Archive for June, 2009
Monday, June 29th, 2009
Book Review: The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Opportunities and threats in improbable events
I loved Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s earlier book Fooled by Randomness, and I am really loving The Black Swan as well. It has much of the charm of Malcolm Gladwell’s current NYT best seller, Outliers. — But while Gladwell leaves us with merely the understanding that the success of various prominent individuals such as Bill Gates or Steve Jobs is due largely to the “luck” of being born in the right place and at the right time, he gives us no greater insight into how a better understanding of luck (in the form of randomness and improbability forces at work upon us) might better guide us in choosing national and international policies or even actively choosing our life paths taking into consideration the improbable events such as birth date and birth place work that for our success as well as those that against it.
In contrast, Taleb’s The Black Swan sets its sights on providing us a theory and method to make such decisions in a way that better recognizes the role of randomness in our lives. Even more, it also shows us that any theory which simplifies real world complexity enough for us to see patterns also inherently blinds us to the risks hidden in the messy real world complexity which we have now simplified out.
