A rambling padded out diatribe/rant about a simple idea.
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This book could be summarised as : "Improbable stuff happens more often than people think". That's it! I find it hard to believe that this book has been edited as any editor worth his salt would have cut 90% of it; but then maybe it would not be a book but an article and so wouldn't sell? The book should carry an 'ego alert'. The author makes it quite clear that he thinks that he thinks that he is the only person who really understands how the world (universe?) works, with regard to future events, and everyone else (possibly excluding Mandelbrot) just does not get it. Perhaps he has it the wrong way around? The problem is that he does not have an alternative approach other than: 'expose yourself to [good] random events and not [bad] ones". Not really very useful is it? I'd be interested to hear what his contemporaries say!
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Tedious
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He takes 130 pages to say "History is written by the victors", using a repetitive mish-mash of terribly written fake anecdotes. This really is a problem for the book. A book half the length, with some decent editor, would have been fantastic. The book as it is repeats too much and takes too long to deliver the punch.
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A missed opportunity
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This book is a real shame because there do seem to be some interesting ideas in it. Had the author got togther with someone like the author of Freakonomics the book could well have been excellent. Because the trouble with this book is that it is so badly written. The style of the book is generally unpleasant to read and it is badly structured - ideas are strung together without much coherence. On its own that might be forgivable, but the author is incredibly self-obsessed and his arrogance comes across only too clearly. The book seems to be largely an outlet for his own pet peeves.
This book is about the logical holes in the way we look at the world and so perhaps the book's greatest sin is that there are logical flaws in the arguments that are presented. The book is meant as some kind of a guide, but Nassim Nicholas Taleb is not a man that I would trust to be my guide.
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Enough already....!
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Sure there's an ego-trip, and the book could be edited down, and... and... and..., but Mr Taleb presents a set of points that is unarguably rarely presented, and does it with style, humour, accuracy, and effectiveness.
So read it for yourself!
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Fair Point but...
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Mr Taleb has a point. And working in financial markets, I can only but agree with him.
Yes, we are exposed to randomness.
Yes, it is random events that are the big market movers.
Yes, by their very nature such events are unpredictable and no amount of analysis of historical data is going to prepare us for Black Swans.
And that is it. That is the whole point of the book. Nicely summarised. We don't need the other hundreds of pages to tell us so.
Mr Taleb was a trained quant for an investment bank with aspirations of becoming a philosopher, he says so himself in the book. And there lies the problem of this book. The author mixes (with very moderate success) financial markets theory with philosophy and his own account of growing up in war torn Lebanon, producing a book that yes, it is interesting, but yes, it is also a mixed bag of vaguely related stuff that seems more like an ego boosting exercise than a serious theoretical proposition.
Fair point Mr Taleb, but where twenty pages could have worked as an academic journal type article, why write a whole book?. Money, books are scalable as mentioned at the beginning of the book itself. More money, more widespread fame, more ego.
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