Customer Reviews:
 Many important ideas, many flaws that detract from the message April 26, 2007
623 out of 749 found this review helpful
This is an entertaining and enlightening book, and fairly easy to read. It has an important message regarding how the world works; that the world is governed not by the predictable and the average, but by the random, the unknownable, the unpredictable -- big events or discoveries or unusual people that have big consequences. Change comes not uniformly but in unpredictable spurts. These are the Black Swans of the title: completedly unexpected and rare events or novel ideas or technologies that have a huge impact on the world. Indeed, Taleb argues that history itself is primarly driven by these Black Swans.
It is convincing argument, entertainingly presented with plenty of sarcasm, and indeed, anger, by Taleb. For example he rails against the academic community, economists (including specific names), and Nobel Prize committee. Considerable numbers of his arguments "ring true" to me, that is my experience in life confirms that they are more accurate than the traditional approach. Like any important work, 90% of what is in the book is not original; that does not make it less important. Taleb's contribution is in integrating the material together, and showing how these different ideas are tied to the Black Swan.
The themes include: winner-take-all phenonomen, numerous effects of randomness on the world, the invalidity of the Gaussian Bell Curve to most things in world, concepts of scalablity, numerous instabilities in the world, especially the modern world where information travels so quickly, the fallacies about people's inability to predict the future. The importance of these ideas, Taleb's ability to weave them together into a single theory, and the ability of this theory to change the way you look at the world, means the book easily deserves my highest recommendation.
However, the book does have many flaws, unfortunately -- unfortunate because I believe they will take away from the credibility of the message, which is in important one. The are numerous minor flaws such as, for example, the inexplicable invention of a fictional author (disclosed a few pages later), when certainly there must have been some real example that would have worked better. Another example is repeated jabs about the French; these may be amusing but I just don't think they have a place in work like this. There are also diatribes against specific people, including famous economists, which, though amusing, and possibly justified, demonstrate a high level of anger by author and take away from his credibility. Often he also overreaches, for example in saying the usual combination of anti-abortion and pro-death penalty or the opposite combined views of pro-abortion and anti-death penatly cannot be explained logically, when in fact widely known theories such as George Lakoff's (in Moral Politics) have explained hows these groups of views are entirely consistent.
Another flaw is that Taleb seems to go a little toward the extreme of saying that we can predict almost nothing about the future, and though he does not say so explicitly, this seems to imply we have no moral responsibility to the future. This, combined with Taleb's advice to the reader about their behavior based on the "Black Swan" view of world just rubbed me the wrong way, for several reasons. One is that Taleb personally has very little in common with most people; never having as far as I know had a regular career (essentially what he calls non-scalable, e.g. dentist, engineer, baker) he nevertheless recommends that people choose these kinds of careers rather than a scalable career (e.g. financial trader, author, actor which are subject to a few lucky successful people and a lot of failures). This advise is odd first because Taleb is in a non-scalable profession (derivatives trader, then hedge fund manager) -- indeed it appears he is quite wealthy. Even more odd because he says all these types of non-scalable types of work are boring and evens makes sarcastic comments (the book is extremely sarcasm heavy) for example about dentists being able to do well by diligently drilling teeth for 30 years. The second things that bothered me is that Taleb seems be somewhat amoral to me; in this type of book where plenty of his own emotions come through, plenty of his personality, he has plenty of criticism of others for their wrong models and wrong view of the world, and how this has hurt the world, but there remains a lack of moral responsibility to his advice.
Perhaps the best comparison I could make are to other important works that do not suffer from these flaws, for example the Age of Fallibility by George Soros and Irrational Exuberance by Robert Shiller (1st and 2nd editions). But probably Black Swan will sell better than either of these because of it's "edginess," i.e. aggresiveness; I personally have a distaste for this approach.
Despite my criticisms, the main ideas of the book as so important as to merit reading and indeed great consideration.
To Expect the Unexpected April 25, 2007
19 out of 27 found this review helpful
It's a rare book that makes you look at the world differently. The Black Swan enhances our awareness of our skewed way of viewing reality and the damage that can cause. Taleb focuses on one kind of bias: our penchant to forget the improbable. Rare events with big impact, here represented by the black swan, are easy to ignore until they happen. Because they don't show up for long periods, the risk is invisible--out of sight, out of mind.
As he demonstrated with his earlier Fooled by Randomness, Taleb has an exceptional ability to ground abstract ideas in concrete examples, some from his own experience as quant, derivatives trader and hedge fund manager, but also from other aspects of life. The civil war that descended upon his family in Lebanon, a place where ethnic groups lived together in amity for a century, makes a vivid illustration. His well-to-do and politically connected relatives were sure that that the conflict would end in a matter of days; instead it lasted 17 years.
While the book is mostly a demonstration of our cognitive failings, it also contains a quirky but useful how-to manual for dealing with an unpredictable world where huge consequences can follow from tiny differences. Chapter 13, with a title that starts "Appelles the Painter", explains what to do when you don't know what will come.
