3 ms·
I have read this book and want to leave an anti-recommendation here. It's a poorly edited mess and makes at least one blatant mathematical error. More broadly,
by spekcular 6y ago
I have read this book and want to leave an anti-recommendation here. It's a poorly edited mess and makes at least one blatant mathematical error.
More broadly, let me leave a Taleb anti-recommendation. His entire shtick is yelling that traditional statisticians have ignored heavy-tailed random variables in their modeling and that he has special insight into the nature of tail risk (perhaps along with a few select other people, like Mandelbrot).
But this is manifestly not the case. In fact, if you go through his Amazon reviews page, you can find him leaving positive reviews several years ago on all the books written by traditional statisticians that he learned about heavy-tailed randomness from!
- sfashset 6y agolink to his Amazon reviews page?
- spekcular 6y agoScroll back to the early 2010s: https://www.amazon.com/gp/profile/amzn1.account.AHMHNR4MRTDLMBOOT6Q7LX2WP5YA/ https://www.amazon.com/gp/profile/amzn1.account.AHMHNR4MRTDL... For a more detailed critique, see Robert Lund, Revenge of the White Swan, The American Statistician Vol. 61, No. 3 (Aug., 2007). Accessible through your favorite Russian website. If you want a better book on heavy-tailed randomness, I like Didier Sornette's Critical Phenomena in Natural Sciences (subtitled Chaos, Fractals, Selforganization and Disorder: Concepts and Tools).
- SkyMarshal 6y agoRevenge of the White Swan also appears available on ResearchGate: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/4741329_Revenge_of_the_White_Swan https://www.researchgate.net/publication/4741329_Revenge_of_...