get, so you might as well buy the book.

Irritating In The Extreme
Much like the author, I suspect. Nassim Taleb is, at least by his own reckoning, one of the smartest men alive, and this estimate is present in just about every line of this book. The really irritating aspect is that he is writing about some genuinely interesting and even fascinating concepts and what could have been an mesmerising and perhaps even life changing read is destroyed by his complete inability to write. Perhaps English is not his first language, but I think that his real problem is a prickly narcissism which turns what should be an exhilarating exploration of new and sometimes even shocking ideas into a boring, contemptuous declaration of what is wrong with the media, market traders and economists, and this is a real shame, because when he's not pronouncing, he's actually worth listening to. What he needs is a ghost writer and a bloody good editor.

a few hundred pages on...on what actually?
for the general public interested in the weird world of probability or the unknowns of the universe i'd suggest buy a popular book on quantum theory or some post-modern work of fiction instead. sky diving is another option to explore probabilities. for the more mathematically inclined reader or trading professional it's probably better to stick to Taleb's good book: dynamic hedging.