I don’t know how I feel about “the writer” being involved in the observation. Observing themselves in the observation of an event/making both things the focus? It’s a unique writing style apparently popularized by Didion. However, as I’m reading The White Album right now — I just feel like give me the goods, I don’t wanna hear about what you were doing at the same time. Just tell me that story or tell me yours. My brain is tired and I can’t do no mo’! The confirmation bias and the round-trip fallacy, including how we confuse an absence of evidence with an evidence of absence, and the difference between negative empiricism vs naive empiricism. I'm not a philosophy fan, nor economics, and read (by choice) very few books on it; almost everyone today is a philosopher and has a lot of advices for the others. However, the author conveys his ideas and expertise in relation to other sciences, which from my PoV, I have found to be very refreshing, reliable, and accurate. I don't pretend to have advanced economics studies (although I have a master's degree in one of its branches but that's when our ways parted) therefore I can't attest or contradict his knowledge in this book, but I do agree with most of his experiences and life advices, because my life led me, more or less, to the same conclusions. Below quotes resonated the most with me: Here I am, on a beach in Greece, trying to put my thoughts together about this book, which I have enjoyed more than I expected, but at the same time, annoyed me here and there with the writing, which is all over the place.

She’s a natural. Or gives every appearance of being one, her writing elevated yet slangy, bright, bouncy, cheerfully hedonistic—L.A. in it purest, most idealized form." — Vanity Fair Right at the end it occurred to me that this is religion. He tells you how to sustain yourself in the absence of worldly support, how to stand up to others and say your piece, how to wait and be patient, and about the merits of surrounding yourself with like-minded souls. Hampton, John (2009). Fundamentals of Enterprise Risk Management: How Top Companies Assess Risk, Manage Exposure, and Seize Opportunity. AMACOM. p.49. ISBN 9780814414934.Our world is dominated by the extreme, the unknown, and the very improbable." Except when it's not. No, no, there are a number of problems with the book. A bit bloated, a bit repetitive. And NNT does make the misstep every once and a while. To take a very small instance, Taleb bases a short section of the book upon the idea that to be "hardened by the Gulag" means to become "harder" or "stronger" rather than its true meaning of someone who has become inured to certain difficulties, not necessarily stronger because of it. Ultimately, our world and future are unknowable and unpredictable because of various factors, including: Taleb lauds two unexpected types of practitioners: military people and financial managers. They will know if their predictions are wrong or right. If they are wrong, they'll have to face the music. Their predictions matter. Not so the world of talking heads and stuffed shirts: they just adjust their stories and keep on going. Picture a turkey cared for by humans. It has been fed every day for its entire life by the same humans, and so it has come to believe the world works in a certain, predictable, and advantageous way. And it does...until the day before Thanksgiving.

Consider, for example, a financial analyst predicting the price of a barrel of oil in ten years. This analyst may build a model using the gold standards of her field: past and current oil prices, car manufacturers’ projections, projected oil-field yields, and a host of other factors, computed using the techniques of regression analysis. The problem is that this model is innately narrow. It can’t account for the truly random—a natural disaster that disrupts a key producer, or a war that increases demand exponentially. The subject of these nine stories by Babitz ( Sex and Rage) is Hollywood: brilliant and beautiful couples who somehow get along; charming yet moody men and their odd needs; and "Eve," the narrator, who cautiously reveals in herself the vices of a naughty but not really bad girl." — Publishers Weekly He would like for us to realize our overuse of normal-curve thinking, which makes us minimize risk and have no expectations out of the ordinary: like the turkey whose experience all goes to show how human beings love him and care about him and prove it by feeding him--until Thanksgiving day arrives and he's dinner. They compel human beings to explain why they happened—to show, after the fact, that they were indeed predictable.

The Black Swan Summary

I put this book down after the first chapter, but thought I would give it another chance, that I was being unfair. When I read the second chapter (which is a metaphor for what Taleb thinks is him) I puked in my shirt. This man is the most conceited person I think I've discovered through reading his garbage hypothesis. If I met Taleb, I would recommend that he read some other theories on random variables (why does he use Gaussian distribution as the only example of random distribution?), systems theory, and the scientific theory. He apparently was sleeping though these discussions. If you skipped your Systems, Statistics, or Random Variables classes in college, or if you think you know more than everyone else on Wall Street, then read this book. It will reaffirm what you already know. To the rest of you: this book will reaffirm what you thought you knew when you were 5 or 6...with an updated vocabulary. If we are surrounded by randomness and unpredictability, if our well-being is radically uncertain, what—besides despair—are our options? 1) Don’t Sweat the Small Predictions