putsalreads 's review for:

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

3.75

informative reflective medium-paced

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Nassim Taleb’s The Black Swan is full of sharp ideas about unpredictability and the outsized impact of rare events. His definition of a black swan—an unforeseen event with massive consequences that we often explain only in hindsight—really stands out and makes you look at the world differently. It pushed me to think about how much of what we call certainty is actually just us rewriting the past to make it look neat.

At the same time, I couldn’t help feeling the book could have been more concise. Taleb tends to circle around his points and add layers of anecdotes that sometimes weigh the book down. A shorter and more practical version would have made the insights easier to take in and more accessible to a wider audience.