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A review by dknippling
The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
3.0
An expansion on the ideas of Fooled by Randomness.
I really liked the earlier book; this one not so much. Book two of the Incerto series seems less well organized without much expansion on the ideas in book one.
The author spends a lot of time digging into his detractors, hitting the same issues from different approaches, and name dropping.
Nevertheless, I was following along until he started making weird assumptions, like "one person, one vote," and how poor people control the system in a democracy, that we know not to be effectively true, even if true in theory. I started questioning what he was saying. It feels like he's advocating gaming the system while decrying those who treat real life systems like games, and advocating survival of the fittest while claiming that people shouldn't have to absorb risks caused by others. I notice that he has stopped harping on how randomness determines a lot of success, now that he is a successful author.
Yet a lot of this is good advice, or at least seems good advice. It's hard to know. But the good advice seems very general: Don't assume you can predict the unpredictable. Eliminating stupid risks is an overall success strategy, because you tend not to weed yourself out. Theories should be built from facts, not the reverse.
I recommend Fooled by Randomness, but not Black Swan, despite this being the more famed book. The same ideas are presented more simply and clearly, at less length.
I've decided to keep reading the series, since this line of thinking seems likely to influence others, but I'm not going to rely on finding much more wisdom than was in book one.
I really liked the earlier book; this one not so much. Book two of the Incerto series seems less well organized without much expansion on the ideas in book one.
The author spends a lot of time digging into his detractors, hitting the same issues from different approaches, and name dropping.
Nevertheless, I was following along until he started making weird assumptions, like "one person, one vote," and how poor people control the system in a democracy, that we know not to be effectively true, even if true in theory. I started questioning what he was saying. It feels like he's advocating gaming the system while decrying those who treat real life systems like games, and advocating survival of the fittest while claiming that people shouldn't have to absorb risks caused by others. I notice that he has stopped harping on how randomness determines a lot of success, now that he is a successful author.
Yet a lot of this is good advice, or at least seems good advice. It's hard to know. But the good advice seems very general: Don't assume you can predict the unpredictable. Eliminating stupid risks is an overall success strategy, because you tend not to weed yourself out. Theories should be built from facts, not the reverse.
I recommend Fooled by Randomness, but not Black Swan, despite this being the more famed book. The same ideas are presented more simply and clearly, at less length.
I've decided to keep reading the series, since this line of thinking seems likely to influence others, but I'm not going to rely on finding much more wisdom than was in book one.