The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

A non-fiction, no-nonsense book on randomness, that proves to be quite an interesting and thought-provoking read while at times entertaining due to the tongue-in-cheek attitude of the author. The book deals mostly with the uncertainties and the unpredictability of events, on why we shouldn’t altogether ignore outliers. Here are roughly some of the points the author mentioned in this book which serves as some food for thought:

• We usually fool ourselves into thinking that the world is easy to predict than it actually is by underestimating the possibility of things to turn out as we expected them to.
• We don’t actually know as much as we think we do, next time if you say you know something, think again.
• Be skeptical, if not wary at those so-called ‘experts’, who sometimes might just be telling you things because they are paid to do the job.
• Don’t be a sucker to the Gaussian bell-curve as it ignores outliers because those events that lie outside the consideration of the bell-curve, have the largest if not serious repercussions.
• Don’t believe everything you saw in television or everything you read in the newspaper.
• Don’t judge a book by its cover because you’ll never know what lies behind those lines and try to withhold judgments to ourselves.

Taleb tries to rationalizes his arguments by relating it with some of his personal experiences while also lacing his explanations with some fictional characters. It’s interesting to read about his anecdotes during his early days as a trader, about his encounters with some ‘highly intellectual’ individuals.

A word of warning though, the structure of this book is rather confusing and most of the time it is rather chaotic due to its too many self-coined terms by the author. It’s worth finishing nevertheless.

“I stick my neck out and make a claim, against many of our habits of thought, that our world is dominated by the extreme, the unknown, and the very improbable…and all the while we spend our time engaged in small talk, focusing on the known, and the repeated.” ~

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Am I more skeptical after reading the book? Sure.

My verdict: 3.5/5