Reddit reviews The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (Incerto)
We found 36 Reddit comments about The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (Incerto). Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
Random House NY
Well, we hit the 10000 limit. Reserving this comment for the misc. section.
FREE TIME/FUN/MISC.
The Art of Deception: Controlling the Human Element of Security
The Art of War
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How to Disappear: Erase Your Digital Footprint, Leave False Trails, and Vanish without a Trace
The Best of 2600: A Hacker Odyssey
Super Crunchers: Why Thinking-by-Numbers Is the New Way to Be Smart
Casting the Net: From ARPANET to INTERNET and Beyond thanks sjhill
A Quarter Century of UNIX thanks sjhill
A Reading List For the Self-Taught Computer Scientist thanks zinver
How to Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk thanks segamix
The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable thanks AgonistAgent
Snow Crash thanks AgonistAgent
Cryptonomicon thanks Mirple
The argument against that comparison is that those upper atmosphere reactions consist of particles traveling at or around light speed colliding with ones that are relatively stationary. Whatever bad stuff may happen (MBH's and strangelets, presumably) gets careened away from, or through and away from, earth due to high residual momentum.
The LHC will collide particles directly into each other, possibly cancelling the momentum of some of the resulting particles. If MBHs are created, don't immediately evaporate due to Hawking Radiation (which we're not certain exists), and aren't careened off anywhere, they will eventually fall to the center of earth's gravity and aggregate there. Do this long enough, and eventually Earth gets sucked up.
I know nothing about this and hate to talk about something I am completely ignorant on, but the critics are worth reading. They're apparently not all a bunch of quacks.
Having recently read Nassim Taleb's works on the impact of the highly improbable, I find myself sympathetic to the desire of some physicists who want to require LHC to do a full safety analysis before going online. I know the entire global particle physics community is waiting in breathless anticipation, and I myself have long lamented the shortsighted cancellation of the even more awesome SSC, but would it kill us to delay a half year or whatever to do a full, formal risk assessment?
Have you read Nassim Taleb's The Black Swan or his Fooled by Randomness?
If not, go and order a copy of both now.
> Knowing what you don't know is really useful in life. And business.
There's a lot of truth in this single sentence alone. Counterpart quote from Mark Twain:
> It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so.
I can recommend everybody to read the book "The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable" if you are interested in getting better at these things.
Thanks once again for this amazing write up Molly. While I've never crunched these numbers to the full extent I realized pretty quickly how bad these convertibles will hit ACB in the future - this was one of the main reasons why I stayed away from them all the time. Crazy how high they've run still.
I don't think it has that much to do with how much time has passed. At least not in terms of "x number of years".
Every art form is never completely new, and simply builds on what came before. To say that Citizen Kane took us roughly 50 years from what one might call the "infancy of film" is somewhat misleading. Film builds upon a foundation of theatre, which has existed for thousands of years(greek comedies/tragedies, etc). All of the storytelling, character development, etc has been with humanity much longer than the discovery of motion pictures.
If you take games purely for what they are (mostly leaving the narrative element aside since the mechanics are what make games unique from other medium (flim, novels, etc)) then we have plenty of games that have never been truly usurped. Elite, Master of Orion 2, and others still have elements that haven't been expanded upon much (obviously this is subjective, like all art opinion).
The other comment about the game of Go is very applicable, as it alludes to just how much we build on previous forms of media. Elements of gameplay have existed much longer than computers have. Thus, every art form is simply a culmination, a constantly outward-expanding realm that occasionally reaches new territory.
To say something like "It took over 100 years of humanity developing the art of filmmaking before we had the breakthrough 'found footage' that was the Blair Witch" is completely off base. Someone could have made something similar in 1941, but didn't. Why? Who knows. Creativity is strange like that. We may yet see another breakthrough genre in the next decade. It has less to do with the 'maturity of the medium' and more to do with just random chance.
We always try to look back on events and think we have a better explanation for them than we actually do (hence the black swan event).
Economics:
Sciences:
I had the same thought when reading the title. That book and The Black Swan are two of the most thought-provoking books I've read in recent years, not to mention containing ideas the apply to everyday life.
