Skip to main content

The Black Swan – Nassim Nicholas Taleb ***

I have a strange relationship with this book. Back in 2008 I was having a talk with my then-agent about what to write next. He said to me ‘You ought to write something like The Black Swan,’ proving, as we shall see, that he hadn’t read the book. I duly bought a copy, had a quick flick through it, decided it was pretentious tosh and put it to one side. So it has sat there unread for four years, until I was needing a bit of light relief from physics books and decided it was time it was reviewed.
I quickly discovered this is in many ways a very readable book, though with some serious reservations I’ll mention in a moment. Nassim Nicholas Taleb really only makes one point in the entire 292 pages, but it is a very important point: that there are two types of randomness, and the sort physicists and economists deal with bears very little relationship to the kind of randomness that drives everything from the weather to sales of books and the success or failure of traders.
This is a hugely significant point, and Taleb has no end of fun pointing out the idiocy of those who try to use predictions based on the normal distribution bell curve in situations that are dominated by huge unexpected discrepancies. As he points out, a turkey trying to predict the future given its normal distribution of life’s ups and downs in the past would never predict the day when Christmas looms on the horizon and it gets the chop.
So far, so good. And Taleb uses some great examples and makes some excellent points along the way. (Or rather scores some excellent points as this is very much a ‘me versus the world’ book.) But, despite this flash of genius there are good reasons for this book only getting three stars.
One is the style. It is often pompous, didactic, nit-picking and irritating. There is far too much of the author in it – I really don’t care about him or want to know about him. The other is the lack of content. My agent was wrong about ‘writing another Black Swan‘ because the whole point of mega-successful books is you can’t predict their coming. And Black Swan also proves him wrong as one of his tests of a successful non-fiction book was to say ‘Is it a book or is it an article?’ I.e. does it have enough material to make a book? Black Swan is definitely an article posing as a book – it makes the one point over and over and over again, because there is really very little else to say. There is no real defence against this kind of randomness (though he gives a couple of pages of vague suggestions) and so it is just a warning of things going wrong, repeated indefinitely.
As such it shouldn’t have worked as a book – but it did (sorry, agent). I find it difficult to recommend it because I disliked so much of it,  but I have to admire that key would-make-a-great-article point, so in the end it’s a book I would probably go out and buy anyway.

Paperback:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Antigravity Enigma - Andrew May ****

Antigravity - the ability to overcome the pull of gravity - has been a fantasy for thousands of years and subject to more scientific (if impractical) fictional representation since H. G. Wells came up with cavorite in The First Men in the Moon . But is it plausible scientifically?  Andrew May does a good job of pulling together three ways of looking at our love affair with antigravity (and the related concept of cancelling inertia) - in science fiction, in physics and in pseudoscience and crankery. As May points out, science fiction is an important starting point as the concept was deployed there well before we had a good enough understanding of gravity to make any sensible scientific stabs at the idea (even though, for instance, Michael Faraday did unsuccessfully experiment with a possible interaction between gravity and electromagnetism). We then get onto the science itself, noting the potential impact on any ideas of antigravity that come from the move from a Newtonian view of a...
Post a Comment
Read more

The World as We Know It - Peter Dear ***

History professor Peter Dear gives us a detailed and reasoned coverage of the development of science as a concept from its origins as natural philosophy, covering the years from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. inclusive If that sounds a little dry, frankly, it is. But if you don't mind a very academic approach, it is certainly interesting. Obviously a major theme running through is the move from largely gentleman natural philosophers (with both implications of that word 'gentleman') to professional academic scientists. What started with clubs for relatively well off men with an interest, when universities did not stray far beyond what was included in mathematics (astronomy, for instance), would become a very different beast. The main scientific subjects that Dear covers are physics and biology - we get, for instance, a lot on the gradual move away from a purely mechanical views of physics - the reason Newton's 'action at a distance' gravity caused such ...
Post a Comment
Read more

It's On You - Nick Chater and George Loewenstein *****

Going on the cover you might think this was a political polemic - and admittedly there's an element of that - but the reason it's so good is quite different. It shows how behavioural economics and social psychology have led us astray by putting the focus way too much on individuals. A particular target is the concept of nudges which (as described in Brainjacking ) have been hugely over-rated. But overall the key problem ties to another psychological concept: framing. Huge kudos to both Nick Chater and George Loewenstein - a behavioural scientist and an economics and psychology professor - for having the guts to take on the flaws in their own earlier work and that of colleagues, because they make clear just how limited and potentially dangerous is the belief that individuals changing their behaviour can solve large-scale problems. The main thesis of the book is that there are two ways to approach the major problems we face - an 'i-frame' where we focus on the individual ...
Post a Comment
Read more