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statman 's review for:
The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
I'd read this once before a while back and decided to read it again. It is a thought provoking book and Taleb spares no punches for government officials, bankers, economist and statisticians. It comes across that he is anti prediction and anti building any sort of models but that is not the case. What he is against is having an overconfidence because you have a model and blindly applying a model for prediction that doesn't work. I guess as a statistician, I could be offended and dismiss the book as a bunch of rubbish, but there is some truth in what he says and I'm not a particular strong fan of models. I am a big fan of the data and making good decisions based on the data, which doesn't necessarily require one to build a model, particularly where there is a lot of data. Fun book to read, quite different than most that you will read.