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The first time I read Talebs Black Swan was pretty mind bending. It's a intriguing mix of philosophy, history and the application of probabilistic thinking. It

The first time I read Talebs Black Swan was pretty mind bending. It's a intriguing mix of philosophy, history and the application of probabilistic thinking. It's also a great aggregator book. It introduced me to the works of Kahneman, Tetlock, Poincare and Mandelbrot.

sixhobbits 6y ago
Read "fooled by randomness" if you haven't already. I much preferred it to his later work, and it introduced me to Popper (who was someone that 3 years of philosophy at university somehow managed to skip) who you might also enjoy.
- Pandabob 6y ago
  Yup. While I appreciated the points he made in "Antifragile", the writing itself wasn't as enjoyable as it was in "Fooled by Randomness" or "The Black Swan". I haven't read "Skin in the Game" yet tho.
  - sixhobbits 6y ago
    I managed to get through skin in the game, but I didn't enjoy the writing style at all. It's much more abrasive/emotional, similar to his tweets.
- thatswrong0 6y ago
  I tried to read this but just could not get over his writing style. It just felt so self-indulgent and took forever to get to the point. I have no idea why it's recommended so highly.
  - alexilliamson 6y ago
    I don't know why it is, but I suspect it's the same reason people listen to Nate Silver
ashishb 6y ago
True that. The Taleb trilogy is great. Here are some notes I took from them - https://ashishb.net/?s=taleb https://ashishb.net/?s=taleb
2019-nCoV 6y ago
Especially pertinent to understanding current events. As is the entire Incerto.
choxi 6y ago
I don't understand the excitement about Black Swan but I genuinely would like to. If a "Black swan event" is an "event with small probability but massive impact", why would it be surprising that they exist or that they have disproportionate impact? I'd argue that defining "impact" is also problematic because we conflate things that are surprising with things that are impactful all the time. We don't count all the trains and planes that run on time as "impactful" exactly because they're not surprising, but they do have a large impact on the progression of the future. So part of Taleb's argument just seems like a semantic debate over what counts as "impactful".
- Pandabob 6y ago
  IDK if you've read the book or not, but in case you haven't I'd recommend this summary of Mediocristan and Extremistan [0]. Mediocristan and Extremistan are Talebs analogies for domains with different underlying mechanics (for lack of a better word). I'm going cut some corners here, but to keep it short, the phenomena in Mediocristan can be modeled by using gaussian probability distributions (weight, height etc.), while the phenomena in Extremistan are better modeled using power law distributions, that have so called fat-tails. (wealth, land ownership) One of the central arguments of the book is that people have been using tools from Mediocristan in Extremistan and that's what leads to these Black Swan phenomen, which in turn might have potentially ruinous effects. One example he uses is a now defunct hedge fund called Long Term Capital Management (LTCM) [1]. My (poor) understanding of what led to LCTMs ruin (and required the Federal Reserve to intervene) is that they used some fundamentally Gaussian techniques to model derivatives. The models predicted certain events to have a lot lower probability to occur than what was actually the case (fat-tails). Underestimating these outliers combined with the fact that the firm was highly leveraged, was ultimately what went wrong and had potentially disastrous effects on the financial markets. [0]: https://people.wou.edu/~shawd/mediocristan--extremistan.html https://people.wou.edu/~shawd/mediocristan--extremistan.html [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-Term_Capital_Management https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-Term_Capital_Management
- carapace 6y ago
  Taleb is a good talker but not as smart as he thinks he is. (About halfway through "Black Swan" he starts taking potshots at scientists about the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.) Anyhow, a "Black swan event" is NOT an "event with small probability but massive impact", that's a common misconception. A BSE is an event that, before it occurs no one credits it ("There are no black swans." because no one (in Europe) had ever seen one until they went to Australia (IIRC)), and after it occurs everyone post-rationalizes it. There are lost of events "with small probability but massive impact": people win the lottery every day. It's the ones we ignore, both before and after, that count as Black Swan Events.
jeffreyrogers 6y ago
Taleb can be extremely pompous and annoying, but his books are truly original[0], and I think likely to alter how you think about the world. Many people hear words like "anti-fragile" or "black-swan" and know sort-of what they represent, so decide there's no reason to read his books, but those concepts are just the tip of the iceberg of Taleb's larger way of thinking. [0]: By original I mean there aren't other books like his. If anyone else tried to write like Taleb it would be absurd, but he makes it work.

sixhobbits 6y ago

Read "fooled by randomness" if you haven't already. I much preferred it to his later work, and it introduced me to Popper (who was someone that 3 years of philosophy at university somehow managed to skip) who you might also enjoy.

