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3.71 AVERAGE
3.71 AVERAGE
Like all his other books. Really Really Really Great. Nasssim Taleb is a genius and this is one of the books that gave me more practical info on how to deal with the world. It doesnt disguise as a business book or a self help book but its amazing advice on how to deal with your life.
He makes you realize no one can predict, the best you can do is prepare. Stop predicting, start preparing.
A summary of my notes:
This book is all about "Black Swan" events stuff that’s totally random and unpredictable but ends up shaping our lives and history. We’re always trying to find patterns and predict things, but most of the big results actually come from the unpredictable stuff. Real knowledge is about understanding what we don't know.
The author talks about "Mediocristan" and "Extremistan." Mediocristan is where things are pretty standard, and weird outliers don’t mess with the average too much. Extremistan is the total opposite – one single event can flip everything on its head. Think of it like a world of giants and dwarves. Things like money and how many books get sold? That’s Extremistan.
The book dives into the "Narrative Fallacy," which is our habit of making up explanations for everything because, let's face it, humans hate randomness. We try to connect events to causes, basically turning information into stories so it’s easier to get and remember. The catch is, our memories are always changing, and we tend to ignore info that doesn’t fit the stories we like.
Then there's the "Gaussian Distribution," or the Bell Curve. The author calls it a massive intellectual scam because it just doesn’t work for the real world where the outliers are the ones that actually control the average. The world is more likely to follow "Fat Tailed Curves" or 80/20 type rules, where a small bit of what you do leads to a huge chunk of the results.
He also brings up "The Anti-Library" – the idea that the more you learn, the more you realize how much you don't know. History is "opaque"; we see what happened, but we don’t get the real deal behind it until way later. And get this: so-called experts can be the blindest because having too much info can make them think they can predict random events when they really can't.
The main takeaway seems to be that we need to be aware of these Black Swans. It’s better to be generally right than precisely wrong. True "empirical skeptics" would rather win than just be right; they start with what works in practice and only use theory to back it up.
He makes you realize no one can predict, the best you can do is prepare. Stop predicting, start preparing.
A summary of my notes:
This book is all about "Black Swan" events stuff that’s totally random and unpredictable but ends up shaping our lives and history. We’re always trying to find patterns and predict things, but most of the big results actually come from the unpredictable stuff. Real knowledge is about understanding what we don't know.
The author talks about "Mediocristan" and "Extremistan." Mediocristan is where things are pretty standard, and weird outliers don’t mess with the average too much. Extremistan is the total opposite – one single event can flip everything on its head. Think of it like a world of giants and dwarves. Things like money and how many books get sold? That’s Extremistan.
The book dives into the "Narrative Fallacy," which is our habit of making up explanations for everything because, let's face it, humans hate randomness. We try to connect events to causes, basically turning information into stories so it’s easier to get and remember. The catch is, our memories are always changing, and we tend to ignore info that doesn’t fit the stories we like.
Then there's the "Gaussian Distribution," or the Bell Curve. The author calls it a massive intellectual scam because it just doesn’t work for the real world where the outliers are the ones that actually control the average. The world is more likely to follow "Fat Tailed Curves" or 80/20 type rules, where a small bit of what you do leads to a huge chunk of the results.
He also brings up "The Anti-Library" – the idea that the more you learn, the more you realize how much you don't know. History is "opaque"; we see what happened, but we don’t get the real deal behind it until way later. And get this: so-called experts can be the blindest because having too much info can make them think they can predict random events when they really can't.
