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3.72 AVERAGE
3.72 AVERAGE
I loved this book. The snarky tone, the exploration of logical fallacies and the use of data kept me reading.
Good book on different types of randomness. Loses a star for annoying rant-y style.
I found myself alternately nodding my head in agreement and laughing at his arrogant narcissism and cruel snobbish snarkiness. It's possible that the way I made it through it was because I got it out of the library and someone else wanted it so I had to stop 2/3 of the way through. He most reminded me of David Brin, who's blog I used to read regularly -- a polemicist, but far more arrogant and dismissive, repeatedly telling you how brilliant he is and how everyone else are clueless, unselfaware morons.
The whole made a bit more sense with his postscript for the second edition. It helped to skim through the bibliography and see that he has indeed published a score of more mathematical articles. Even with that understanding, though, it still felt like I was reading a flimflam artist, a carnival huckster, throwing a fusillade of erudite buzzwords to hide his actual complete lack of real understanding or knowledge, hoping that you'll be wowed enough by them to buy is snake oil.
There were times where he said things that I already completely agree with, but I would then come across statements that I had to interpret, and once I did, it made me lean toward not giving him any credit at all.
He left a LOT of exercises to the reader. He would lead into a claim sounding reasonable, then lay out a stack of 'supporting' statements with absolutely nothing to back it up other than "I'm right and everyone else is wrong." You don't get any real math until Chapter 16, where he still just says a lot of "I did this", lots of handwaving, ending with "If you did it, you'd find what I did."
In some ways it was a little like reading [b:Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid|24113|Gödel, Escher, Bach An Eternal Golden Braid|Douglas R. Hofstadter|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1547125681l/24113._SY75_.jpg|850076], but blurrier -- he slides into and out of his made up stories and people making it hard for me to buy them. And the stories seem to be going somewhere, but they just end. Is that the point? That the world is always incomplete? Then why not say that instead of leading us on these uninteresting wild goose chases?
There was one point where I found myself wanting to scream at him "Get out of your arrogant bubble!"
"We are not easily able to conceive of future inventions -- if we were they would have already been invented." Yeesh. Any SF fan can list off the inventions that didn't exist that were conceived of in SF that were, eventually, created: Clarke (satellites), Star Trek (communicators), and if I cared to spend the time I'd come up with dozens. Seriously, read some SF, dude!
The guy is so full of himself, he even turned his philosophy into a health diet.
It's like being lectured to by a possibly politically agnostic Rumsfeld.
I suppose I could be so critical of him because I can see where he could be right. And it's frightening because of the big bet I'm making on being able to retire. It's frightening to be told that the world is chaotic and that society is only feeding the chaos. Especially now, when everything is, in fact, so unstable and chaotic. Maybe that's why I finished. I kept hoping to read something that felt actionable. But to a large extent, his recommendation is to stop doing... things that I'm to a large extent not doing. Because I'm not an economist or a banker or in the Federal Reserve.
I'm actually really mystified at how it became a NY Times Bestseller. The audience he's aiming at might buy it but won't hear what he's saying. Almost everyone else isn't going to understand it and/or act on it.
That said, I did come away with one nugget that I think is worthwhile being reminded of: "What are the consequences?" However, it's mostly being addressed at big corporations and government. Neither of which I have any real say in. Still, I do think I'll try to keep it in mind.
That said, I thought I'd read his other books. But I'm not going to now.
The whole made a bit more sense with his postscript for the second edition. It helped to skim through the bibliography and see that he has indeed published a score of more mathematical articles. Even with that understanding, though, it still felt like I was reading a flimflam artist, a carnival huckster, throwing a fusillade of erudite buzzwords to hide his actual complete lack of real understanding or knowledge, hoping that you'll be wowed enough by them to buy is snake oil.
There were times where he said things that I already completely agree with, but I would then come across statements that I had to interpret, and once I did, it made me lean toward not giving him any credit at all.
He left a LOT of exercises to the reader. He would lead into a claim sounding reasonable, then lay out a stack of 'supporting' statements with absolutely nothing to back it up other than "I'm right and everyone else is wrong." You don't get any real math until Chapter 16, where he still just says a lot of "I did this", lots of handwaving, ending with "If you did it, you'd find what I did."
