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I think Black Swan was mostly propelled forward by its extremely poignant timing: It was published just before the financial crash, an event it seemed to descri

I think Black Swan was mostly propelled forward by its extremely poignant timing: It was published just before the financial crash, an event it seemed to describe in pretty high detail. Also, I liked it. I felt it did very a good job of describing some important concepts in statistics and epistemology that weren't obvious to me at the time. YMMV, especially if you (unlike me) paid much attention in college maths and statistics.

justin66 10y ago
> I think Black Swan was mostly propelled forward by its extremely poignant timing: It was published just before the financial crash, an event it seemed to describe in pretty high detail. If true that's ironic, since Taleb is the first to say that the mortgage crisis and the associated problems were not black swans (they were predictable).
- mseebach 10y ago
  That's sounds strange. It's been a while since I've read it, but as I recall it, black swan events are inherently predictable (they are explicitly different from truly unpredictable events), it's just that human nature struggle to intuitively process their low probability and round it off to zero - which makes their impact so much greater if they do end up happening. Which is exactly what happened in the financial crash. All of the mortgage investors assumed a worst case scenario of zero growth in house prices. If they had modelled even a modest decline, the fragility would have been exposed.
  - justin66 10y ago
    In Taleb's words: For the last 12 years, I have been telling anyone who would listen to me that we are taking huge risks and massive exposure to rare events. I isolated some areas in which people make bogus claims --epistemologically unsound. The Black Swan is a philosophy book (epistemology, philosophy of history & philosophy of science), but I used banks as a particularly worrisome case of epistemic arrogance --and the use of "science" to measure the risk of rare events, making society dependent on very spurious measurements. To me a banking crisis --worse than what we have ever seen -- was unavoidable and NOT A BLACK SWAN, just as a drunk and incompetent pilot would eventually crash the plane. And I kept receiving insults for 12 years! (http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/imbeciles.htm http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/imbeciles.htm) In other places I've seen Taleb acknowledge that he was not the only one who predicted the problems.

justin66 10y ago

> I think Black Swan was mostly propelled forward by its extremely poignant timing: It was published just before the financial crash, an event it seemed to describe in pretty high detail. If true that's ironic, since Taleb is the first to say that the mortgage crisis and the associated problems were not black swans (they were predictable).

mseebach 10y ago
That's sounds strange. It's been a while since I've read it, but as I recall it, black swan events are inherently predictable (they are explicitly different from truly unpredictable events), it's just that human nature struggle to intuitively process their low probability and round it off to zero - which makes their impact so much greater if they do end up happening. Which is exactly what happened in the financial crash. All of the mortgage investors assumed a worst case scenario of zero growth in house prices. If they had modelled even a modest decline, the fragility would have been exposed.
- justin66 10y ago
  In Taleb's words: For the last 12 years, I have been telling anyone who would listen to me that we are taking huge risks and massive exposure to rare events. I isolated some areas in which people make bogus claims --epistemologically unsound. The Black Swan is a philosophy book (epistemology, philosophy of history & philosophy of science), but I used banks as a particularly worrisome case of epistemic arrogance --and the use of "science" to measure the risk of rare events, making society dependent on very spurious measurements. To me a banking crisis --worse than what we have ever seen -- was unavoidable and NOT A BLACK SWAN, just as a drunk and incompetent pilot would eventually crash the plane. And I kept receiving insults for 12 years! (http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/imbeciles.htm http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/imbeciles.htm) In other places I've seen Taleb acknowledge that he was not the only one who predicted the problems.