The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (Incerto)

480 Seiten

Sprache: English

Am 2007 von Random House veröffentlicht.

ISBN:: 978-1-4000-6351-2
Goodreads:: 242472

The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable is a 2007 book by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, who is a former options trader. The book focuses on the extreme impact of rare and unpredictable outlier events—and the human tendency to find simplistic explanations for these events, retrospectively. Taleb calls this the Black Swan theory. The book covers subjects relating to knowledge, aesthetics, as well as ways of life, and uses elements of fiction and anecdotes from the author's life to elaborate his theories. It spent 36 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list. The book is part of Taleb's five-volume series, titled the Incerto, including Fooled by Randomness (2001), The Black Swan (2007–2010), The Bed of Procrustes (2010–2016), Antifragile (2012), and Skin in the Game (2018).

16 Auflagen

Rainer König hat The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (Incerto) von Nassim Nicholas Taleb besprochen

2 Sterne

Lots of pages, but at the end I'm still thinking "WTF?! What is the message of this book?" Honestly, I can't see it. Yes, there is that black swan which is very rare, but what is the takeaway from this conclusion?

I was reading the german translation, so even in my mother tongue I'm not able to get the message, if there is any. The only thing I understood so far is that the author does not like Gauss and his bell curve for normal distributions. The funny part of his "evidence that Gauss is wrong" seems to be the idea that according to Gauss a crash of the finance market should happen only once in whatever million years and since we had several of those crashes in the past this proves that Gauss is wrong. Problem with this is, that Gauss is looking at random events. Finance markets are …

Lots of pages, but at the end I'm still thinking "WTF?! What is the message of this book?" Honestly, I can't see it. Yes, there is that black swan which is very rare, but what is the takeaway from this conclusion?

I was reading the german translation, so even in my mother tongue I'm not able to get the message, if there is any. The only thing I understood so far is that the author does not like Gauss and his bell curve for normal distributions. The funny part of his "evidence that Gauss is wrong" seems to be the idea that according to Gauss a crash of the finance market should happen only once in whatever million years and since we had several of those crashes in the past this proves that Gauss is wrong. Problem with this is, that Gauss is looking at random events. Finance markets are not random events but driven by greed. So if you misbehave, then you get the bill for it. If I'm daily speeding on the road and get my daily speeding tiket I can't blame Gauss for that because according to Gauss it would be a very low probability to get speeding tickets for 28 days in a row.

One of the books that was painful to read for me.