The main takeaway seems to be that we need to be aware of these Black Swans. It’s better to be generally right than precisely wrong. True "empirical skeptics" would rather win than just be right; they start with what works in practice and only use theory to back it up.
informative
reflective
medium-paced
fast-paced
A history of risk and how we've misunderstood a whole world of prediction. Taleb incisively breaks down traditional models of probability and proposes an empirically skeptical worldview which, as he argues, is a much more suitable way to approach an Extremistan world. He's a clear writer who writes with a lot of confidence, and he definitely exposed some big flaws in how the world predicts I hadn't considered before. Some good insights, but not a ground-breaking book like some call it - a lot of the time he was simply piecing together different philosophical insights, and the front half of the book felt slow and incohesive to me.
so embarrassing to let everyone see that i read a business book! but i am trying to make myself more employable OK?!?
this book is interesting yet at the price of making me so stressed out! basically the way we think about probability in our daily lives is irrational, as we greatly underestimate its significance. reading it i was like omg everything that happens in life is just sooo random and we have no control over it!
a lot of reviews on here rated it low because they think the author is arrogant and annoying, which like fair, i really thought so too! but it kind of even annoyed me more that people refused to finish the book because of this. like... it wasnt that big of a deal.
some wise nuggets:
"Marmot's impressive project shows how social rank alone can affect longevity. It was calculated that actors who win an Oscar tend to live on average about five years longer than their peers who don't. People live longer in societies that have flatter social gradients. Winners kill their peers as those in a steep social gradient live shorter lives, regardless of their economic condition." Like what???? honestly motivation to succeed because i would be so embarrassed to die because i didn't win an award
towards the end of the book he acknowledges that his ideas are stressful and like tries to ease the reader which i appreciated. borrowing from a friend who advises not to run after trains he says " Missing a train is only painful if you run after it! Likewise, not matching the idea of success others expect from you is only painful if that is what you are seeking."
anyway, i kept telling people about specific parts of this book ce qui est un bon signe !
this book is interesting yet at the price of making me so stressed out! basically the way we think about probability in our daily lives is irrational, as we greatly underestimate its significance. reading it i was like omg everything that happens in life is just sooo random and we have no control over it!
a lot of reviews on here rated it low because they think the author is arrogant and annoying, which like fair, i really thought so too! but it kind of even annoyed me more that people refused to finish the book because of this. like... it wasnt that big of a deal.
some wise nuggets:
"Marmot's impressive project shows how social rank alone can affect longevity. It was calculated that actors who win an Oscar tend to live on average about five years longer than their peers who don't. People live longer in societies that have flatter social gradients. Winners kill their peers as those in a steep social gradient live shorter lives, regardless of their economic condition." Like what???? honestly motivation to succeed because i would be so embarrassed to die because i didn't win an award
towards the end of the book he acknowledges that his ideas are stressful and like tries to ease the reader which i appreciated. borrowing from a friend who advises not to run after trains he says " Missing a train is only painful if you run after it! Likewise, not matching the idea of success others expect from you is only painful if that is what you are seeking."
anyway, i kept telling people about specific parts of this book ce qui est un bon signe !
This was a hard read. As in hard to actually finish the book! I see what he tried to do, but it may have not actually translated well to the reader. The concept was great, just not the actual story.
challenging
informative
reflective
slow-paced
Essential to living in the current world. Most other people that have read this level the claim that Taleb is arrogant. I agree, but that doesn't make his ideas any less essential. This combined with [a:John Robb|16350|Peter Robb|http://www.goodreads.com/images/nophoto/nophoto-U-50x66.jpg]'s [b:Brave New War|679469|Brave New War The Next Stage of Terrorism and the End of Globalization|John Robb|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1177085151s/679469.jpg|665871] is a prescription of how the future will operate that must be addressed and planned for. A quick quote that does not sum up the content of the book:
"I don't know the odds of an earthquake, but I can imagine how San Francisco might be affected by one. This idea that in order to make a decision you need to focus on the consequences (which you can know) rather than the probability (which you can't know) is the central idea of uncertainty. [...:] You can build an overall theory of decision making on this idea. All you have to do is mitigate the consequences." (211)
it took me two years to acknowledge i wasnt going to finish this it
Always wanted to read this book but when finally got to it, it turned out to be a surprisingly complete disappointment.
In its essence the book is basically a collection of hardly logically connected — and not too exciting — stories and anecdotes.
The book generally lacks structure and any serious substance.
challenging
informative
reflective
slow-paced