Author: Nassim Nicholas Taleb is a Lebanese American philosopher, essayist, scholar, statistician and former derivatives trader, whose work mainly concerns problems of randomness, probability and uncertainty. He defines himself as a “skeptical empiricist”.
Book: Remember that Taleb’s books cannot be summarized, so will only provide some insights: A black swan is a highly improbable event with three principal characteristics: It is unpredictable; it carries a massive impact; and, after the fact, we concoct an explanation that makes it appear less random and more predictable than it was. The inability to predict these outliers implies the inability to predict the course of history. In domains belonging to “mediocristan” no single outlier will change the aggregate, (i.e., height of the population), but in "extremistan", one single observation can disproportionately impact the aggregate (i.e., wealth of the population), problems arise there. We must be careful with narratives as most of the times they are an oversimplification of reality and tend to increase our vulnerability to over interpretation. The Black Swan asymmetry allows us to be confident about what’s wrong, not about what’s right. We cannot predict, but we can somewhat prepare, both for positive and negative black swans.
Opinion: Another superb book by Taleb. This one is a bit heavier than his previous “Fooled by Randomness”. It has both more pages and more digressions. Some people enjoy that, and others don’t, I think the key is to read it for pleasure without any deadlines or worries. Apart from the main idea and all the examples & details given, I love this book because it showed me for the first time the great B. Mandelbrot and his fractal view on markets as an alternative to the fraudulent Gaussian finance we are taught at universities (more of this soon in his book The (mis)behaviour of markets.) Again, I’ll attach some interesting fragments of the book.
Comentarios