Anti Book Review: The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

After reading fooled by randomness, I was very keen to read Taleb’s follow up The Black Swan. I really had high expectations of The Black Swan it was one of the best selling non-fiction book on Amazon.com for 2007. After reading The Black Swan it is very evident that no words I can write in this review will do the book justice. It is once again very thought provoking and confronting materiel that Taleb presents. This really is a must read book not just for pseudo financial professionals.

Contents

Prologue

Part One – Umberto Eco’s Antilibrary, or how we seek validation

• Chapter One: The Apprenticeship of an Empirical Skeptic
• Chapter Two: Yevgenia’s Black Swan
• Chapter Three: The Speculator and the Prostitute
• Chapter Four: One Thousand and One Days, or How Not to Be a Sucker
• Chapter Five: Confirmation Shmonfirmation!
• Chapter Six: The Narrative Fallacy
• Chapter Seven: Living in the Antechamber of Hope
• Chapter Eight: Giacomo Casanova’s Unfailing Luck: The Problem of Silent Evidence
• Chapter Nine: The Ludic Fallacy, or The Uncertainty of the Nerd

Part Two: We Just Can’t Predict

• Chapter Ten: The Scandal of Prediction
• Chapter Eleven: How to Look for Bird Poop
• Chapter Twelve: Epistemocracy, a Dream
• Chapter Thirteen: Appelles the Painter, or What Do You Do if You Cannot Predict?

Part Three: Those Gray Swans Extremistan

• Chapter Fourteen: From Mediocristan to Extremistan, and Back
• Chapter Fifteen: The Bell Curve, That Great Intellectual Fraud
• Chapter Sixteen: The Aesthetics of Randomness
• Chapter Seventeen: Locke’s Madmen, or Bell Curves in the Wrong Places
• Chapter Eighteen: The Uncertainty of The Phony
• Chapter Nineteen: Half and Half, or How to Get Even with the Black Swan
• Epilogue: Yevgenia’s White Swan
• Acknowledgements
• Glossary
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

About the author

Mark - Is a 28 year old form Australia. He has a Bachelor in Economics and a Major in CS. He is currently working towards his CFP. His interests include algorithmic trading systems, artificial intelligence, game theory and poker.