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Loading... The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (edition 2008)by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Work detailsThe Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
  tauruseducation | Jun 6, 2013 |  tauruseducation | Jun 5, 2013 | Highly interesting but hard to understand. After reading this book, I feel that everything is probalble and nothing is certain, which is true and it is an important book to read for young people whose life experience is limited. (  ) drjesons | May 24, 2013 | This isn't an easy book to review because it's dealing with an idea that's at one time simple and yet so outside the regular paradigm that it is hard to grasp. It is derived in great part from the world of high finance, but it applies everywhere, to everything. The idea is this -- we have four areas of knowledge -- what we know we know, what we know we don't know, what we know we don't know, and what we don't know what we don't know. It's that 4th area where we get into the most trouble and where we try in all kinds of ways to predict, forecast, prognosticate, and otherwise reveal (which we can't, because we don't know what we don't know). Big events with big consequences come out of that quadrant, and the author names these Black Swans. And if you're still with me, let me say that is a huge oversimplification of the ideas in this book. Taleb has written a huge personal essay on a highly practical yet nearly unconsidered area of human knowledge and endeavor. He's studied it, thought about it, talked about it (usually while walking), and written about it. He's found the places it most affects us. He's thought about and proposes methods for making ourselves robust against it (or taking advantage of it, because a Black Swan can be positive or negative, depending on one's preparation and response). I am not qualified to review this book except to say how it affected me. It has exposed me to the idea that the most valuable part of my library are the books I have yet not read. It tells me not to let things get too big because everything and anything can (and eventually will) fail. Small, fast, and flexible tends to survive and even thrive. Conservative didn't mean what I thought it meant. I need to read this book again one day. ( ) Murphy-Jacobs | Apr 8, 2013 | interesting, but verbose; difficult at times to separate the wheat from the chaff FKarr | Apr 3, 2013 |
 Since the book was written prior to the current situation, many of the insights will seem prophetic. For instance, “regulators in the banking business are prone to a severe expert problem and they tend to condone reckless but (hidden) risk taking.” Some might think that the book specifically predicted the current market and economic crisis—wrong. The book is about the expectation that it could occur. Is contained inContains
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"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 almost everything about our world, from the rise of religions to events in our own personal lives." "Why do we not acknowledge the phenomenon of black swans until after they occur? Part of the answer, according to Taleb, is that humans are hardwired to learn specifics when they should be focused on generalities. We concentrate on things we already know and time and time again fail to take into consideration what we don't know. We are, therefore, unable to truly estimate opportunities, too vulnerable to the impulse to simplify, narrate, and categorize, and not open enough to rewarding those who can imagine the "impossible."" "For years, Taleb has studied how we fool ourselves into thinking we know more than we actually do. We restrict our thinking to the irrelevant and inconsequential, while large events continue to surprise us and shape our world. Now, in this revelatory book, Taleb explains everything we know about what we don't know. He offers surprisingly simple tricks for dealing with black swans and benefiting from them."--BOOK JACKET.… (more)
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