Entertaining as they are, chapter headings like "How to Look for Bird Poop" don't help the reader navigate what is an unconventional, nonlinear format. While it bristles with intriguing ideas, the book as a whole is not easy to grasp, as those familiar with Mr. Taleb's style from Fooled by Randomness will know. Each piece is powerfully engaging, but the entire argument is more elusive. But being forced to figure it out is no bad thing and along the way one laughs at the absurdities of fate and humanity.
read it and absorb... April 25, 2007
0 out of 2 found this review helpful
what a wonderful book. open it up anywhere and start reading. this book will make you think and ponder life. a "big think" book that delivers. also check out his earlier book, FOOLED BY RANDOMNESS.
An Improbable and Wonderful Book April 22, 2007
27 out of 56 found this review helpful
Not since Gregory Bateson has a writer elucidated that how we look at the world can cause focus on the wrong things and thus be drawn to irrelevant, incomplete or incorrect conclusions that carry consequences both large and small. For Bateson focus needed to be on 'relata' rather than things. For Taleb, it is studying extremes rather than central tendencies.
For me, both add immeasurably to the discussion as to how the world may actually work. Thank you Mr. Taleb for taking the time and trouble to engage us in explanation and exposition.
An Excellent Blend of History,Philosophy,Probability,Economics,Statistics,and Mathematics April 22, 2007
31 out of 63 found this review helpful
Taleb(T)has written an excellent book that should be required reading for every social scientist who bases his theoretical analysis, empirical work,and applied policy recommendations on the presumed use of the normal probability distribution.The use of the Normal distribution ,usually applied by social scientists,especially economists and psychologists, without any type of goodness of fit test, to their time series data,is the major reason for the predictive and forecast failures that occur with regularity in the social sciences.Taleb's message is that accurate and reliable prediction in the social sciences is not possible because of what Schumpeter called the " regular irregularity "problem of not being able to know,due to changing expectations,what the process or mechanism generating the stochastic time series data is.The social data being generated by the interaction of the ever changing mix of relevant social variables over time is not stable,uniform,and homogeneous over time due to constant financial, social,technological,political, and economic innovation and advance(or obsolescence and decay).Taleb's message is practically identical to the one that John Maynard Keynes delivered to Jan Tinbergen in 1939 and 1940 in their exchange in the Economic Journal over the logical(inductive and analogical) foundations of econometrics.Tinbergen sought to use the method of multiple correlation and regression based on least squares.Unfortunately,least squares is based on the assumption of normality( assume a normal probability distribution).Tinbergen,in his lifetime,never provided a goodness of fit test demonstrating that the time series data was, in fact,normally distributed.
At a much deeper philosophical and epistemological level,T explicitly shows how the social sciences ,over the last 130 years, have failed to grasp the limitations imposed on these fields by Hume's problem of induction.All social sciences have the severe problem that the interactions of human beings with each other in their physical environment constantly creates new combinations of possible outcomes that are not predictable or forseeable.T is correct that this problem is enormous and can't be dealt with by assuming some kind of probability distribution a priori,especially when the generating mechanism for the outcomes is constantly being changed by the very interactions of human decision makers with eachother brought about by reactions to previous forecasts or predictions that may have had some degree of reliability in the past.
I have one minor bone to pick with T.This is T's decision not to explicitly make use of the extremely powerful results presented by Keynes in 1921 in his A Treatise on Probability.Keynes spent all of Part III of this book on Hume's problem of induction and his partial solution in terms of an interval based approach to probability combined with his concept of the weight of the evidence,w.w measures the degree of the completeness of the relevant evidence upon which the probabilities are being calculated.Keynes always sought to differentiate between the highly improbable and the highly uncertain(or highly ambiguous a la Daniel Ellsberg).The highly improbable becomes a severe problem in all social sciences precisely because the weight of the evidence in these fields is relatively low in general.w must have a weight of 1(w is defined on the unit interval between 0 and 1,0<=w<=1) in order to support the claim that the probability distribution has a particular shape(i.e.,a bell shape)that will be applicable in the future.The presumption that the shape is bell shaped rules out BOTH the highly improbable(which Mandelbrot has shown for over 50 years occurs much more often than would be predicted by a normal distribution)and the highly uncertain or ambiguous.The use of Keynes's TP would have added support to T's sound conclusions.Perhaps he is planning to write another book in this area which would explicitly take Keynes's work into account.
T has demonstrated that the social sciences,particularly economics and psychology, are a mess.These fields assume continuity,independencs,and stability,as well as the existence and uniqueness of supposed solutions without providing any empirical/experimental support for such claims.The entire foundation for social science must be rethought.The tool kit presently in use is not correctly measuring and/or describing what is actually occurring.Unfortunately,just as Keynes and Mandelbrot have been rejected,so will Taleb.This is because coming to grips with failure requires that the current practitioners realize that their methodology is not working and decide to change.This is precisely what these fields refuse to do and will continue to refuse to do.They will simply continue to catalog an exploding number of anomalies that future researchers will supposedly have to deal with.
|
