The Black Swan
April 17, 2009 1:04 pm Books, RandomThe Black Swan, Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wow! I would strongly recommend reading this, it will change the way you think and especially the way you look at data (especially predications/forecasts) which people give you.
The basic concept is that the future is complicated and uncertain yet we try (by looking at past events) make sense of it and create future predications based on our past assumptions. Think a turkey everything is going well until Christmas/Thanks giving, but as it has no idea it can never predict what happens next. There is a lot more to it than that obviously, and he even predicts the banking crash and its effects in an aside!
My main problem with the book was that the style of writing didn’t suit me and whilst I was very interested in the topics and the concepts I found it a very difficult book to read. The style is sort of a mix of egotistical (I’m rich and clever you must want to know that because you’re reading my book), academic (a lot of depth in backing up the arguements) , patronising (if this is too complicated for you skip to the end of the chapter), and a few other styles dropped in. Not easy to follow, but please persist, the concepts are great. I’m sure one day there will a concise ‘business’ version going over the main points without having to wade through the rest. (There is an overview on wikipedia which covers the main points.)
As I was reading this I also came across these sites which seemed to fit in with the theme.
Wrong tomorrow – a great site where you can add predictions made by pundits and politicians and the date at which they can be checked, to see how often they are actually right! and this page on the BBC new site How can a graph be so wrong.