The Black Swan

Denis A 09/07/2025

Well... It's okay at best, but a chore most of the times. What could've been 80-100 pages was instead stretched out to 400+ pages filled with the same regurgitated point. Some of it doesn't even make sense. When he is (often) insulting professions or other people, he makes the point that "you should not predict, you should prepare", which falls apart very quickly - in one of his first examples in fact, which is 9/11. Taleb is insulting, frequently condescending, and often seems more interested in tearing down than building up. His stories have little to no point or connection to lessons, so they feel meaningless. Reading this book ultimately feels like reading an overly long article from an author who suffers from narcissism or a shitty autobiography *no one* asked for of a schizo man ranting endlessly about how amazing he is and how much everyone else - especially the experts - sucks. Had high hopes for this book, but it turned out to have the same impact on me as a fart in the wind. If only he was able to tweak the atrocious delivery and keep the "old guy ranting at the bus stop" energy at a minimum it would have been a far better book.

Michael L 06/01/2016

Nassim Taleb has written a number of interesting books and articles, but none as popular and well known as 'The Black Swan'. It is written as what Taleb calls an essay, meaning basically that he speaks freely about his thoughts on randomness and how he believe it has shaped the world as we know it. If you've read any of his other books, you'll recognise the style (which you either love or hate). The Black Swan is a metaphor for the highly improbable, extreme impact event. Given our human nature and what is mostly referred to as hindsight bias. a Black Swan seems explainable and predictable only after it has occurred, while being vastly unexpected before it occurs. Among the given examples are: ? - The rise of Hitler and the subsequent war - The market crash of 1987 - The fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Union - The invention of the personal computer - The spread of the internet - The popularity of Harry Potter (and the number of sold books) - The events on September 11 Dr Taleb argues that the world is much more random and a lot less organised, explainable and predictable than we think (and than history books wants us to believe). The generator of historic events, he explains, is different from the events themselves and the truth is, nbody really knows what is going on. Tricked by our love for narratives and their cause-effect explanations we tend to value so-called objective information too dearly. The problem according to Taleb is that we seek confirmation rather than falsification. To use his own words, we forget to search the graveyard for silent evidence when building a theory. One of the best things about The Black Swan is, ironically, the narratives Taleb uses to illustrate his points. I'm absolutely in love with his portrayal of Mediocristan and Extremistan as representatives for mild and wild uncertainty respectively. While most physical observations and the bell curve (or the Great Intellectual Fraud as he like to call it) belong to Mediocristan, most economic and social science events belong to Extremistan – the home of black swans – yet we treat them as if they were from Mediocristan. We basically "confuse absence of proof with proof of absence" of extreme non-Gaussian events. This increases our exposure to the highly improbable, extreme impact events and regularly leads to massive blow ups and successes. Contrary to common beliefs, Taleb states, history doesn't crawl, it jumps, and the main drivers are extremely hard to predict, because they're basically hard to even image. Instead of trying to assess the probability of the unimaginable, we should break with the worn saying, that all models are wrong, but some are usefull and realise, that some models are outright harmful. His recommends focusing on consequence rather than probability and that we pursue a Barbell-like strategy (i.e. buy insurance against the extreme, highly unlikely downsides while maximising the exposure toward the extreme, highly unlikely upsides). The book itself is roughly 300 pages and consists of heaps of small chapters (there's a 75 page postscript essay, where he addresses the most common misunderstandings, he's meet). It can be a little heavy from time to time and some of his sections on heuristics and bias you can skip.

Michael L 06/01/2016

Nassim Taleb has written a number of interesting books and articles, but none as popular and well known as 'The Black Swan'. It is written as what Taleb calls an essay, meaning basically that he speaks freely about his thoughts on randomness and how he believe it has shaped the world as we know it. If you've read any of his other books, you'll recognise the style (which you either love or hate). The Black Swan is a metaphor for the highly improbable, extreme impact event. Given our human nature and what is mostly referred to as hindsight bias. a Black Swan seems explainable and predictable only after it has occurred, while being vastly unexpected before it occurs. Among the given examples are: - The rise of Hitler and the subsequent war - The market crash of 1987 - The fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Union - The invention of the personal computer - The spread of the internet - The popularity of Harry Potter (and the number of sold books) - The events on September 11 Dr Taleb argues that the world is much more random and a lot less organised, explainable and predictable than we think (and than history books wants us to believe). The generator of historic events, he explains, is different from the events themselves and the truth is, nbody really knows what is going on. Tricked by our love for narratives and their cause-effect explanations we tend to value so-called objective information too dearly. The problem according to Taleb is that we seek confirmation rather than falsification. To use his own words, we forget to search the graveyard for silent evidence when building a theory. One of the best things about The Black Swan is, ironically, the narratives Taleb uses to illustrate his points. I'm absolutely in love with his portrayal of Mediocristan and Extremistan as representatives for mild and wild uncertainty respectively. While most physical observations and the bell curve (or the Great Intellectual Fraud as he like to call it) belong to Mediocristan, most economic and social science events belong to Extremistan – the home of black swans – yet we treat them as if they were from Mediocristan. We basically "confuse absence of proof with proof of absence" of extreme non-Gaussian events. This increases our exposure to the highly improbable, extreme impact events and regularly leads to massive blow ups and successes. Contrary to common beliefs, Taleb states, history doesn't crawl, it jumps, and the main drivers are extremely hard to predict, because they're basically hard to even image. Instead of trying to assess the probability of the unimaginable, we should break with the worn saying, that all models are wrong, but some are usefull and realise, that some models are outright harmful. His recommends focusing on consequence rather than probability and that we pursue a Barbell-like strategy (i.e. buy insurance against the extreme, highly unlikely downsides while maximising the exposure toward the extreme, highly unlikely upsides). The book itself is roughly 300 pages and consists of heaps of small chapters (there's a 75 page postscript essay, where he addresses the most common misunderstandings, he's meet). It can be a little heavy from time to time and some of his sections on heuristics and bias you can skip.

Ashraf R 14/02/2014

En berømt bog der slet ikke lever op til forventningerne. Den grundlæggende idé er vigtig, men bogen er rodet og der er langt mellem guldkornene - og de vigtigste guldkorn er behandlet bedre i andre bøger. Jeg bryder mig ikke om Taleb's selvglade fortælling.