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3.72 AVERAGE
3.72 AVERAGE
Gostei muito do livro, mesmo com a sensação de ter entendido uns 70% dele. Provavelmente precisarei reler algumas vezes pra entender por completo, mas a mensagem principal, de não se guiar pelos modelos e teorias e buscar sempre o ceticismo é muito valiosa.
Human fallibility is a topic near and dear to my heart, but this book - which should have been great - left me underwhelmed. The problem is Taleb himself. He is so prone to overstatement and unnecessary, derogatory asides that it really detracts from whatever point he is trying to make at a given moment. Worse, for a book that is not so much original as synthesizing, he frequently misrepresents the work of other authors, including those whom he uses as support.
Read Kahneman or Tetlock, for example and who he points to with great admiration, and one finds arguments and data that are not quite so cut-and-dry as Taleb makes them seem. On the negative side, Taleb dismisses entire disciplines: economics, philosophy, history, finance, the social sciences generally, and probably more that I'm forgetting,* while merely criticizing narrow aspects of what they do. And then there's the Bell Curve, which on the one hand he labels the "Great Intellectual Fraud" in a chapter dedicated to attacking it, while acknowledging elsewhere that it very much has its uses. What is most unforgivable in all this is that the reader who does not have a background in these subjects, who really is the intended audience of this book, would probably not catch these errors.
This is not to say that the book is without merits. It is uncommonly forceful in its argumentation, and his message that the world is not so orderly as many theorists try to make it seem is an important one. Moreover, as a practitioner, his discussion of cognitive biases and statistical methods will be more helpful to the average reader than most books. There is value in being confronted so bluntly with the limitations of the human intellect, I just think that there are maybe other books you should read on the subject before this one.
3.5/5
*I should mention, however, that charges here that Taleb is anti-science are unfair. On the contrary, he is frequently and uncharacteristically complimentary of their methods. Rather, I see him more as being of the tradition of Thomas Kuhn and Stephen Jay Gould, who see scientific progress as being subject to limitations of the human pscyche.
Read Kahneman or Tetlock, for example and who he points to with great admiration, and one finds arguments and data that are not quite so cut-and-dry as Taleb makes them seem. On the negative side, Taleb dismisses entire disciplines: economics, philosophy, history, finance, the social sciences generally, and probably more that I'm forgetting,* while merely criticizing narrow aspects of what they do. And then there's the Bell Curve, which on the one hand he labels the "Great Intellectual Fraud" in a chapter dedicated to attacking it, while acknowledging elsewhere that it very much has its uses. What is most unforgivable in all this is that the reader who does not have a background in these subjects, who really is the intended audience of this book, would probably not catch these errors.
This is not to say that the book is without merits. It is uncommonly forceful in its argumentation, and his message that the world is not so orderly as many theorists try to make it seem is an important one. Moreover, as a practitioner, his discussion of cognitive biases and statistical methods will be more helpful to the average reader than most books. There is value in being confronted so bluntly with the limitations of the human intellect, I just think that there are maybe other books you should read on the subject before this one.
3.5/5
*I should mention, however, that charges here that Taleb is anti-science are unfair. On the contrary, he is frequently and uncharacteristically complimentary of their methods. Rather, I see him more as being of the tradition of Thomas Kuhn and Stephen Jay Gould, who see scientific progress as being subject to limitations of the human pscyche.
challenging
funny
inspiring
medium-paced
Really didn't enjoy this book. Gave up half way through the chapter where he was explaining how all people that work in safe, low-risk jobs are unhappy with their life, with wives who are unhappy with their lack of wealth, and jealous of people in high-risk jobs who are all fascinating, and rich, with happy wives.
I don't want to meet this author.
I don't want to meet this author.
informative
reflective
slow-paced
Nassim Taleb's book is about surprises and why they happen. He doesn't set out to explain every power outage and Cracker-Jack toy, but rather, why they take us by surprise. The answer: because we make predictions. Charts and curves give us a cozy feeling that makes us ignore wrecking balls swinging at us from behind. The "black swan" is Taleb's term for highly unexpected, and often catastrophic, events. The metaphor comes from the example of ornithologists who thought that all swans were snow-colored until a black one appeared and overturned their model. His book has received special attention in light of September 11th and the recent financial crisis.
