Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #470 in Books
• Published on: 2007-05-03
• Original language: English
• 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

Not bad, but not impressive
If you nkow the basics of statistics, you'll find nothing new and amazing in this book. However it is a time passing reading and gives the opportunity to remind you of the things you normally attribute to ability and skill. Sometime we tend to overstimate people. I think it is well worth the money of a paperback. One star less for no new discovery and one star less because he considers himself the only one enlightened.

is there a thesis here?
Can someone please tell me what the thesis of this book is? If so, is it something other than "Gee, sometimes really surpriving things happen"? Thanks.

Best read so far this year!
The art of the sustained polemic is not dead! In an age where bland agreement with the current fad is 'in', Nicholas Taleb has written a book that not only takes apart the pretensions of the market traders and other would-be oracles, but also reintroduces robustness into debate.
Some people won't like the style, of course. That's sad, because they will also be missing a very informative book. It really does tell you a lot about randomness in life, what it means, and possible strategies for dealing with it.
As a computer programmer I was particularly struck by the discussion of how easy it is to mistake noise for signal by looking at phenomena at the wrong scale. That's just a small part of the discussion though, others will find nuggets relating to their own experience as they read through the book.
I liked this book. I liked the irreverence - arrogance even - with which Taleb dispatches his enemies, and turns 'common sense' upside down.
Highly recommended