Book Review: The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (2007) by Nassim Nicholas Taleb is a difficult book to review.  I’m not ashamed to say that I don’t really understand all that this book is about but have hopes that reading it may have broadened my knowledge some and will be an incremental step in understanding similar works in the future.  Not that I can predict the future, that appears to be something that NNT feels strongly about.

Here are a few other things that Nassim Nicholas Taleb doesn’t like:

• ludic fallacy
• Platonicity
• pompous academics
• the bell curve (this won big points with me)
• the narrative fallacy
• financial consultants
• and, putting things into categories (oops)

The idea of the black swan is that there are events that are rare & hard-to-predict with huge impact in just about every endeavour including science, finance, and mathematics.  The name comes from the belief among Europeans in past centuries that all swans are white because all the swans ever observed were white, a theory busted by the discovery of black swans in Australia.  Black swans may be beneficial or disasterous but have in common that people will generally ignore theses outliers until they happen and then try to create a reason for their happening.

NNT (he calls himself by these intials, btw) writes in a style mixing an essay-style discourse with narrative stories, often rather silly.  He also has kind of an arrogant, sarcastic tone that can be off-putting, but mostly I liked it since what he writes is pretty interesting.

Taleb, Nassim.
The black swan : the impact of the highly improbable / Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
New York : Random House, c2007.