I'm wary of reviewing this book because it deals largely with the topic of statistical modeling, and statistics has confounded me more than academic subject. Liberal-artsy as I am, I actually enjoyed math in high school--GeoTrig? Great. Calculus? Swell. But statistics I despised. For this reason, I took some pleasure in discovering that Taleb spends a better part of his book abusing gaussian models of prediction taught in my statistics class: the old bell curve and standard deviation, which is currently dominant model of prediction for most market statisticians. Taleb suggests that our brains would be more usefully employed learning the intricacies of post-colonial African dance than studying the bell curve, which is OK with me, because that's sort of what I was doing in college.
Taleb himself had a brief and highly lucrative career as a financier. The Black Swan is, in many ways, a personal statement for Taleb, a divorce from the expectations of his former job, more specifically, the expectation that he make predictions with an air of certainty. In the later years of his employment, Taleb frequently refused flat out to endorse predictions, a practice that nonplussed many of his clients. Ironically, Taleb received a wave of new requests for predictions after the publication of his book, Fooled by Randomness, in which he discusses a hypothetical scenario in which a plane collides with his office building. The book came out in October, 2001. Post 9-11, the media approached him as a prophet, and he nearly pulled his hair out. The Black Swan sets out to clarify Taleb's goals as an "epistemologist of randomness." Rather than claiming certainties and using them to predict, Taleb specializes in recognizing uncertainty, and then making decisions--not predictions.
Taleb's beef with the bell curve as a model of prediction is that it minimizes the dangers of the black swan by making surprise events seem like uncommon outliers. He refers to the bell curve a a "platonified" model used by "nerds" who wish to impose their golden means on the more gravelly nature of reality. The bell/gaussian model focuses on the average, creating the illusion that we are living in "Mediocristan," when in fact we may be living in "Extremistan," where unexpected events arise often in a complex world. In order to make predictions, we have a tendency to simplify the world to an equation based on past events. The world becomes a game with rules that allow us to predict. This view of the world as a game is what Taleb calls the Ludic Fallacy. Casinos, for example, are nothing like markets; the former is in fact highly controlled with predictable odds, the latter influence by innumerably complex factors.
The Black Swan is surprisingly rife with controversy, full of bile and ideological mudslinging. Taleb feels pinched between the business and scholarly worlds. He enjoys listing the insults his book has provoked, including "academic," by businessmen and "practical" by academics. I see the difficulty. To an investor, Taleb's principle against making predictions would seem to hold him aloof basic utility of statistics. It probably doesn't help that his reasoning often involves quoting philosophers.
I consider myself relatively academically-minded, and I can't picture him in a tower made of ivory, or of anything else. His examples are all drawn from practice. I even occasionally detect an anti-academic edge in his voice, especially when he discusses shiny mathematical models, and the kinds of people who view them as mimetic. To illustrate his value of real-world practice, Taleb sketches two characters, a "Dr. John" who spends his time engrossed in reading and theories, and a "Fat Tony," a streetwise wheeler and dealer. Taleb favors Fat Tony, who doesn't cloister his expectations to fit a textbook model. He is immersed in a world of firsthand data.
Taleb's point seems to be that black swans arrive when people become too immersed in their theories and distant from the data. He supports an empirical approach, while recognizing that it garners incomplete knowledge. He writes with a skeptic's need for addenda and qualifiers. Occasionally I'll form an objection or locate a flaw in his reasoning and find that he addresses that flaw two paragraphs later.
Reading the work of a skeptic always raises a few questions. First, in the light of all this uncertainty, how do you step outside and cross the street without fearing contamination from some airborn desease? Answer: he is only paranoid half of the time, about the important things. How he designates important from unimportant remains a mystery to me. I should add that he believes that uncertainty can yield positive black swans as often as negative ones, and the former are worth hunting down.
