Customer Reviews
Just a rehash of John Stuart Mill - By: Stuart Anson, 17 Jul 2008 
an important time for this book, valuable for businesspeople to read before making decisions. throw away the spreadsheets & open up your minds.
Only worth 3* as most of the work is just a rehash of John Stuart Millin the 19th Century (who first wrote about Black Swans). The author takes credit for more original thinking than he has actually done..
Over-sized ego and rambling - By: Pester, 16 Jul 2008 
NNT definitely has an over-sized ego. He says he found it easy to write - mainly becuase little care & effort seemed to go into it. He appears to have decided that we are only capable of reading half-a-page at a time, so the book comes over as hideously disjointed - no argument is developed to a conclusion.
Got bored out of my brain, reading his ego pieces & invented characters.
I think Monty Python did it better: 'No-one expects the unexpected'
Just don;t expect anything much from this book
Fantastic book - By: Paul M. Clark, 08 Jul 2008 
A great read, engagingly written. He is a little arrogant & clearly likes to demonstrate his intelligence however recovers his humility with a wonderful sign off to the book. Enjoy.
Black Swan, Dying Duck - By: J. N. Melone, 02 Jul 2008 This book was actually an enjoyable read. It is witty & humorous, though, as other reviewers point out, Taleb is basically infatuated with himself. Butin spite of enjoying the intellectual challenges he throws at you throughout the book, I have to say that there is little real substance here. Why? Because his black swan is a dying duck. He argues that there is such a class of events as black swans - that is to say totally unpredicted events. But that "class" of events doesn't exist. Each one event that is unpredicted is a unique event & shares no common features with other such events apart from unexpectedness. He argues that the future can't be predicted accurately (well we all know that, & all too well, often from bitter experience). So, he argues, planning is virtually futile, because plans can't take account of the totally unexpected. Nothing new there, but applying his own technique of reverse-logic, if a plan is blown off course after 6 years, by an unexpected event, we can say that the plan was accurate enough to work from for 6 years. Is 6 years of workable planning worthless becausein the 7th year the plan comes unstuck?
If his message only boils down to a warning not to assume that forecasts will be highly accurate for an indefinite period, then there is nothing new here - how many of us trust the weather forecast for the day after tomorrow? For those readers interestedin economics Tony Lawson has done a much more thorough explanation of why economic forecasting is futile (if we expect forecasts to turn out to be accurate). According to Lawson, attempting to forecast is a highly valuable way of learning something about the economic forces that are at workin society, even when the forecasts go wrong. And Taleb's bias against governments & government plans is ridiculous. Governments don't need to know everything about everythingin order to plan to build a bridge or a hospital.
A good hard read - By: Mr. Christopher J. Cottell, 30 Jun 2008 
I picked this upin a train station as it was top of the best sellersin Smiths & it seemed to be advertised everywhere. After the first few pages I was surprised that such a book was as popular as it is a paper on philosophy & mathematics. However, Taleb's writing is interesting & I was drawnin with the personal accounts, his anger at the bell shaped curve & disgust at those that seek false risk protection from equations they don't understand.
Although my background is not economics this book still relates to the management of risks & specifically changing the way you think about that pile of numbers on the spreadsheet. This is the point of the book as well, not to present the one solution to manage Black Swans (highly improbable events), but to look at your environment & be aware that there are other risks out there & to deal with themin a practicable way.
Above all the book is interesting for exploring the logic of his idea & although he worships a certain Mandelbrot, B the book is actually quite funnyin places.
