Black Swans: Stories

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The way she was so casual about cheating like everyone cheats and it is normal to do so, it is not and not everyone does it! I feel like dating and relationships didn't evolve at all since the 80s~90s or when was this book written and I am disappointed af. Also, there were no feelings behind the cheating, everyone was cheating. She was sleeping with a married man. The only reason I rated Jealousy, the first chapter, 5 stars is that it was funny how it portrayed the difference between the sexes when they cheat. Everything is fine and everyone is supposed to be happy if HE cheats, but if SHE does it she is a hoe! I find it funny how this mentality is still going even now, and even more because really a woman is a hoe either way after a break-up or in any situation. I put this book down after the first chapter, but thought I would give it another chance, that I was being unfair. When I read the second chapter (which is a metaphor for what Taleb thinks is him) I puked in my shirt. This man is the most conceited person I think I've discovered through reading his garbage hypothesis. If I met Taleb, I would recommend that he read some other theories on random variables (why does he use Gaussian distribution as the only example of random distribution?), systems theory, and the scientific theory. He apparently was sleeping though these discussions. Chapter four brings together the topics discussed earlier into a narrative about a turkey before Thanksgiving who is fed and treated well for many consecutive days, only to be slaughtered and served as a meal. Taleb uses it to illustrate the philosophical problem of induction and how past performance is no indicator of future performance. [14] He then takes the reader into the history of skepticism.

Scholars are judged mostly on how many times their work is referenced in other people's work... it's an I quote you, you quote me type of business." The first claim is only partially true. The reputation of an author is judged by their published work, but the products of science are ideas. These ideas are, in the scientific literature, judged primarily by their content. In science, a humble patent clerk can become the biggest name in theoretical physics by having the right idea. The accusation of tit-for-tat citation is ludicrous. Speak for yourself, Taleb! In Extremistan environments, there can be wild randomness and extreme deviations. Typically, there’re no physical constraints and no known upper/lower limits (e.g. knowledge, financial markets, e-book sales, social media “likes”). Thus, the outliers can make a big difference—if you add the net worth of Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates to a group of 1,000 people, it will drastically shift the average.Once upon a time there was a clever young financial professional called Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Of Lebanese - or, as he preferred, Levantine - descent but working in New York, he was an option trader and quantative analyst. Mistrusting the "bell-curve" models used by many financial institutions to mitigate risk, he wrote a book called Fooled by Randomness about the delusions of control and reliability under which labour much of Wall Street, many other businesses - and, indeed, individual human beings. 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.

So I gave this book two stars. I valued the content but it is most definitely not groundbreaking and it most definitely is not well written.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. 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 ]

Hume ... puts to shame almost all current thinkers, and certainly the entire German graduate curriculum." Retrospective predictability: Although the events are unpredictable, humans tend to explain them on hindsight as if they could be perfectly understood and predicted. No, no, there are a number of problems with the book. A bit bloated, a bit repetitive. And NNT does make the misstep every once and a while. To take a very small instance, Taleb bases a short section of the book upon the idea that to be "hardened by the Gulag" means to become "harder" or "stronger" rather than its true meaning of someone who has become inured to certain difficulties, not necessarily stronger because of it. Chevallier, Arnaud (2016). Strategic Thinking in Complex Problem Solving. Oxford University Press. p.88. ISBN 9780190463908. Although the world is ran by unpredictable events, it doesn’t mean we can’t benefit from them. Taleb closes with a bunch of practical tips to benefit from the uncertainty in the world.

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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. In stories like “Jealousy” and “Free Tibet”, Babitz dealt with our most profound flaws. I asked myself: “how can we be so flawed, so blind, so mean and so self-absorbed…?” “Slumming at the Rodeo Gardens” and “Self-Enchanted City” portray the vanity of Los Angeles and brings into discussion what Babitz calls the ‘self-enchantment’ and the ‘self-enchanted people’. According to her, “Hollywood is a fiction that happened, a tornado of fabrication, a comedy of publicity. (…) Whatever it is, it’s not over yet. Not yet”.

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. Taleb is a pretty good writer, but I thought this was a very uneven book. As I read it I was constantly alternating between "Wow, that's a really great insight, a great way of presenting it" and "Gee, who doesn't realize that?", or even "That just seems flat-out wrong". 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.” If you see an ice cube sitting on a table you can predict the future: it will melt into a little puddle of water. But if you see a puddle on the table, and that's all you see, there could be a thousand stories of what it is and how it came to be there. The correct explanation may be 1001--or one which will never be found. 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.

They compel human beings to explain why they happened—to show, after the fact, that they were indeed predictable. Collins, Bryan (August 23, 2018). "Why You Should Prepare For Disaster (And How To Do It)". Forbes . Retrieved December 20, 2020.