Second: well, we have to model things somehow. If not with the bell curve, how? That's where his friend Benoit Mandelbrot comes in. Taleb prefers a fractal to a bell curve because he perceives that fractals appear both in nature and in human behavior--even in the poems of Emily Dickinson, an uncited, two-sentence claim that tormented me. However, Taleb qualifies that even fractals are prone to large degrees of error, and should not be used to predict, only to "describe." Here I feel the strength of his Taleb's skepticism; he waxes poetic and even giddy about fractals, but he will not invest in them an unqualified faith.
I'm generally impressed at the non-dryness of Taleb's approach to the topic of mathematical modeling; his prose is moist enough, I'd wager, to house several swans. By that I mean the topic is highly personal for Taleb, a liesure-time passion, even a moral issue. One gets the feeling that Taleb's liesure time has involved books of all topics since he was quite young, partly because he tells you so. Also, a large portion of The Black Swan is a philosophical history of mathematical modeling, mostly listing the names of thinkers that Taleb wouldn't mind pushing off a bridge, except that most of them are already dead. Taleb is never ginger and only sentimental when he discusses the smell of library books. For some reason, when I read him, I picture him telling me stories over a cheesesteak in a diner car, pounding the table a lot and upsetting the other diners with his loud voice. He is cocky and bristling the way of men who are used to being ignored, contradicted, and in general forced to repeat themselves. He reminds me of a professor I know who used to yell: "Clear!?" after every chunk of information, as if he were reinforcing it with a dose of electroshock therapy.
Taleb is perhaps most aggressive in his tendency to ground ideas in anecdotes (all the while warning you against the narrative fallacy). Certain elements in his writing (not his ideas) remind me of Ayn Rand, namely his love of the lambaste, his underdog syndrome, his claims to practical philosophy, and his willingness to caricature certain professions. Taleb enjoys exposing other people for fools, particularly people who disagree with him, much, I suppose, as I enjoy hearing him use colorful language to call the bell curve useless. However, I get the sense that Taleb, unlike Rand, picks apart his own ideas as well. In short, his arguments are slick enough that I begin suspect him of something, but I have a feeling that's the reaction he wants.
I'm wary of reviewing this book because it deals largely with the topic of statistical modeling, and statistics has confounded me more than academic subject. Liberal-artsy as I am, I actually enjoyed math in high school--GeoTrig? Great. Calculus? Swell. But statistics I despised. For this reason, I took some pleasure in discovering that Taleb spends a better part of his book abusing gaussian models of prediction taught in my statistics class: the old bell curve and standard deviation, which is currently dominant model of prediction for most market statisticians. Taleb suggests that our brains would be more usefully employed learning the intricacies of post-colonial African dance than studying the bell curve, which is OK with me, because that's sort of what I was doing in college.
Taleb himself had a brief and highly lucrative career as a financier. The Black Swan is, in many ways, a personal statement for Taleb, a divorce from the expectations of his former job, more specifically, the expectation that he make predictions with an air of certainty. In the later years of his employment, Taleb frequently refused flat out to endorse predictions, a practice that nonplussed many of his clients. Ironically, Taleb received a wave of new requests for predictions after the publication of his book, Fooled by Randomness, in which he discusses a hypothetical scenario in which a plane collides with his office building. The book came out in October, 2001. Post 9-11, the media approached him as a prophet, and he nearly pulled his hair out. The Black Swan sets out to clarify Taleb's goals as an "epistemologist of randomness." Rather than claiming certainties and using them to predict, Taleb specializes in recognizing uncertainty, and then making decisions--not predictions.
Taleb's beef with the bell curve as a model of prediction is that it minimizes the dangers of the black swan by making surprise events seem like uncommon outliers. He refers to the bell curve a a "platonified" model used by "nerds" who wish to impose their golden means on the more gravelly nature of reality. The bell/gaussian model focuses on the average, creating the illusion that we are living in "Mediocristan," when in fact we may be living in "Extremistan," where unexpected events arise often in a complex world. In order to make predictions, we have a tendency to simplify the world to an equation based on past events. The world becomes a game with rules that allow us to predict. This view of the world as a game is what Taleb calls the Ludic Fallacy. Casinos, for example, are nothing like markets; the former is in fact highly controlled with predictable odds, the latter influence by innumerably complex factors.
