Customer Reviews: Read 32 more reviews...
 The Emperor has no clothes October 10, 2008
2 out of 5 found this review helpful
The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
A highly disappointing text from an erudite and capable author. The book is fallacious, mislaeding and mischievious. The abuse of simple statistical distributions alone warrants not taking it seriously. It is oversold by the blurb and does not do what it says on the cover. Extremely disappointing.
 Good for teachers of Critical Thinking? October 2, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
There are already many reviews here so I'd simply like to add that this could be useful to anyone teaching Critical Thinking. It's full of neat little stories and interesting points. The author often contradicts himself or ignores his own warnings (possibly deliberately to keep the readers on their toes) so it should be used carefully.
Interesting, but an ego-trip October 1, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I have to agree with most of the other reviews, that although this book is an interesting read which lets you look at some of the problems in "routine statistics in practice" from a different angle.
However, at the same time the book is one big ego-trip with the author being very full of himself and people who share his ideas, while looking down on everyone else. For some reason the authors feels that almost everyone involved in statistics has no idea about the data he or she is working with, no idea of variability of data, and no idea of its shortcomings. Everyone, except himself and some friends...
To illustrate this, the author uses interesting and entertaining examples which make the book a good read. Unfortunately, some of his examples and the thought process used to make his point are flawed.
Nonetheless, i would recommend this book to people routinely working with data just to be aware of the different angles on the same topic in an easy to understand language, while simultaneously being entertained.
 Suddenly, it all made sense ... October 1, 2008
Nothing short of ABSOLUTELY REVALATORY ... notwithstanding other reviewers' comments regarding arrogance, ego, verbosity etc., I found this book to be nothing short of life altering; entertaining and funny in it's written style, too.
Working in a profession which constantly deals with unpredictability, including extremely high-impact unpredicability, this book holds up a bright light to the anti-intellectual lunacy prevading my own profession and brings me a clarity of thought I wondered if I'd ever enjoy.
NNT was willing all throughout this book to highlight his disdain for 'anti-scholars' who peddle 'anti-knowledge' and I have to accept that some who've missed his main point will take this as arrogance, ego, etc.. I've found throughout life that it takes some extremely confident, contrary and often arrogant people to set the new standards and shock people into seeing the light.
AWESOME BOOK; Iimmediately bought several copies to distribute as Christmas presents to the un-enlightened and ordered his previous book 'Fooled by Randomness' which I can wait to devour upon arrival today.
strong character, strong book September 26, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
I just read the book whilst in Colombia a bit more than a week ago. Though it shines through that Nassim Nicholas Taleb is an opinionated man (in all positivity) with a rather big than small ego, it certainly needs a character like this to be able to step back from common (dis-)believe and make a critical point can has the potential to smash many of our assumptions about nothing less than life itself. Looking at rare phenomena from an economic and philosophical point of view, he (if his numbers are right) makes a strong point against the industry of predictability for the least. Reading from his experience and research, it makes me think of when I first read Stephen Johnson's 'Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities and Software', John Gray's 'Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals, or Naomi Klein's 'The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism'. All those books, written in the last few years show how we are slave of our own misconception about our own history, decisions, believe in the power of prediction and generally our 'greatness' as a species.
It is very sobering to see that we still keep getting things wrong most of the time, despite the claim of being part of any of the many groups of 'a chosen people' or the more secular view of having 'progressed' into something better, higher (whatever that might be). Despite all our knowledge, we now have scientists as the new scriptwriters and painters of how armageddon looks like (see 100 years ahead predictions of rising sea-levels and the 5 billion deaths it's supposed to cost us). But maybe armageddon is the only Black Swan we can't fully imagine but we been predicting long enough to get one of the many dates right.
Essential reading, definitely get's you away from the craziness that is London commuting.
|
