However, this luck doesn't apply to his favorite philosophers. NNT spends a chapter lauding Poincare for being a 'thinking mathematician' because he didn't rely on rigor, but rather intuition. NNT lambastes other mathematicians for criticizing Poincare by calling his techniques 'hand waving' which he decides is due to childishness on the part of the other 'nerd' mathematicians. But success due to intuition is not success due to skill and is therefore not success to be recognized or rewarded at least, that's the case with bankers and investors.
NNT doesn't understand the reason why mathematicians and other 'hard' scientists don't like hand waving is because there's no way to know if it's success or luck, it isn't repeatable and it isn't verifiable.
Also, NNT ignores the silent evidence of intuition. He looks to Poincare as a savior and steward of his profession while ignoring the unmarked graves of all the other 'thinking mathematicians' who failed miserably in their intuitive hand waving. For all of his experimental 'proof' offered in defense of claims about how we understand, learn and process things, NNT never gives more than one study as evidence although he will claim, without a footnote or other reference that many other studies have verified that particular claim.
He accepts these theories as facts and bases large portions of his argument upon them, yet he criticizes doctors, biologists and other scientists for using experimental evidence to make theories on why things work instead of simply accepting that they do work. How many times does he bring up 'anchoring' as a theory for why things happen, yet he cannot accept the fact that perhaps birds and humans use different brain regions to perform similar tasks? The study didn't prove that complex models are no different from simple ones, just that not all of them were better but no claim that they were ever worse.
So why would I get rid of something that doesn't do worse but could do better? If I buy a lottery ticket that is guaranteed to make me my money back and could make me more than what I paid, why wouldn't I buy it? Now, I understand that predicting the future is foolhardy, and I'm not saying that it's something we should put a lot of stock into pun intended but past information can give us a general idea about the future, even if it doesn't give us a great one.
NNT passes himself off as some cool headed, rational thinker who sees beyond the noise and chaos of the world and invites the world to join him on the greener side of the pasture. But nearly all of his arguments are based on contradictions with other arguments that he has made.
Further, the remaining arguments that are defensible are impossible to disprove because they impossible to prove. Much like a believing person who argues that without empirical proof of man evolving from lower life or of the big bang, the scientist cannot be right, NNT argues that because models are not perfect, no one can use them to any benefit. The book is altogether too long given the core point of the book which is this: the most important things that happen or that don't happen are unknowable.
Because we cannot predict the future with certainty or even near certainty, we should not even try but rather just do whatever the heck we want because sometimes it's just as good. View all 19 comments. Dec 21, Greg rated it it was ok. This book has diminishing returns on the time spent reading it. Taleb's jeremiad is directed against - well - everyone who is not as enlightened as he is. I trudged through this book because - well - everyone is reading it and enlightened people should know how to comment on it.
There, I did it. Now I can look down on all those people out there who aren't enlightened like Taleb. And now, me.
Taleb is actually on to something important if you can tolerate his self-importance enough to filter his v This book has diminishing returns on the time spent reading it. Taleb is actually on to something important if you can tolerate his self-importance enough to filter his verbage to get his good ideas.
A central idea is that we assume everything in the world is Gaussian and then we base all our decisions about life on our Gaussian models. But the significant, life-changing, society-changing, events are outside the Gaussian. Things like They belong to Extremestan, not Mediocristan.
The ideas are interesting. Many are quite compelling. But it really seems Taleb's main point is "everyone else is an idiot. I did find quite useful a good line of thought regarding the importance of narrative in grasping truth. We are so drawn to narrative, that all retained "true" facts must fit into our constructed narrative. Other data are ignored or made to fit. We need to be on the watch for data that disproves rather than confirms our story.
And perhaps we ought to learn better how to understand and speak in story. Mmm - God himself, in the person of Jesus, communicated truth in parables - narratives! No one else seems to have caught on. Except Taleb, of course. View 2 comments. The first time through, I listened to this book with my husband, usually while I was cooking. Although I tried to stop and mark important passages, I ended up thinking the book was not very systematic. The second time through, chapter by chapter, the method in his madness is more apparent.
I continued to think Taleb is more a popularizer than an innovator. But even if so, that's not so shabby. He's trying to revolutionize the way we think, and the more we rehearse that, the better. Nassim Nichol The first time through, I listened to this book with my husband, usually while I was cooking. While they both have us investigating our thinking, for Kahneman, it's to make us own up, while Taleb has more direct emphasis on avoiding disaster.
He would like for us to realize our overuse of normal-curve thinking, which makes us minimize risk and have no expectations out of the ordinary: like the turkey whose experience all goes to show how human beings love him and care about him and prove it by feeding him--until Thanksgiving day arrives and he's dinner. The normal curve tells us that the further out from the mean we go, the rarity of unusual events rapidly increases. Fine--when it applies. We are not going to meet any foot tall people or anyone living to years old.
But the normal curve often doesn't apply. We can't predict which books will be best sellers or how how the sales count will go on one of them. We can't predict when a war will occur or just how one will transpire.
