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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 | Add your feedback

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  • I really wanted to like this book, but its signal:noise ratio is far too low.

    

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• ― pktechgirl said on Jul 23, 2008 | 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 | 1 feedback| 1 feedback

From Booklist
In business and government, major money is spent on prediction. Uselessly, according to Taleb, who administers a severe thrashing to MBA- and Nobel Prize-credentialed experts who make their living from economic forecasting. A financial trader and current rebel with a cause, Taleb is mathematically oriented and alludes to statistical concepts that underlie models of prediction, while his expressive energy is expended on roller-coaster passages, bordering on gleeful diatribes, on why experts are wrong. They neglect Taleb's metaphor of "the black swan," whose discovery invalidated the theory that all swans are white. Taleb rides this manifestation of the unpredicted event into a range of phenomena, such as why a book becomes a best-seller or how an entrepreneur becomes a billionaire, taking pit stops with philosophers who have addressed the meaning of the unexpected and confounding. Taleb projects a strong presence here that will tempt outside-the-box thinkers into giving him a look. Gilbert Taylor
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Book Description
A black swan is a highly improbable event with three principal 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. For Nassim Nicholas Taleb, black swans underlie ... [강컴닷컴 제공]

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