The Black Swan is surprisingly rife with controversy, full of bile and ideological mudslinging. Taleb feels pinched between the business and scholarly worlds. He enjoys listing the insults his book has provoked, including "academic," by businessmen and "practical" by academics. I see the difficulty. To an investor, Taleb's principle against making predictions would seem to hold him aloof basic utility of statistics. It probably doesn't help that his reasoning often involves quoting philosophers.
I consider myself relatively academically-minded, and I can't picture him in a tower made of ivory, or of anything else. His examples are all drawn from practice. I even occasionally detect an anti-academic edge in his voice, especially when he discusses shiny mathematical models, and the kinds of people who view them as mimetic. To illustrate his value of real-world practice, Taleb sketches two characters, a "Dr. John" who spends his time engrossed in reading and theories, and a "Fat Tony," a streetwise wheeler and dealer. Taleb favors Fat Tony, who doesn't cloister his expectations to fit a textbook model. He is immersed in a world of firsthand data.
Taleb's point seems to be that black swans arrive when people become too immersed in their theories and distant from the data. He supports an empirical approach, while recognizing that it garners incomplete knowledge. He writes with a skeptic's need for addenda and qualifiers. Occasionally I'll form an objection or locate a flaw in his reasoning and find that he addresses that flaw two paragraphs later.
Reading the work of a skeptic always raises a few questions. First, in the light of all this uncertainty, how do you step outside and cross the street without fearing contamination from some airborn desease? Answer: he is only paranoid half of the time, about the important things. How he designates important from unimportant remains a mystery to me. I should add that he believes that uncertainty can yield positive black swans as often as negative ones, and the former are worth hunting down.
Second: well, we have to model things somehow. If not with the bell curve, how? That's where his friend Benoit Mandelbrot comes in. Taleb prefers a fractal to a bell curve because he perceives that fractals appear both in nature and in human behavior--even in the poems of Emily Dickinson, an uncited, two-sentence claim that tormented me. However, Taleb qualifies that even fractals are prone to large degrees of error, and should not be used to predict, only to "describe." Here I feel the strength of his Taleb's skepticism; he waxes poetic and even giddy about fractals, but he will not invest in them an unqualified faith.
I'm generally impressed at the non-dryness of Taleb's approach to the topic of mathematical modeling; his prose is moist enough, I'd wager, to house several swans. By that I mean the topic is highly personal for Taleb, a liesure-time passion, even a moral issue. One gets the feeling that Taleb's liesure time has involved books of all topics since he was quite young, partly because he tells you so. Also, a large portion of The Black Swan is a philosophical history of mathematical modeling, mostly listing the names of thinkers that Taleb wouldn't mind pushing off a bridge, except that most of them are already dead. Taleb is never ginger and only sentimental when he discusses the smell of library books. For some reason, when I read him, I picture him telling me stories over a cheesesteak in a diner car, pounding the table a lot and upsetting the other diners with his loud voice. He is cocky and bristling the way of men who are used to being ignored, contradicted, and in general forced to repeat themselves. He reminds me of a professor I know who used to yell: "Clear!?" after every chunk of information, as if he were reinforcing it with a dose of electroshock therapy.
Taleb is perhaps most aggressive in his tendency to ground ideas in anecdotes (all the while warning you against the narrative fallacy). Certain elements in his writing (not his ideas) remind me of Ayn Rand, namely his love of the lambaste, his underdog syndrome, his claims to practical philosophy, and his willingness to caricature certain professions. Taleb enjoys exposing other people for fools, particularly people who disagree with him, much, I suppose, as I enjoy hearing him use colorful language to call the bell curve useless. However, I get the sense that Taleb, unlike Rand, picks apart his own ideas as well. In short, his arguments are slick enough that I begin suspect him of something, but I have a feeling that's the reaction he wants.
There was the person I was before I read this book and the person I am afterwards. Huge perspective shift! Beware: if you’ve read this book, you will look at the world differently.
informative
inspiring
medium-paced
challenging
informative
lighthearted
slow-paced
challenging
informative
slow-paced