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You should read silent risk (currently freely available as a draft on talebs website). It's mathematical, with solid proofs and derivations, so it doesn't reall
by ves 11y ago
You should read silent risk (currently freely available as a draft on talebs website). It's mathematical, with solid proofs and derivations, so it doesn't really suffer from the same problems as The Black Swan. I had basically the same issues with the Black Swan that you did.
- tripzilch 11y agoThanks for the tip, I'll check it out! On that note, I also read Fooled by Randomness, an earlier work by Nicholas Taleb. It covers (somewhat) similar topics as Black Swan does, but from a bit more technical perspective. I found it a lot more pleasant and educational read. IIRC, it talks less about the financial world and rare catastrophal risks ("Black Swans"), and more about how humans are wired to reason intuitively quite well about certain types of probability/estimates/combinatorics, and particularly on how we really suck at certain others. Fooled by Randomness also doesn't needlessly bash people for wearing ties or being French, like Black Swan does :) ... only later did I learn that Taleb was a personal friend of Benoit Mandelbrot (who was French), which put it in a bit more context (as a friendly poke, I'm assuming), but at the time I found it a bit off-putting and weird, as it really had nothing to do with the subject matter at all.