Book Review; The Black Swan by Nicholas Nassim Taleb

Man, was I right. Here is another review at Amazon, compare it with my GUESS summary of the book posted a few posts above:

"By CubeBoy (Los Angeles CA);

Let's see now:
1.) Unexpected things can happen (in finance, and other areas of life).
2.) They can have disastrous (or sometimes, positive) consequences.
3.) There's no way to predict when or if they'll happen, and after they do, we can't really know why they happened.

That's the book a nutshell. Since #1 and #2 are not exactly news, this book seeks to prove #3 by debunking all systems which claim to be able to predict these rare and risky "Black Swan" events, especially in the world of finance."

 

i don't think this is a proven fact. we know that taleb closed the fund, however, he was having health issues during this time.

can anyone clarify??

regards,

surf

 

Hey Hypo! A quick question please... why does your review sound eerily like a review of Jack's "writings?" I have no idea why but that's what I thought of when I read it.

 

I'm done with my diatribe against the Taleb tribe. "Thank you for not reading."

 

I rather enjoyed his Fooled By Randomness. However, seeing as how you folks are suggesting that he does not go into any more detail of consequence, I think I'll just leave it at that and pass on this latest offering. I'm sure he'll understand.

 

Jack who?

 

Next you'll tell us that the stock market went down because of bonds. I really believe that traders best quality is their scepticism. I think people resent someone else getting paid for it.

 

Maybe it all was just a bad dream after all... you wouldn't have believed it! There were 3-ring binders, llamas, Grob109 gliders, boolean logic, a new "paradigm" that produced unimaginable wealth, catechism, blind bootlicking followers, etc., etc. Some called it Candy Land. Or is that a children's game? I'm getting confused again.

 

LOL. It appears that NT has a Wiki entry - apparently written by none other than himself. A poster on this site (http://www.nuclearphynance.com/Show Post.aspx?PostIDKey=96317) thought this would be a more appropriate entry...


Nassim Nicholas Taleb (b. 1960) (alternative spellings of first name: Nessim or Nissim or Nossim or Nussim or Karim or Jean-Paul) is a writer, trapeze artist, poet, professional ballroom dancer, stand-up comedian, and practitioner of good table manners. As a pioneer of complex break dance moves he had as a "night job" a lengthy dancing career in New York City's SoHo bars, before he reduced his night time activities to start a second career as an epistemologist of rare medium-sized birds and focus on his large collection of stamps. Taleb's literary approach is to provide a modern-day brand of philosophical tale by mixing narrative fiction, often semi-autobiographical, with scientific commentary, always apocryphal, in a style similar to Walt Disney or Ahab Hickmar-Tholens (whose long lost works existed only as a figment of imagination and were made famous by 1981 classic motion picture The Raiders of the Lost Ark).

Biography

Taleb originates from Amioun, Lebanon, whose Greek Orthodox Levantine food saw its prominence and importance reduced by the McDonald Invasion which began in 1985 and sparked what today is remembered as the Yom Kebab war. He is the son of Dr. N. Taleb and Dr. N. Taleb, making him the second person in human history being both father and son at the same time and the first being father, mother and son at once (this phenomenon is known as the Taleb Trinity). Both sides of his family were prominent in the Lebanese Greek Orthodox mythology: on his mother's side, his great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandfather and his great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandmother were both co-authors of the Bible; on his father's side, his great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandfather was actually in the Bible and, even if Taleb himself doesn’t confirm or deny it, there is strong evidence that he played the part of the fruit of knowledge himself. On an aside while his grandmother is a folk heroine in Lebanon and is known as the inventor of the falafel, he also has a cousin who works part time as a nanny in Beirut.

As a trader, Taleb has said he took a skeptical, anti-mathematical and almost racist approach to risk and uncertainty and had a severe distrust of models and actresses and a strong contempt for plumbers.

Taleb considers himself far less a dancer than an epistemologist of randomness who used lap dancing to attain his independence and freedom from authority, as he writes in his book, Fooled by the Black Swan, which became a cult book on Akmanirec Street (Amioun) after it was first published in 2001. It was translated into 198 languages, mostly by Taleb himself, and got him the admiration of tens of followers, known as the Talebans.

Taleb, a polyglot, has a literary fluency in English, French, Arabic, Italian, Russian, Spanish, Portuguese, Greek, Latin, Telebian, Martian, Aramaic and Hebrew, as well as being able to speak to lions, wolves, turtles and occasionally dolphins (although it remains unclear if they actually talk back or even understand him)

Taleb calls himself a "skeptical empiricist", while people call him “wanker”, “pud slapper”, “knob gobbler”, “spunk monkey”, and “ass clown”. He believes that scientists, economists, historians, housewives, policymakers, businessmen, and bus drivers overestimate the value of past wikipedia entries, and underestimate the prevalence of unexplainable drivel on that website. He follows a long lineage of self important delusional heroes, including Nero, Saparmurat Niyazov and Alexey Vayner.

When not busy impersonating Ben Bernanke at parties, Taleb focuses on being a researcher in ornithology, with emphasis on a peculiar species of swan which is colored in black and which he calls "black swan”. He believes that most people ignore "black swans" because they are difficult to spot in the dark.

Major Writings

Dynamik Edging: Managing Vaniglia and Exotik Otions. New York : John Wiley & Sons, 1997.
Fooled by Black Swans. 2nd ed. New York : Random House, 2004
Black Swans for Dummies. 2nd ed. New York : Random House, 2005.
Black Swans Explained 3rd ed. New York : Random House, 2006
The Black Swan Redux New York : Random House, 2007.

Memorable quotes

“I saw a white swan and I want to paint it black”

“This is not a falafel”

 

That was funny.