The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable | Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | A philosophy from statistics

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The Black Swan: Th...

	The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable Nassim Nicholas Taleb Random House, 2007 - 400 pages average customer review:based on 337 reviews view larger image
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What we don't know can hurt us

In 1997 my cousin worked on Wall Street and suggested to her colleagues that the office keep a rubber raft in the storage room in case the World Trade Center gets attacked again. She had to leave soon after that. They thought she was crazy. In fact, she was dead right. She had predicted what this book calls a "Black Swan"...something that most people cannot or will not predict.

One reason why I never bought real estate is because I have always been concerned about the effect of a nuclear bomb or nuclear reactor accident on said purchase. Most people would laugh at me for saying that. I hope that I am never correct, but I fear that somewhere, some day, real estate in a given area will approach zero value because of such a "black swan" event.

This is one of the best books you can read that describes how knowing what you don't know is more important than knowing what you know. It is interesting to know that the US Military takes this book and this author very seriously. Rumsfeld apparently quoted him several times when he was in office.

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A philosophy from statistics

This is a very fun book to read. Taleb is one of those polymath writers who are totally unashamed to bloviate and utterly convinced he's right (and is willing to call Nobel laureates frauds). I give him credit for making statistics engaging to read and a philosophy to boot.

My one criticism is his chapter on narrative fallacies. One of Taleb's arguments is that we should avoid seeing patterns in the past and that the past is almost entirely unexplainable and irreducible with respect to causation. He then applies this to history. I think Taleb's dead wrong here. It is absurd to think of history without thinking about causation and narrative. History is not naked chronology, as Taleb seems to think, but understanding reasons, causes. People don't want to know what happened, but why it happened. This is a valid question! IMHO, Taleb's argument about randomness and skepticism applies only to economic variables. And it's a good point. In sum, I thought Taleb's romp through the world of economics and forecasting was fun and thought-provoking.

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A good point, but Taleb overdoes it

Nassim Taleb has written a very enthusiastic book, and provides some very tasteful food for thought. The problem is, Taleb himself is far too pleased with his own work.
Talebs confidence in his own ideas helps him write a book which is easy and fun to read. For an economist, interested in the philosophical background of the science, he offers plenty of very interesting references. I will most certainly dig more into the thoughts of Karl Popper and Benoit Mandelbrot.
But Taleb's confidence also helps him make several rather banal mistakes. His main adversary is the statistician Gauss and his normal distribution. Taleb is right that many economists and financial analysts rely far too much on normal distribution. But figure 7 on page 238 reveals that Taleb himself does not understand the concept pretty good: "..as your sample size increases, the observed average will present itself with less and less dispersion".
His confidence also makes Taleb jump to conclusions and make banal errors (the French Maginot Line, the main line of defence built in the 1930s, was not built where the Germans attacked France in World War One). Taleb even goes in his own primary trap: the confirmation bias. Every little thing happening by chance is counted as evidence of his Black Swan theory. But the story of penicillin is famous just because it was sensational, not because it is the normal way of making major medical breakthroughs.
It is probably not worthwhile to read this book, although there are grains of gold in it. The book is written in the spring of 2007, before subprime. In a footnote Taleb is writing about the risk of Fannie Mae: it "seems to be sitting on a barrel of dynamite." Touché!

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