This is supposed to be some all fired amazing book about randomness. The title is derived from the idea that Europeans thought all swans were black until they visited Australia and suddenly found a black swan. They had no way of knowing that what they thought was true was untrue until confronted by the evidence.
Taleb tries to weave together how important randomness is and how bad we are at accounting for it in the future, while deluding ourselves in hindsight that we knew all along this random event would happen. He pulls 9/11 out as an example, which we “clearly” see in hindsight from intelligence reports was a possibility, but had no real way of knowing would happen as we looked forward into a world where we confidently asserted that we understood how it functioned.
Now for my confession, I couldn’t finish the book. I started skimming around 20% through and then skipped ahead from around 30% to 50% to his third section because I wondered if he’d finally do something to draw the book together. After that I tried a few more sections but continued to find the writing overly heavy and full of self-aggrandizing stories of his amazing life and the amazing people he knows while he threw barbs at those he seems to feel are beneath him. His mocking comments about the “new rich” at the Sydney Opera House is what finally got me to realize how Taleb’s view of himself is so elevated while others that don’t “get it” as he does are clearly inferior.
I’m glad I borrowed this book from the library because I don’t have to worry about money I wasted on an author with such an inflated opinion of himself that he must make up his own terms for widely accepted things like confirmation bias.
I don’t recommend this book, but would recommend Thinking in Systems as a book that covers many similar ideas without being written by someone wanting to show how smart they are with overfly flowery words and dumb stories.
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