In some ways it was a little like reading [b:Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid|24113|Gödel, Escher, Bach An Eternal Golden Braid|Douglas R. Hofstadter|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1547125681l/24113._SY75_.jpg|850076], but blurrier -- he slides into and out of his made up stories and people making it hard for me to buy them. And the stories seem to be going somewhere, but they just end. Is that the point? That the world is always incomplete? Then why not say that instead of leading us on these uninteresting wild goose chases?
There was one point where I found myself wanting to scream at him "Get out of your arrogant bubble!"
"We are not easily able to conceive of future inventions -- if we were they would have already been invented." Yeesh. Any SF fan can list off the inventions that didn't exist that were conceived of in SF that were, eventually, created: Clarke (satellites), Star Trek (communicators), and if I cared to spend the time I'd come up with dozens. Seriously, read some SF, dude!
The guy is so full of himself, he even turned his philosophy into a health diet.
It's like being lectured to by a possibly politically agnostic Rumsfeld.
I suppose I could be so critical of him because I can see where he could be right. And it's frightening because of the big bet I'm making on being able to retire. It's frightening to be told that the world is chaotic and that society is only feeding the chaos. Especially now, when everything is, in fact, so unstable and chaotic. Maybe that's why I finished. I kept hoping to read something that felt actionable. But to a large extent, his recommendation is to stop doing... things that I'm to a large extent not doing. Because I'm not an economist or a banker or in the Federal Reserve.
I'm actually really mystified at how it became a NY Times Bestseller. The audience he's aiming at might buy it but won't hear what he's saying. Almost everyone else isn't going to understand it and/or act on it.
That said, I did come away with one nugget that I think is worthwhile being reminded of: "What are the consequences?" However, it's mostly being addressed at big corporations and government. Neither of which I have any real say in. Still, I do think I'll try to keep it in mind.
That said, I thought I'd read his other books. But I'm not going to now.
there are books that give you a new way to think and look at the world. this is that book
Interessante e a tratti complicato libro sul cigno nero un evento improbabile non previsto e dagli effetti dirompenti e su come intendere la vita per comprenderli. 7
challenging
informative
inspiring
slow-paced
Very thought-provoking book, though I'd be lying if I said I understood all of it. (Though I did understand most of it.) Taleb's insights into the randomness of our lives are both compelling and disturbing, since they leave us with lots of questions about how we're supposed to prepare for a future we can't predict. I was going to give this book 3 stars, since it's a bit of a slog and sometimes meandering, but went with 4 stars since few authors have the guts to tackle these questions honestly.
Taleb is writing theory, but he wants to relate it to experience, to work bottom up from experience. He is more interested in premises than the logic built from them.He eschews closed systems that have lost touch with lived reality. He wants practice to account for the black swan events (the unpredictable, rare event --positive or negative--with great impact). Current economic models do not. He is skeptical about what can be known or predicted, about models. He speaks of false confirmation (every white swan seems to confirm that swans are white; however, one black swan disproves it). He speaks of other thought processes that misguide. He occasionally speaks to how to live with uncertainty--ignore what has low impact, avoid the negative with high impact, or at least bolster yourself against the possibility, and seek to be open the the positive possibility.
Where he does touch on practical measures (other than recommending we withhold judgment on important issues or bolster against loss) I find our ways diverging. He briefly touched on climate change. Though he agrees it is a problem, he is skeptical of the modeling there too. And though he thinks the misleading of financial models is a problem, he blames regulation for creating the need for predicting.
The book vacillated between interesting and tedious. Although Taleb nodded to art, literature, and medicine, most of his arguments and examples came from the world of finance, an unfamiliar (and minimally interesting) world to me. He appears to be trying to introduce paradigm shift into financial/risk management thinking, and as such has to give more arguments and evidence than I as a lay person needed.
Where he does touch on practical measures (other than recommending we withhold judgment on important issues or bolster against loss) I find our ways diverging. He briefly touched on climate change. Though he agrees it is a problem, he is skeptical of the modeling there too. And though he thinks the misleading of financial models is a problem, he blames regulation for creating the need for predicting.
The book vacillated between interesting and tedious. Although Taleb nodded to art, literature, and medicine, most of his arguments and examples came from the world of finance, an unfamiliar (and minimally interesting) world to me. He appears to be trying to introduce paradigm shift into financial/risk management thinking, and as such has to give more arguments and evidence than I as a lay person needed.