| The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable |  | Author: Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Publisher: Penguin
Category: Book
List Price: £9.99
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Rating:  139 reviews
Sales Rank: 1,654
Media: Paperback
Pages: 480
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.7
Dimensions (in): 7.6 x 5 x 1.1
ISBN: 0141034599
EAN: 9780141034591
Publication Date: February 28, 2008
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Product Description
What have the invention of the wheel, Pompeii, the Wall Street Crash, Harry Potter and the internet got in common? Why are all forecasters con-artists? And, what can Catherine the Great's lovers tell us about probability? This book shows us how to stop trying to predict everything and take advantage of uncertainty.
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| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 139
 Rambling drivel from an arrogant author July 11, 2010
Crouching Soldier, Hidden Taliban
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This author is probably the first to make shout and scream at a book!
The prose is rambling and arrogant, swerving from philosophy to mathematics, economics, his personal life history and psychology and back again. Taleb is constantly at pains to show us just how wonderfully well read he is quoting from as many and varied sources as he can muster form his memory be it literary or (pseudo)scientific.
The analogies he presents are sometimes just downright wrong e.g. his examples of swimmers' bodies and Gulag survivers regarding the fact that we only see the "survivors" or successes and not the failures.
The fact that he takes chapters to explain some of these basic concepts that pretty much everybody is already aware of throws into sharp relief just how nebulous his narrative is.
I have a suggestion for Taleb, summarize / distill his "idea" (which isn't actually a new idea at all) into a book an quarter of the size and i might read it on the toilet if i have the time.
Short summary: this book is a complete and utter waste, of effort on the part of the reader and of paper on which it is printed.
 Struggeling to finish it July 5, 2010
amiquel
After about 150 pages, I am still deciding if I should invest more time on it. Some ideas are quite interesting but it seems to me quite disperse, there is no line I can follow easily. The author clearly knows what he is talking about, but sometimes gets lost in references to what others said or wrote about this and that. If I was the editor I would cut half of it and rewrite it so it can catch the reader's attention easily. Overall it is not a bad book to read, but I wonder what clear message or ideas would I get from it.
A charlatan June 18, 2010
William Podmore (London United Kingdom)
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
This twerp thinks that Richard Dawkins is a charlatan - which is proof that Taleb himself is a charlatan.
The rest is just pop politics, guff economics and pomposity.
Should have known better June 13, 2010
Joe Gorman (Norway)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
There are enough other 1-star reviews here, making lots of criticisms, and I agree with almost all of it.
I have a general principle that once I start to read a book I like to give it a chance and finish it, even if it is initially not very promising. In this case, I would have done well to abandon my principle. This was a book that started badly, and got worse. I should have know better from my initial instincts.
It started badly because, early on, there were statements that were poorly presented, in a pompous tone, and with attempts at humour that were just not funny. It got worse because the insights I was hoping would eventually appear never did, and the bad aspects just got worse.
The core message of "expect the unexpected" is reasonable enough, but could have been epxressed more clearly and a lot more concisely.
The one thing I did like about the book was how it pointed out how academics and others sometimes make claims without providing good evidence to back it up, and that we should be sceptical of such claims. (If that is something that interests you, buy "Bad Science" by Ben Goldacre instead). As a general rule I agree that less fawning reverence should be accorded to professors, and the book contributes to achieving that.
Don't bother reading this book, and certainly don't spend money buying it.
 Why all the negative reviews? June 3, 2010
Halifax Student Account (Liverpool, UK)
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
I found this book a breath of fresh air. We tend to read in an echo chamber of books that confirm our world view. Black Swan is not like this. Telab dismantles our inbuilt pretensions and invites us to live with the mystery of not knowing jack all about the world, the future and knowledge in general. This book is a treasure trove of caustic wit and sharp intelligent insights; from the problem of induction (but in the real world), to the phoney Nobel laureate scam jobs, pseudo geniuses selling mumbo jumbo and other economic modelling idiocies and philosophical paradoxes that have never occurred to me before. Thus this book really got my mind racing. Taleb is a very clever man for sure and he lets us know it. He believes himself to have made great discoveries concerning the stupidity of the bellied up beast we call capitalism and why things generally tend to cock up in unexpected ways. Oh, and he shows why experts don't know as much as you and I, which I find very worrying! Thus this book is well worth the read, just to swim inside the mind of a true intellectual. And not one of those pop intellectuals who grave our culture (and populate the philosophy book shelves at my local Waterstones)! Taleb then is on hand to tell you how it is. He has experience working in the `machine', he's made lots of money and so he's in a good position to insult the map and kick the territory; which he does with venom. He has plenty of funny venomous asides aimed at philosophers and `experts'.
Though I'm not qualified (or clever enough) to comment on the guys massive ego (it really is huge!), he just puts his ideas out in a crystal clear and provocative way which I find irresistible. He writes with confidence you see and so he seems to know what he is talking about. So if you can stomach the man's genius complex, you may well start finding him a charming and somewhat very funny character (as I did). What Taleb has to say he says it really well and so his book is a joy to read and well worth your time. Though it can be challenging in places (you won't finish it in one sitting), you will put it down and so that you can process what you have just read.
I'm therefore bemused by all the negative reviews for this book. Ok, for sure, Taleb does ramble on a bit and he struggles with his punch-lines (get to the point man!) but, I reckon anyway, clever people should be allowed to ramble with impunity, as long as their position is strong and they have something to say. So if you're smart, ignore all the negative winging and whining about Talebs arrogance. God, these days you can buy a book for the price of a Big Mac (I bought this one for $2) and Black Swan is a very digestible read indeed. So just give this book go and stop moaning that Taleb needs an editor and digest the man's ideas instead.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 139
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