The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable: Difference between revisions

{{author|Nassim Nicholas Taleb}} is, in equal parts, enthralling and utterly infuriating. He has written a book so sure of its own certitude, that has one effective lesson: there can be no certitude. Taleb makes the enormous mistake of believing (and saying) that he’s solved the eternal verities — that after millennia of philosophical, ethical, political, economic and social debate: thrust and counter-thrust — that mathematics and physics can save the day.

While there is certainly value in this book — if you can bear the cloying self-regard with which it is expounded, it’s a pretty ripsnorting read — Taleb is also very, very inconsistent (or confused) about some very, very fundamental things which he doesn’t seem to have read or thought nearly hard enough about. Early doors he praises the virtue of having unread volumes on the shelves of ones library: I was continually struck that it was a pity Taleb hadn’t dipped into one or two of them along the way.

That’s ultimately the conclusion of this unnecessarily long book: “Stuff happens". The interesting material is mostly covered in existing books written by more talented and less egotistical authors (I recommend {{author|Philip Ball}}’s {{br|Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another}}) and the implication of the [[power law]] on the behaviour of markets is the subject of {{author|Benoit Mandelbrot}}’s very good {{br|The (Mis) Behaviour of Markets: A Fractal View of Risk, Ruin And Reward}}.