I will try to write down my first impressions after finishing part One of Nassim Taleb's "The Black Swan" book. More thoughts will hopefully come after finishing the second and third part as well as the postscript essay. Unexpectedly, I have heard about this book from Tim Ferris while watching his Random Show podcast (co-hosted with Kevin Rose). Many Google queries later, I decided to make the jump and order The Black Swan. Nassim Taleb aims at an encyclopedic knowledge, he graduated in Financial Mathematics, is working as a trader, and is a university professor in Risk Engineering, whatever that means. The book is about a topic which is so dear to myself, that is randomness. Taleb defines a black swan as a very rare and unpredictable event with drastic consequences. The author gives many examples of black swans all along the book. Such examples cover the 1987 market crash, the 9/11 attacks, the rise of Google... The author claims that most people, are blind to black swans. Taleb elaborates on a few reasons to explain such blindness. One of these reasons is Platonification, that is a heavy use of statistical models to predict the future, namely the Gaussian Distribution. The author thinks that the world is much more complex for such models to succeed. You might tell me that this is far from being the discovery of the century. Nevertheless, people seem to ignore this fact and prefer to find refuge in some complex mathematical equations. Taleb makes an interesting connection between our tendency to model/ platonify/narrate and Kolmogorov Complexity: it is more economical (in terms of memory (be it human or electronic) to remember summarized data. At the end, modeling is nothing but a form of summarization. I liked the chapter where the author compares two hypothetical worlds: Mediocristan and Extremistan. In Mediocristan, everything is mediocre and a single individual cannot have an impact on the population's average. For instance, physical features like weight belong to this realm. On the other hand, a single individual living in Extremistan can have a tremendous effect on the population's average, for instance a feature like personal wealth belongs to Extremistan (think Bill Gates). The author finally claims that our world is rather Extremistanic. The book does not come with anything new, its primarily goal seems to rise awareness of black swans through many examples and personal anecdotes. At some point we have the impression that Taleb is repeating himself over and over. Some Amazon reviewer of this book even wrote that the book could have been written in two pages and a half. Though, please don't get me wrong. I really enjoyed reading the first part of this book. It is very well written. The cross-discipline background and knowledge of Nassim Taleb makes it a very interesting read. Also, and most importantly it is food for thought. Now, I am constantly surprising myself chasing black swans in every day's life. I cannot say that I have read many books that triggered such effect.
