Non-fiction
Buy Black swan :The Impact Of The Highly Improbable from Flipkart
Before the discovery of Australia every one around the globe thought that all swans where black, but then they realised the existence of Black swans everyone was took by surprises and now their number has steadily... Essence of the book is the bottom line of uncertainty and its done and he is pundit to to it form different vantage...
Our mind is used to witness the usual not the unexpected, and these unexpected events are the one that has extreme effect upon us... Unexpected events like Hitler rise and war, dissemination of Soviet union now on 9/11 is one such event.. That essentially is what the book deals with ...But this book was a difficult read for me as I had to google certain theories time and again ... Major part deals with distinguishing and explanations between Mediocristan and Extremistan..The book is divided into three parts..If you don't understand well he helps us with examples of famous names.. Mediocristan is the regular guy whose earning is proportional to his work done that moves in Guassian Distribution (I told you I had to brush up my basics of school) with a bell curve.While extremistan are those of celebrities such as J.K Rowling, book authors and rock stars who earn more beyond their proportion of work and energy spent, he puts certain cases also into extremistain that of the black Monday and Tuesday when the stock crashed in 1987 that resulted in 22% decline of US stock market..For a technically ignorant person like me it was real enlightening but a heavy dose of book..
He quotes several anecdotes from the lives of many scholars who are not famous..There is an amusing tale of a turkey..Turkey lives in a fantasy thinking that its life is great having been well fed for almost thousand days, but its only on the 1001 day it fatally realises that the farmer is going to cut its head out, and that precisely how we live under the wrong impression that everything is well unless we are hit with the reality..Black swan events are the ones that are rare and difficult to predict in all fields such as science, finance and mathematics.. These events might be good or bad...
He advice to invest 85% of the investment on very safe T-Bills and then use the rest of 15% on high risk but high payoff devices and make adjustments as per once ability to take risk..At times I felt the book to be repetitive..His work is scholarly 19 pages of notes and 18 pages of bibliography explains it..He boldly comes across with the pitfalls of many statistical data which according him were meant to fail than help in extreme situation..I don't think the book will go down well with the management experts, statistician and academicians..
Taleb (he calls himself NNT) puts that the success of a author is when a reader reread him work, to me to get to know certain facet of his vantage I indeed had to reread...
the quotes that I loved are:
"What matters is not how often you are right , but how large you're cumulative errors are.."
"Problem with expert is that they don't know what they don't know.."
"Information is bad for knowledge..Worry less about embarrassment rather than missing an opportunity.".
Go for the book If you are looking for an unusual hard subject...
No comments:
Post a Comment