Black Swans: Stories

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As exemplified by figures like Beyoncé and Jeff Bezos, social and economic advantages accrue highly unequally in Extremistan. If you skipped your Systems, Statistics, or Random Variables classes in college, or if you think you know more than everyone else on Wall Street, then read this book. It will reaffirm what you already know. To the rest of you: this book will reaffirm what you thought you knew when you were 5 or 6...with an updated vocabulary. We concentrate on things we already know and time and time again fail to take into consideration what we don’t know. We are, therefore, unable to truly estimate opportunities, too vulnerable to the impulse to simplify, narrate, and categorize, and not open enough to rewarding those who can imagine the “impossible.” What stands out about Babitz’s writing is her voice: smart, unapologetic and knowing, like Dorothy Parker magically time traveling to the modern era . . . Rereading Babitz is a delicious, guilty pleasure.”— Alta The author's tone throughout the book, slightly irreverent, didn't annoy me as much as it seems to have bothered other readers. I enjoyed learning a new way to look at reality, but, as I mentioned before, this is a dense read and I wouldn't consider it "fun" reading either.

Taleb believes that prizes, honorary degrees, awards, and ceremonialism debase knowledge by turning it into a spectator sport. Retrospective predictability: Although the events are unpredictable, humans tend to explain them on hindsight as if they could be perfectly understood and predicted. Consider the fate of Giaccomo, the opera singer at the end of the 19th Century. In his day, there was no way of storing his work, so his presence was required for every single performance, so the pie was evenly split, relatively, as inequalities existed but were mild. At this time in history, there is no scalability yet, no way to double the largest in person audience without having to sing twice. Shortform note: It’s unclear how Taleb defines “predicted.” Plenty of science-fiction writers and cultural commentators anticipated recent technologies like the Internet and augmented and virtual reality.)Think of an ice cube sitting on a table. Imagine the shape of the puddle that ice cube will make as it melts. Right at the end it occurred to me that this is religion. He tells you how to sustain yourself in the absence of worldly support, how to stand up to others and say your piece, how to wait and be patient, and about the merits of surrounding yourself with like-minded souls. While the author has valid points, his writing style oscillates between boring, repetitive, and just plain bad. Plus he uses the pronouns “I” and “me” more often than any other author I have read. Perhaps he is using his gigantic ego to prove the existence of fat tails in the standard bell curve and thus exhibit directly the central thesis which is that the Gaussian curve does not hold up in our modern “extremistan” society (and trust me that that sentence is funny if you read the book). Eve Babitz became one of my muses, undoubtedly, and one of my favourite female writers. There was this moment, she mentioned that when we admire an author, we think we become that same author; we believe we wrote ourselves those words. Oh my, didn’t I feel this with both of her books…? Eve Babitz began her independent career as an artist, working in the music industry for Ahmet Ertegun at Atlantic Records, making album covers. In the late 1960s, she designed album covers for Linda Ronstadt, The Byrds, and Buffalo Springfield. Her most famous cover was a collage for the 1967 album Buffalo Springfield Again.

There is no question here, Taleb is an erudite and intelligent scholar. His take on epistomology and the scientific method breathe fresh air into the subject and gloss it with some 21st century context. Consider, for example, a financial analyst predicting the price of a barrel of oil in ten years. This analyst may build a model using the gold standards of her field: past and current oil prices, car manufacturers’ projections, projected oil-field yields, and a host of other factors, computed using the techniques of regression analysis. The problem is that this model is innately narrow. It can’t account for the truly random—a natural disaster that disrupts a key producer, or a war that increases demand exponentially. The confirmation bias and the round-trip fallacy, including how we confuse an absence of evidence with an evidence of absence, and the difference between negative empiricism vs naive empiricism. We are social animals" - how true is this statement! I never realized this until I worked more than a year from home. I have always considered myself somewhat antisocial, but I was proved wrong. When I returned to the office, I felt like I was in vacation, and this feeling didn't left me yet. And I don't have problems at home, it's just that I never realize how much I missed my colleagues, friends, our jokes and interactions. Above statement has a continuation: "hell is other people" - also true, but some of them can be heaven too: a sparkling conversation, a good joke, a meaninful look, a kind gesture, a shared moment - all these can make someone feel good for a long time.

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Easterbrook, Gregg (April 22, 2007). "Possibly Maybe". The New York Times . Retrieved December 20, 2020.

This felt like it was trying to be the next The Tipping Point or Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything and just failed spectacularly, on all counts. Most importantly, perhaps, was that it was dull and a chore to read. In the little footnotes suggesting a chapter was unneccessary for a nontechnical reader and could be skipped (read: you are too dumb to understand this chapter, so don't even bother), like Chapter 15, I gladly took his advice because it meant one less chapter to slog through. I finished it out of a perverse desire to finish things, nothing more. It is an inconvenient truth that humans’ predictive capabilities are extremely limited; we are continuously faced with catastrophic or revolutionary events that arrive completely unexpectedly and for which we have no plan. Yet, nevertheless, we maintain that the future is knowable and that we can adequately prepare for it. Taleb calls this tendency the scandal of prediction. Epistemic Arrogance In chapter nine, Taleb outlines the multiple topics he previously has described and connects them as a single basic idea. In chapter thirteen, the book discusses what can be done regarding “epistemic arrogance”, which occurs whenever people begin to think they know more than they actually do. [15] He recommends avoiding unnecessary dependence on large-scale harmful predictions, while being less cautious with smaller matters, such as going to a picnic. He makes a distinction between the American cultural perception of failure versus European and Asian stigma and embarrassment regarding failure: the latter is more tolerable for people taking small risks. He also describes the " barbell strategy" for investment that he used as a trader, which consists in avoiding medium risk investments and putting 85–90% of money in the safest instruments available and the remaining 10–15% on extremely speculative bets. [16] [17] Argument [ edit ] A new reissue by the writer who has been acclaimed by the Boston Globe as a “true original” and by the San Francisco Chronicle as “marvelously witty and wildly observant ” and of whom Joseph Heller has said, “Her words are worth one hundred moving pictures.” A key difference between Mediocristan and Extremistan is the scalability. Something is scalable if it can grow exponentially with little/no additional resources. A massage therapist is a non-scalable profession since he/she can only serve so many clients in a day. However, a singer in the digital age is a scalable profession since he/she can perform a song once, record and disseminate it widely. Scalability can create vast inequalities, extremities and winner-takes-all situations. Top singers earn vastly more than average singers, even though they aren’t proportionately more talented.The first time through, I listened to this book with my husband, usually while I was cooking. Although I tried to stop and mark important passages, I ended up thinking the book was not very systematic. The second time through, chapter by chapter, the method in his madness is more apparent. The Eve Babitz phenomenon continues with this special reissue of her 1993 story collection in a beautiful new edition

Here I am, on a beach in Greece, trying to put my thoughts together about this book, which I have enjoyed more than I expected, but at the same time, annoyed me here and there with the writing, which is all over the place.An anti-academic academic weaves a non-narrative narrative about predicting the unpredictable into the theory that rigid theories are bad.