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3.72 AVERAGE
3.72 AVERAGE
Great idea, but the telling is repetitive. The challenge with being a contrarian and putting down other professionals is it comes off arrogant and often overlooks some important caveats to why things do/don't work.
The book brought a new perspective on forecasting and the random and infrequent occurrence of life changing events. Provides a new world view.
very tough going. could have been cut down to half the size if the fluff was left out.
Quite interesting, especially if you are interested in statistics and human behavior, or you're in any profession where you use forecasts regularly. NNT really puts things in perspective. A very good read.
I still use concepts introduced in this book and Fooled By Randomness in my life regularly, especially when I think about risk evaluation of uncertain and rare events that have high consequences. Sometimes, however, the author's ego can be hard to swallow.
For the first 3/4 of the book I was determined to give this 2-3 stars. Taleb is an asshole. However, the post-script essay was much more personable (or maybe it was Stockholm syndrome?), and the technical aspects made me understand the content of the book much better. In either case, NNT can work on his personality, but I thought this book was interesting and would recommend!
I wrote a medium article inspired by the ideas of this book. Seems like enough of a review to me. You can check it out here: https://medium.com/@jtd1096/black-swans-and-the-great-man-theory-of-history-e1f14d97333b?source=friends_link&sk=1b35e69142aa22f4287d649115fd67f4
I much preferred this book to Taleb’s other book that I read, “AntiFragile,” but this book still suffers from the same drawbacks. The author has good points and is communicating a well-thought-out system, but is really a terrible writer.
Throughout the book, we hear about how Taleb is from the war-torn city of Amun, Lebanon. And every time, he mentions it like it’s new information to the reader— even in AntiFragile, the follow up to this book.
As I’ve come to expect from Taleb, we hear him continuously rail against intellectuals and current fin tech folks. He’s has good points, but his ad-hominem, name-calling prose comes off very poorly.
We continuously hear about how he knows better, because he was on the front lines of trading as a quant. Maybe, but it makes Taleb sound like a class-A jerk; the kind of guy you wouldn’t want to even spend the duration of an elevator ride with. Maybe he doesn’t care. As he won’t let you forget throughout this book, he is Successful and he has “F you money”.
What he actually does do well in this book is provide solid foundations of his ideas, refutes the reliance on the bell curve assumption that powers our current statistical methods, and go into detail about how to implement his “barbell-shaped” risk exposure curve.
In that sense, AntiFragile is really just a repackaging of all the concepts in this book and adds absolutely no additional information.
Throughout the book, we hear about how Taleb is from the war-torn city of Amun, Lebanon. And every time, he mentions it like it’s new information to the reader— even in AntiFragile, the follow up to this book.
As I’ve come to expect from Taleb, we hear him continuously rail against intellectuals and current fin tech folks. He’s has good points, but his ad-hominem, name-calling prose comes off very poorly.
We continuously hear about how he knows better, because he was on the front lines of trading as a quant. Maybe, but it makes Taleb sound like a class-A jerk; the kind of guy you wouldn’t want to even spend the duration of an elevator ride with. Maybe he doesn’t care. As he won’t let you forget throughout this book, he is Successful and he has “F you money”.
What he actually does do well in this book is provide solid foundations of his ideas, refutes the reliance on the bell curve assumption that powers our current statistical methods, and go into detail about how to implement his “barbell-shaped” risk exposure curve.
In that sense, AntiFragile is really just a repackaging of all the concepts in this book and adds absolutely no additional information.
This book is essential for the modern-day empiricist interested in the nature of the high-impact random event. The writing style is very conversational and its arguments are eloquently and entertainingly stated. Furthermore Taleb does a great job of supporting his philosophy and theories with some math and domain-specific examples, keeping them firmly grounded in the real world. About the only negative thing I can say about the book is that it's a bit long-winded and there might be just a bit too many asides. Most of them are alright, but maybe a few could easily be cut and improve the overall focus of the book. That being said, it's exuberance is also part of its charm and I can't say that all readers would find this to be an issue at all.
Okay, let's see if I got it straight...
An anti-academic academic weaves a non-narrative narrative about predicting the unpredictable into the theory that rigid theories are bad.
Oh, and count on things you can't conceive of happening happening.
Something like that.
Taleb's observations on the expectations and biases we hold, especially when estimating risk or uncertainty, are pretty dead on.
His key practical point is about the need for a NON-parametric look at any situation in which low-probability events can carry a high-impact. He's almost certainly right that we over-apply the "bell curve" and other normalized frequency distributions, with the consequence of underestimating the probability of very rare events.
But he's kind of a jerk about it.
If you don't mind that kind of thing (I don't, really), then this is a pretty good read. If you've thought along these lines before, though, don't expect to be startled. There are no magic recipes for success in Taleb's "Extremistan" here, just some common sense principles that you can pretty much derive from the first 50 pages of the book.
My only other complaint--and it's not one I can really spell out with any confidence--is this: I came away with this diffuse sense of overconfidence from Taleb...that he believes his metaphors and conjectures, etc. apply in more instances than they actually do.
All told, it's a good book, and if I could force it on MBA graduates, I would. I'd just package it with a single grain of salt.
An anti-academic academic weaves a non-narrative narrative about predicting the unpredictable into the theory that rigid theories are bad.
Oh, and count on things you can't conceive of happening happening.
Something like that.
Taleb's observations on the expectations and biases we hold, especially when estimating risk or uncertainty, are pretty dead on.
His key practical point is about the need for a NON-parametric look at any situation in which low-probability events can carry a high-impact. He's almost certainly right that we over-apply the "bell curve" and other normalized frequency distributions, with the consequence of underestimating the probability of very rare events.
But he's kind of a jerk about it.
If you don't mind that kind of thing (I don't, really), then this is a pretty good read. If you've thought along these lines before, though, don't expect to be startled. There are no magic recipes for success in Taleb's "Extremistan" here, just some common sense principles that you can pretty much derive from the first 50 pages of the book.
My only other complaint--and it's not one I can really spell out with any confidence--is this: I came away with this diffuse sense of overconfidence from Taleb...that he believes his metaphors and conjectures, etc. apply in more instances than they actually do.
All told, it's a good book, and if I could force it on MBA graduates, I would. I'd just package it with a single grain of salt.