The world is not fair. Unfairness and inequality are no epiphenomena but part and parcel of reality. Even in evolution, the fittest survive, thrive, and have more offspring. Take writing: before literacy, every town crier and performer had his day. With written methods, all the little guys are out of work. Then, one book may become a bestseller. It leaves even the other books in the dust. And when the author of the bestseller writes another book, it'll get more attention than those who didn't write a bestseller.
When we think normal curves apply but they don't, we are confusing what the world is like with how we would like it to be. We are shoving reality into the Procrustean bed of our idealized thinking. That distorts our vision of reality.
By keeping an open mind, at least, we won't be walking blindly into risk. We can't prevent the unexpected, but we can at least turn the black swans into grey swans. We are like the 13th fairy at the Sleeping Beauty's christening. We can't do away with the angry fairy's curse, but we can mitigate it. Grey swan, not black. The difficulty with many kinds of prognosticators in our world is that they are spinning theories that purport to predict, but their theories are stories, and their stories connect the plot points and only sound as though they are predictive.
We are lulled or, even worse, misled. We listen according to our preferred belief system. We listen to what we want to hear: confirmatory listening. We actively cherry pick reality to make it fit what we want to believe. The solution? Try the opposite, finding something that doesn't fit. A plethora of confirmatory evidence is exactly what the turkey had before Thanksgiving.
Taleb lauds two unexpected types of practitioners: military people and financial managers. They will know if their predictions are wrong or right. If they are wrong, they'll have to face the music.
Their predictions matter. Not so the world of talking heads and stuffed shirts: they just adjust their stories and keep on going. What those stories are, are predictions of the past. If you see an ice cube sitting on a table you can predict the future: it will melt into a little puddle of water. But if you see a puddle on the table, and that's all you see, there could be a thousand stories of what it is and how it came to be there.
The correct explanation may be or one which will never be found. It could be that angry old fairy, melted. As I said, most of the stories are not explanations. But theories are sticky. Once you have one you have a hard time seeing beyond it remembering that sometimes no theory is best, if the theory is wrong. So, he recommends an empirical approach with art and craft, a less grand theory, and always an eye toward outcomes.
Right at the end it occurred to me that this is religion. He tells you how to sustain yourself in the absence of worldly support, how to stand up to others and say your piece, how to wait and be patient, and about the merits of surrounding yourself with like-minded souls.
To close, a rousing rendition of Kipling's If He can't teach like Kahneman, but he gets it said. View all 89 comments. Aug 23, Daniel rated it it was ok. I stopped reading this because the author is so pompous and annoying. View all 5 comments. Mar 08, Ben rated it did not like it Shelves: shit.
If you skipped your Systems, Statistics, or Random Variables classes in college, or if you think you know more than everyone else on Wall Street, then read this book. It will reaffirm what you already know. To the rest of you: this book will reaffirm what you thought you knew when you were 5 or I put this book down after the first chapter, but thought I would give it another chance, that I was being unfair.
When I read the second chapter which is a metaphor for w If you skipped your Systems, Statistics, or Random Variables classes in college, or if you think you know more than everyone else on Wall Street, then read this book. When I read the second chapter which is a metaphor for what Taleb thinks is him I puked in my shirt. This man is the most conceited person I think I've discovered through reading his garbage hypothesis. If I met Taleb, I would recommend that he read some other theories on random variables why does he use Gaussian distribution as the only example of random distribution?
He apparently was sleeping though these discussions. Thank God I am not an editor. View all 11 comments. Jan 25, Gendou rated it did not like it Shelves: fiction , humor.
This book profoundly nasty and intellectually demented. Taleb a classic science denier; oscillating between anti-science and pseudo-intellectual arguments. When some scientist says something he likes, he misrepresents it to fit his narrative.
When the scientific consensus is against him, he cries grand conspiracy theory or slanders the methods of science. His argumentation in this book is like a case study in logical fallacies and crank red flags. Special pleading. Ignoring disconfirming evidence This book profoundly nasty and intellectually demented. Ignoring disconfirming evidence like the exceptions to the professed rule. Straw man. To see this logical fallacy in action, simply reply "Speak for yourself, asshole!
The reputation of an author is judged by their published work, but the products of science are ideas. These ideas are, in the scientific literature, judged primarily by their content. In science, a humble patent clerk can become the biggest name in theoretical physics by having the right idea. The accusation of tit-for-tat citation is ludicrous. Speak for yourself, Taleb! He accuses whole fields of study, like economics, of being rife with mathematical theatrics.
If that's true I'd love to read about it. But he offers no evidence for this, and is more guilty of this particular offense than any person I know. Which is an area of mathematics. Very much the mathematician's business! View all 13 comments. Feb 21, Bonnie rated it did not like it Shelves: nonfiction.
Most importantly, perhaps, was that it was dull and a chore to read. In the little footnotes suggesting a chapter was unneccessary for a nontechnical reader and could be skipped read: you are too dumb to understand this chapter, so don't even bother , like Chapter 15, I gladly took his advice because it meant one le This felt like it was trying to be the next The Tipping Point or Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything and just failed spectacularly, on all counts.
