The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

3.72 AVERAGE

homebuddy's review against another edition

3.0
Great premise and he is very knowledgeable. It gets repetitive but overall a very helpful book for dealing with those pesky and lovely Black Swans.
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alastairherd's review against another edition

4.0
informative slow-paced
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lucyroth's review against another edition

2.0
So I tried. I remained curious for a bit to the author’s pompous and pretentious pseudo intellectual musings. However, he stayed annoying and many of his comments I found misinformed and completely inaccurate. Particularly those about autism — particularly here, “They see others as inanimate objects, like machines, moved by explicit rules. They cannot perform such simple mental operations as "he knows that I don't know that I know," and it is this inability that impedes their social skills. (Interestingly, autistic subjects, regardless of their "intelligence," also exhibit an inability to comprehend uncertainty.” — this is simply untrue!

deebballer's review against another edition

5.0
Probably the best book I've ever read. Taleb is the consummate erudite.

romanibinbin's review against another edition

3.0
medium-paced

kbelcher1992's review against another edition

5.0
The Black Swan really changed the way I think about forecasting and uncertainty. As someone who’s been down the rabbit hole with probabilistic predictions, this book challenged a lot of the ideas I’ve found useful, especially compared to people like Philip Tetlock. Taleb’s core message is humbling: we usually know a lot less than we think, and the events that matter most are often the ones we can’t predict at all. While it gets dense in parts, Taleb’s style makes his arguments clear and direct. If you’re interested in exploring the boundaries of what we know—or think we know—I’d definitely recommend checking out The Black Swan.

waltcamp45's review against another edition

4.0
Some incredibly important ideas ... from an author who's mighty full of himself, while bemoaning this quality in others.

cwr_2020's review against another edition

1.0
Author is very full of himself to the point of being annoying. Very repetitive, could have been < 100 pages long and gotten the same message across. This was supposedly a classic...maybe I should have read it when it 1st came out.

nadh's review against another edition

4.0
informative reflective slow-paced
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dave_peticolas's review against another edition

4.0

Taleb explains his ideas regarding 'Black Swans', highly unlikely and largely unforeseen random events that nevertheless have significant impact. Taleb maintains that Black Swans dominate the history of the human race but are largely ignored due to a combination of psychological biases and what he dismissively refers to as "Platonic" theories like the classical theory of statistics centered around the Gaussian distribution.

It's a lot to digest but NNT, as he styles himself, is a very entertaining and largely lucid writer. I would say he raises far more questions than he answers but the book is no worse for that and may be one of his central points -- we just don't know nearly as much as we think we do.