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The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable | 
 enlarge | Author: Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Publisher: Allen Lane
Category: Book
This item is no longer available
Rating:  319 reviews
Sales Rank: 985227
Format: Import
Media: Paperback
Edition: Open Market Ed
Pages: 400
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.1
ISBN: 1846140455
EAN: 9781846140457
ASIN: 1846140455
Publication Date: May 18, 2007
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| Customer Reviews: Read 314 more reviews...
 Disaster Planning for Black Swans August 18, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I have found Mr. Taleb's book to be a very interesting and thought provoking read. As an experienced emergency management professional and instructor, I find it calls into question the whole process of risk and hazard analysis. While the book is certainly intellectually stimulating and should cause one to be very careful with planning assumptions, I question its value in any direct application. While looking in the rear view mirror we don't know how many Black Swan's were prevented by well conducted risk and hazard analyses based on historical occurrences. As Mr. Taleb points out, history has overlooked the successful interventions and un-occurred disasters.
 Nothing useful that anyone in a scientific field would benefit from August 16, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
Talebs point is painfully simple. For some reason he seems to think that it is very unique and it is almost laughable that he thinks people in academia are so near sighted as to not realize much of what he presents.
He fails to provide any new model for evaluating risk... It's obvious that we can't predict the future, yes markets could collapse if a nuke hit america... or some other "Black Swan" occurrence happened. But the fact is we can't really practically use any of these events to model risk.
One example I found to be pretty stupid was when he talked about the banking crisis (where South American countries all simultaneously defaulted on their loans) ... and implied that this meant that "bankers were not conservative". His basic vice is that many strategies produce very little volatility yet still contain chaotic possibility of an extremely large loss. Unfortunately he never offered a practical alternative to what conservative should be defined as. Humans have limited tools to evaluate risk, I think everyone realizes that our models aren't perfect (yet unfortunately Taleb seems to think that he is the only one that has had this insight). This pattern occurs throughout the book -- Taleb chastising people for wrongly evaluating future occurrences without offering any practical alternative.
I didn't buy a book simply be told that ... "well...humans aren't oracles they can't predict stuff...sometimes crazy stuff goes down... here are some examples... oh yeah and some advice: Be open minded"... which in essence is what this book wastes 400 pages doing.
 A philosophy from statistics August 14, 2008
This is a very fun book to read. Taleb is one of those polymath writers who are totally unashamed to bloviate and utterly convinced he's right (and is willing to call Nobel laureates frauds!). And I give him credit for making statistics engaging to read and a philosophy to boot.
My one criticism is his chapter on narrative fallacies. One of Taleb's arguments is that we should avoid seeing patterns in the past and that the past is almost entirely unexplainable and irreducible with respect to causation. He then applies this to history. I think Taleb's dead wrong here. It is absurd to think of history without thinking about causation and narrative. History is not naked chronology, as Taleb seems to think, but understanding reasons, causes. People don't want to know what happened, but why it happened. This is a valid question! IMHO, Taleb's argument about randomness and skepticism applies only to economic variables. And it's a good point. In sum, I thought Taleb's romp through the world of economics and forecasting was fun and thought-provoking!
Shoot the editor August 12, 2008
The obvious premises of this book could have been related in 50 pages or less. I agree with those who commented that the author is self-engrossed. I've never wanted to skim-read a book more than this one.
 useless pages are more than 85% of the book August 3, 2008
3 out of 4 found this review helpful
I bought the book because it is on best selling list, 4 stars and an interesting topic. However, quite a disappoinment. The black swan idea is quite refreshing but it is revealed completed in the first 20 pages. The rest are just repeative garbage.
I guess the author needs to make a living too and he is obviously paid by the number of pages. He simply turned a good article into a over-weight book.
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