Pandabob 6y ago
Yup. While I appreciated the points he made in "Antifragile", the writing itself wasn't as enjoyable as it was in "Fooled by Randomness" or "The Black Swan". I haven't read "Skin in the Game" yet tho.
- sixhobbits 6y ago
  I managed to get through skin in the game, but I didn't enjoy the writing style at all. It's much more abrasive/emotional, similar to his tweets.
thatswrong0 6y ago
I tried to read this but just could not get over his writing style. It just felt so self-indulgent and took forever to get to the point. I have no idea why it's recommended so highly.
- alexilliamson 6y ago
  I don't know why it is, but I suspect it's the same reason people listen to Nate Silver

ashishb 6y ago

True that. The Taleb trilogy is great. Here are some notes I took from them - https://ashishb.net/?s=taleb https://ashishb.net/?s=taleb

2019-nCoV 6y ago

Especially pertinent to understanding current events. As is the entire Incerto.

choxi 6y ago

I don't understand the excitement about Black Swan but I genuinely would like to. If a "Black swan event" is an "event with small probability but massive impact", why would it be surprising that they exist or that they have disproportionate impact? I'd argue that defining "impact" is also problematic because we conflate things that are surprising with things that are impactful all the time. We don't count all the trains and planes that run on time as "impactful" exactly because they're not surprising, but they do have a large impact on the progression of the future. So part of Taleb's argument just seems like a semantic debate over what counts as "impactful".

Pandabob 6y ago
IDK if you've read the book or not, but in case you haven't I'd recommend this summary of Mediocristan and Extremistan [0]. Mediocristan and Extremistan are Talebs analogies for domains with different underlying mechanics (for lack of a better word). I'm going cut some corners here, but to keep it short, the phenomena in Mediocristan can be modeled by using gaussian probability distributions (weight, height etc.), while the phenomena in Extremistan are better modeled using power law distributions, that have so called fat-tails. (wealth, land ownership) One of the central arguments of the book is that people have been using tools from Mediocristan in Extremistan and that's what leads to these Black Swan phenomen, which in turn might have potentially ruinous effects. One example he uses is a now defunct hedge fund called Long Term Capital Management (LTCM) [1]. My (poor) understanding of what led to LCTMs ruin (and required the Federal Reserve to intervene) is that they used some fundamentally Gaussian techniques to model derivatives. The models predicted certain events to have a lot lower probability to occur than what was actually the case (fat-tails). Underestimating these outliers combined with the fact that the firm was highly leveraged, was ultimately what went wrong and had potentially disastrous effects on the financial markets. [0]: https://people.wou.edu/~shawd/mediocristan--extremistan.html https://people.wou.edu/~shawd/mediocristan--extremistan.html [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-Term_Capital_Management https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-Term_Capital_Management
carapace 6y ago
Taleb is a good talker but not as smart as he thinks he is. (About halfway through "Black Swan" he starts taking potshots at scientists about the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.) Anyhow, a "Black swan event" is NOT an "event with small probability but massive impact", that's a common misconception. A BSE is an event that, before it occurs no one credits it ("There are no black swans." because no one (in Europe) had ever seen one until they went to Australia (IIRC)), and after it occurs everyone post-rationalizes it. There are lost of events "with small probability but massive impact": people win the lottery every day. It's the ones we ignore, both before and after, that count as Black Swan Events.

jeffreyrogers 6y ago

Taleb can be extremely pompous and annoying, but his books are truly original[0], and I think likely to alter how you think about the world. Many people hear words like "anti-fragile" or "black-swan" and know sort-of what they represent, so decide there's no reason to read his books, but those concepts are just the tip of the iceberg of Taleb's larger way of thinking. [0]: By original I mean there aren't other books like his. If anyone else tried to write like Taleb it would be absurd, but he makes it work.