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  • Look forward to reading this one since I enjoyed "Fooled by Randomness" by the same author.

    

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• ― mortonfox said on May 18, 2007 about the Hardcover edition| Add your feedback

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  • This book is a bit harder to follow than Taleb's last effort. He presents most of his concepts in short understandable snippets, but they do not always flow together easily. Ironically, he refers repeatedly about "missing the forest for the trees", while the writing style in this book lends itsel ... Continue

    This book is a bit harder to follow than Taleb's last effort. He presents most of his concepts in short understandable snippets, but they do not always flow together easily. Ironically, he refers repeatedly about "missing the forest for the trees", while the writing style in this book lends itself to that predicament for the reader.

    That said, the concepts do flow together well in the end, and mulling over Taleb's views of life's dynamics is a very refreshing exercise in thought. Big thumbs up for the concept and ideas, only one thumb up for the style in which they are presented.

    

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• ― Bossdog said on Nov 15, 2007 about the Hardcover edition| 1 feedback| 1 feedback

Elegant, startling, and universal in its applications, The Black Swan is a concept that will change the way you look at the world. Black Swans underlie almost everything, from the rise of religions, to events in our own personal lives. A Black Swan is a highly improbable event with three principle characteristics: it is unpredictable; it carries a massive impact; and, after the fact, we concoct an explanation that makes it appear less random and more predictable than it was. The astonishing success of Google was a black swan; so was 9/11. And why do we always ignore the phenomenon of Black Swans until after they occur? As Nassim Nicholas Taleb reveals, we are hard-wired not to truly estimate risk, too vulnerable to the impulse to simplify, narrate, and categorize and not open enough to rewarding those who can imagine the 'impossible'. In this revelatory book, Taleb explains everything we know about what we don't know, and shows us how to face the world.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb has devoted his life to immersing himself in problems of luck, uncertainty, probability, and knowledge. Part literary essayist, part empiricist, part no-nonsense mathematical trader, he is currently the Dean's Professor in the Sciences of Uncertainty at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. His last book, the bestseller Fooled by Randomness, has been published in eighteen languages. Taleb lives (mostly) in New York.

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