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| Author: Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Publisher: Penguin
Category: Book
List Price: £8.99
Buy New: £5.29
You Save: £3.70 (41%)
New (33) Used (6) from £3.78
Avg. Customer Rating:  79 reviews
Sales Rank: 169
Media: Paperback
Pages: 400
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.7
Dimensions (in): 7.6 x 5 x 1.1
ISBN: 0141034599
EAN: 9780141034591
ASIN: 0141034599
Publication Date: February 28, 2008
Shipping: Eligible for Super Saver Shipping
Availability: Usually dispatched within 24 hours
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| Customer Reviews:
 The Emperor has no clothes October 10, 2008
9 out of 15 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, misleading and mischievous. 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 3 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
3 out of 4 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
3 out of 6 found this review helpful
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.
 The Black Swan September 28, 2008
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
A one sentence summary of The Black Swan would be 'The future is unwritten, at least in Bell Curves'. Taleb ponders the random events that arrive unseen and yet cause a huge impact on the world around us for example:
Positive black swans: penicillin, cellular phone, micro-processor, worldwide web, Macintosh, the iPod
Negative black swans: Altamont,Watergate, the 1973 oil crisis, July 7 public transport bombings
The book has received the most publicity around the role that it plays debunking many of the 'scientific' theorems that run the financial markets. He exposes the limitations of scientific models employed by bankers and demonstrated how analysts and journalists retrofit event explanations around events that they don't really understand.
However, more important from my perspective as someone interested in technology (in its widest sense) is Taleb's ideas on positive black swans.
Developments that make the most impact creep on us over time. I wouldn't have thought when I was in school at the launch of UK mobile phone networks Vodafone and Cellnet that just about everyone in the UK would have their own mobile telephone. Yet now, it feels so strange to watch films like Bullit, where a large amount of the plot feels odd because Steve McQueen isn't packing a mobile phone.
Taleb writes in an engaging manner explaining that in order to be better prepared for these unforseen events, we need to think outside the box and learn to be open enough to recognise and embrace the positive black swans before they are too mainstream.
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