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marc129 's review for:
The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
This book is hyper-interesting, very rich but also super-annoying at the same time. So much has been written about it, that I am going to limit myself to some essentials. This book is about the absolutely unexpected, the black swan you would never suspect if you only saw white swans all your life. Taleb refers to numerous historical examples of things that have come completely out of the blue: the collapse of the Soviet Union, Nine-eleven, major stock market crises and so on. And also things in our ordinary life: when you look back, it is usually a succession of unexpected events that keep stuck in your memory and have shaped your life.
The interesting thing about this book is that Taleb explains in a solid way why we are always surprised by such things. And that is in the first place psychological: we are mentally set up so that we always expect things to go their way as they are now, we assume stability while reality is very complex and almost unpredictable. Our misjudgment is also caused because we expect everything to be very logical and linear, that cause and effect are always very clear, even in advance. Not so. What's more: we usually strongly oppose warnings about what could go wrong, while - if you look at history - uncertainty is the rule and regularity the exception. So the problem mainly is situated between our ears.
But what is worse: scientists, historians and journalists reinforce that tunnel vision by presenting - in retrospect - plausible explanations, which gives us the impression that if we had sufficient knowledge, we would have been able to estimate everything better and therefore in the future will be able to make the correct estimation, because we know so much more. Or they make it clear that the circumstances were very exceptional, and that a repetition is as good as impossible (and of course they're right: there's almost never a real repetition, every Black Swan is different).
I’m just giving a very superficial summary of what Taleb offers, because his book is actually very rich in examples and arguments. But .... as I said, it is also very annoying at the same time. For three, maybe four reasons. The first is that Taleb almost exclusively focuses on the economy, especially the stock market; that makes sense, since he was a stock market trader and therefore gained a lot of experience in that environment, but it narrows the focus substantially. Two: as the book progresses, Taleb dabs his pen more and more in the purest vitriol against all kinds of scientists, stock market gurus, statisticians and the like, whom he names by name (especially Nobel laureates). According to him they have completely missed the point of reality, by using the wrong methods. It may well be that Taleb is right, that is not what matters to me, it is mainly about the way he presents his criticism: with an arrogance that borders on the unlikely and that only increases as the book progresses.
Moreover, he - and this is my third objection to this book - has resorted to a very technical, statistical explanation to reinforce his bold claims: whole chapters are devoted to mathematical models that – according to Taleb – don’t relate to reality. He may also be right there, but as a reader he completely lost me. And then there is a fourth objection against this book, which in retrospect is perhaps more important than seems plausible at first glance: all experts, both the reliable and the untrustworthy to which Taleb refers are .... men; there is only one female character in this book and that is completely fictional; it might be an interesting study to determine the correlation between the Black Swan syndrome and gender issues (not the least those of Taleb himself, I refer to his mysoginist "Twitter-war" with Mary Beard).
In short, if I can give a concise reading warning: read only the first half of this book and make the best of it, but forget the second half (unless you’re a professional economist or statistician). And remember especially: Black Swans do exist, but you can arm yourself against them to a very limited extent, just by using common sense, and knowing that - at any moment in your life or in history in general - shit can happen.
The interesting thing about this book is that Taleb explains in a solid way why we are always surprised by such things. And that is in the first place psychological: we are mentally set up so that we always expect things to go their way as they are now, we assume stability while reality is very complex and almost unpredictable. Our misjudgment is also caused because we expect everything to be very logical and linear, that cause and effect are always very clear, even in advance. Not so. What's more: we usually strongly oppose warnings about what could go wrong, while - if you look at history - uncertainty is the rule and regularity the exception. So the problem mainly is situated between our ears.
But what is worse: scientists, historians and journalists reinforce that tunnel vision by presenting - in retrospect - plausible explanations, which gives us the impression that if we had sufficient knowledge, we would have been able to estimate everything better and therefore in the future will be able to make the correct estimation, because we know so much more. Or they make it clear that the circumstances were very exceptional, and that a repetition is as good as impossible (and of course they're right: there's almost never a real repetition, every Black Swan is different).
I’m just giving a very superficial summary of what Taleb offers, because his book is actually very rich in examples and arguments. But .... as I said, it is also very annoying at the same time. For three, maybe four reasons. The first is that Taleb almost exclusively focuses on the economy, especially the stock market; that makes sense, since he was a stock market trader and therefore gained a lot of experience in that environment, but it narrows the focus substantially. Two: as the book progresses, Taleb dabs his pen more and more in the purest vitriol against all kinds of scientists, stock market gurus, statisticians and the like, whom he names by name (especially Nobel laureates). According to him they have completely missed the point of reality, by using the wrong methods. It may well be that Taleb is right, that is not what matters to me, it is mainly about the way he presents his criticism: with an arrogance that borders on the unlikely and that only increases as the book progresses.
Moreover, he - and this is my third objection to this book - has resorted to a very technical, statistical explanation to reinforce his bold claims: whole chapters are devoted to mathematical models that – according to Taleb – don’t relate to reality. He may also be right there, but as a reader he completely lost me. And then there is a fourth objection against this book, which in retrospect is perhaps more important than seems plausible at first glance: all experts, both the reliable and the untrustworthy to which Taleb refers are .... men; there is only one female character in this book and that is completely fictional; it might be an interesting study to determine the correlation between the Black Swan syndrome and gender issues (not the least those of Taleb himself, I refer to his mysoginist "Twitter-war" with Mary Beard).
In short, if I can give a concise reading warning: read only the first half of this book and make the best of it, but forget the second half (unless you’re a professional economist or statistician). And remember especially: Black Swans do exist, but you can arm yourself against them to a very limited extent, just by using common sense, and knowing that - at any moment in your life or in history in general - shit can happen.