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dclark32 's review for:
The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Human fallibility is a topic near and dear to my heart, but this book - which should have been great - left me underwhelmed. The problem is Taleb himself. He is so prone to overstatement and unnecessary, derogatory asides that it really detracts from whatever point he is trying to make at a given moment. Worse, for a book that is not so much original as synthesizing, he frequently misrepresents the work of other authors, including those whom he uses as support.
Read Kahneman or Tetlock, for example and who he points to with great admiration, and one finds arguments and data that are not quite so cut-and-dry as Taleb makes them seem. On the negative side, Taleb dismisses entire disciplines: economics, philosophy, history, finance, the social sciences generally, and probably more that I'm forgetting,* while merely criticizing narrow aspects of what they do. And then there's the Bell Curve, which on the one hand he labels the "Great Intellectual Fraud" in a chapter dedicated to attacking it, while acknowledging elsewhere that it very much has its uses. What is most unforgivable in all this is that the reader who does not have a background in these subjects, who really is the intended audience of this book, would probably not catch these errors.
This is not to say that the book is without merits. It is uncommonly forceful in its argumentation, and his message that the world is not so orderly as many theorists try to make it seem is an important one. Moreover, as a practitioner, his discussion of cognitive biases and statistical methods will be more helpful to the average reader than most books. There is value in being confronted so bluntly with the limitations of the human intellect, I just think that there are maybe other books you should read on the subject before this one.
3.5/5
*I should mention, however, that charges here that Taleb is anti-science are unfair. On the contrary, he is frequently and uncharacteristically complimentary of their methods. Rather, I see him more as being of the tradition of Thomas Kuhn and Stephen Jay Gould, who see scientific progress as being subject to limitations of the human pscyche.
Read Kahneman or Tetlock, for example and who he points to with great admiration, and one finds arguments and data that are not quite so cut-and-dry as Taleb makes them seem. On the negative side, Taleb dismisses entire disciplines: economics, philosophy, history, finance, the social sciences generally, and probably more that I'm forgetting,* while merely criticizing narrow aspects of what they do. And then there's the Bell Curve, which on the one hand he labels the "Great Intellectual Fraud" in a chapter dedicated to attacking it, while acknowledging elsewhere that it very much has its uses. What is most unforgivable in all this is that the reader who does not have a background in these subjects, who really is the intended audience of this book, would probably not catch these errors.
This is not to say that the book is without merits. It is uncommonly forceful in its argumentation, and his message that the world is not so orderly as many theorists try to make it seem is an important one. Moreover, as a practitioner, his discussion of cognitive biases and statistical methods will be more helpful to the average reader than most books. There is value in being confronted so bluntly with the limitations of the human intellect, I just think that there are maybe other books you should read on the subject before this one.
3.5/5
*I should mention, however, that charges here that Taleb is anti-science are unfair. On the contrary, he is frequently and uncharacteristically complimentary of their methods. Rather, I see him more as being of the tradition of Thomas Kuhn and Stephen Jay Gould, who see scientific progress as being subject to limitations of the human pscyche.