In the little footnotes suggesting a chapter was unneccessary for a nontechnical reader and could be skipped read: you are too dumb to understand this chapter, so don't even bother , like Chapter 15, I gladly took his advice because it meant one less chapter to slog through.
I finished it out of a perverse desire to finish things, nothing more. My biggest complaint with the book, though, was that the author came across as a giant tool. He loves to use sarcastic quotes to criticize things like "prestigious" institutions despite mentioning multiple times that he himself attended the prestigious Wharton School.
Whether his hatreds are justified or not, the way he does it comes across as terribly juvenile and he never misses a cheap shot. He appears to see himself as some kind of persecuted genius, taking on the establishment. He loves nothing more than describing how some so-called "expert" goes apopleptic when confronted with his brilliant Black Swan idea which he keeps reminding you he came up with at the age of 22 and fantasizes about dropping rats down overly serious people's shirts to watch them squirm is he actually 12 or just a bastard?
Why does he have to make her up? The main characters of this non fiction, economics story are ,. Please note that the tricks or techniques listed in this pdf are either fictional or claimed to work by its creator. We do not guarantee that these techniques will work for you. Some of the techniques listed in The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable may require a sound knowledge of Hypnosis, users are advised to either leave those sections or must have a basic understanding of the subject before practicing them.
DMCA and Copyright : The book is not hosted on our servers, to remove the file please contact the source url. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better and better. What is crucial is that the antifragile loves errors, as it incurs small harm and large benefits from them. Spanning politics, urban planning, war, personal finance, economic systems, and medicine in an interdisciplinary and erudite style, Antifragile is a blueprint for living in a Black Swan world.
In this groundbreaking and prophetic book, Taleb shows that black swan events underlie almost everything about our world, from the rise of religions to events in our own personal lives, and yet we—especially the experts—are blind to them.
Must we always try to uncover nonexistent messages in random events? Fooled by Randomness is about luck: more precisely, about how we perceive luck in our personal and professional experiences.
Set against the backdrop of the most conspicuous forum in which luck is mistaken for skill—the markets—Fooled by Randomness is an irreverent, eye-opening, and endlessly entertaining exploration of one of the least understood forces in our lives. The Bed of Procrustes takes its title from Greek mythology: the story of a man who made his visitors fit his bed to perfection by either stretching them or cutting their limbs. With a rare combination of pointed wit and potent wisdom, Taleb plows through human illusions, contrasting the classical views of courage, elegance, and erudition against the modern diseases of nerdiness, philistinism, and phoniness.
Believe it or not, our DNA is almost exactly the same as that of our ancestors. While scientific advances in agriculture, medicine, and technology have protected man, to some degree, from dangers such as starvation, illness, and exposure, the fact remains that our cave-dwelling cousins were considerably healthier than we are.
Our paleolithic ancestors did not suffer from heart disease, diabetes, high blood pressure, or obesity. In fact, a good deal of what we view as normal aging is a modern condition that is more akin to disease than any natural state of growing older. Our predecessors were incomparably better nourished than we are, and were incredibly physically fit.
And certainly none of them ever craved a doughnut, let alone tasted one. In fact, the human preference for sweet tastes and fatty textures was developed in an environment where such treats were rare, and signaled dense, useful energy. This once-helpful adaptation is the downfall of many a dieter today.
It's what makes it hard to resist fats and sweets, especially when they are all around us. We are not living as we were built to live. Our genes were forged in an environment where activity was mandatory—you were active or you starved or were eaten. This created strong selective pressure for genes encoding a smart, physically adept individual capable of very high activity levels.
Humans are among the most active of species, and we carry energetically expensive brains to boot. Our energy expenditures rank high among all animals. At least they once did. By eliminating modern foods, including carbohydrates, dairy, and all processed foods from our diets, we can undo much of the damage caused by our modern food environment.
The plan is based on three simple principles: 1. Enjoy the pleasure of food and do not count or restrict calories. Eat three satisfying meals a day filled with non-starchy vegetables, fruits, and high-quality, lean proteins 2. Do not starve yourself, but do go hungry episodically, for brief periods, to promote a low fasting blood insulin level and increase metabolic fat-burning.
Exercise less, not more, but with more playfulness and intensity. The goal is to create a strong body with a high resting metabolism and a large physiologic capacity to move through life easily—not to burn calories. After his wife's untimely death, a powerful sorcerer dedicates his life to seeking revenge against all womankind. He turns his captives into beautiful swans--who briefly regain human form by the fleeting light of the moon. Only Odette, noblest of the enchanted flock, has the courage to confront her captor.
But can she gain the allies she needs to free herself and the other swan-maidens from their magical slavery? A monumental tale of loyalty and betrayal, of magic good and evil, of love both carnal and pure, and of the duality of human nature, The Black Swan is a rich tapestry which is sure to become an all-time masterpiece of fantasy.
A beautiful young star. A mission no one expected. Why do we not acknowledge the phenomenon of black swans until after they occur? Part of the answer, according to Taleb, is that humans are hardwired to learn specifics when they should be focused on generalities Addeddate Identifier There are no reviews yet.
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