I don't know if I was just not in the mood for this or what, but writing this over a week after reading it (and reading more in between) does not help me write a review. I took this from the summary: "A black swan is a highly improbable event with three principal characteristics: It is unpredictab...
bookshelves: abandoned, nonfiction Read in November, 2007 A brash and at times almost hysterical tirade against those who take no account of, or leave no room for, improbabilities in their forecasting. This Levantine says that we are being lied to every time someone puts before us a prediction t...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb boasts about showing up at an international think tank on the theory of prediction with his speech written on “five restaurant napkins, some stained”. Half a paragraph later he stresses the importance of being humble and not overestimating our confidence in any acquired knowled...
I have been duped. This writer is a jerk and I don't think I could trust what he said anymore. (updated on 5 Jan 2016) I bought this in 2009, that's 4 years ago, and it has been sitting on the shelf, waiting for me read it. Well, I finally did. It is a good book. Another thinking person book, lik...
The author says he's a mathematician philosopher trader and if you tend towards that mode of thinking as I do this book will forever change your world view.The book was written a year before the financial crisis of 2008 and really predicts that kind of event completely. His bottom line is that most ...
After 4 pages of the introduction:If there is one thing I hate more than a salesman, it's an evangelistic salesman. If your stuff works, it sells itself, after all.If I were on top of Mt Everest and my oxygen was about to run out and Taleb was the tent to tent salesman trying to convince me I needed...
this is a good book. there is a one-star reviewer with currently 100 "likes" here on the GR entry, but aside from the complaints, Taleb expresses the classic "pennies before a steamroller" problem-- i.e., we keep doing what is profitable without realizing the hidden danger to come, but whose scope w...
Should be subtitled: How Not to Be a Sucker.I'm not sure why all the negativity about this book, maybe it's a backlash to all the hype it received. It's not a great piece of literature per se but I don't think that was the author's intention. The ideas are well conceived and presented in a manner...
From the beginning, I could tell this book was going to be tough going. I’ve read several similar books attacking conventional wisdom, including Freakonomics (right before starting this project) and Wrong (reviewed here). Of the three, this book was by far the least conversational and most intelle...
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