I'll give you some books to use as a starting point. You want to start out as generally as possible and then follow what interests you. Someone can give you a list of top books, but if they don't fascinate you enough to really dig in deep and reflect on them to sate your own curiosity, you'll just be scratching the surface. I don't care what it is, you can make money anywhere in the markets. So starting generally will help you find out what direction to go.
So, that said, these are the ones I'd recommend starting out with
https://www.amazon.com/Market-Wizards-Updated-Interviews-Traders/dp/1118273052
https://www.amazon.com/Reminiscences-Stock-Operator-Edwin-Lef%C3%A8vre/dp/0471770884
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1400063515/
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0684840073/
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0809045990/
Some less conventional ones I really liked
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1578645018/
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1422121038/
Chaos theory describes some properties that pop up again and again in markets. I really liked this one.
https://www.amazon.com/Deep-Simplicity-Bringing-Order-Complexity/dp/140006256X
I also highly recommend finding a few good books on behavioral investing, just to get acquainted with the common mistakes investors make (how you can avoid them, and how you can exploit them). I don't have a lot here because the books I read are outdated and you can find better. So one example:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0470067373/
But in general reading about psychology will help you understand the world better, and that's always a good thing.
https://www.amazon.com/Flow-Psychology-Experience-Perennial-Classics/dp/0061339202
The Black Swan the impact of highly improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. This book will fuck your mind up. It shows how little we are in control and how we try to rationalize and explain things that are beyond our scope.
Amazon!
Or if you would like something even hardcore, then
Sperm Wars by Robin Baker(?)
Oops, didn't realize there were more than one.
This one by Nassim Taleb: http://www.amazon.com/Black-Swan-Impact-Highly-Improbable/dp/1400063515/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1260477865&sr=8-1
In the book The Black Swan, Taleb talks about how there are literally millions of people making predictions about the economy at any one time, with millions of dollars at stake based on their predictions. It's basically like throwing stuff against the wall and seeing what sticks: some of the predictions turn out right and some don't. Someone in those millions of people will make a few right guesses in a row that are highly profitable. That doesn't mean that person is skilled at their job or that they have a winning strategy; it just means they guessed right a few times.
One example he gives is a Russian bond trader who made a strategy of buying Russian junk bonds when they were below a certain percentage of their original valuation. For years this was a great strategy: the economy was growing and the companies issuing high-risk bonds would often bounce back, giving tremendous yields. He became a hedge fund manager and his funds were highly lauded and invested in heavily.
Then the Russian bond market tanked. All he saw was thousands of bonds going way under their original valuation, so he kept buying more and more bonds. His strategy wasn't just inflexible and stupid, it was catastrophic. Nearly all the bonds he purchased defaulted, and his investors lost billions of dollars.
Shiller may have predicted both the dot com and housing bubbles, but there's no reason to believe that anything he has to say about the market in the future is true. He's certainly a smart guy, and one of the better people to listen to, but his strategies can be just as wrong as the next guy's. He got it right twice, but there were millions of other economists making similar predictions, so one of them had to get it right.
It's been a while since I read The Black Swan and I'm saying this from memory, so please post any corrections if you've read it.
TL;DR: Two correct predictions don't mean that he's capable of predicting future market trends.
This is not a problem with the analysts, as in different, more skilled, analysts won't solve the problem. It is something more fundamental than that. It is simply impossible to predict the economic future very far. Economic forecasts are only rarely correct, and when it is true it has more to do with luck than anything else.
For a great book on the subject, see The Black Swan.
I thought The Black Swan (no, not the movie) was superfluous and pointless. tl;dr: Everything happens the way you expect it to until it doesn't. There, I just saved you 500 tedious pages.
The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable is on my to-read list.
I'm not well versed on the topic yet, but I just started reading Nassim Taleb's The Black Swan, and the fact that events such as a financial crash is nothing that statistics could possibly suggest, and on top of that the impact of which is far more significant than the typical statistical market fluctuations. He would without a doubt call this crash a "Black Swan" event; whereby the odds of such event are almost incalcuable, and the effect is so broad it changes or affects nearly everything.
So far its been a good read, but I'm only a few chapters in.
http://www.amazon.com/Black-Swan-Impact-Highly-Improbable/dp/1400063515
Good thread
Nassim Nicholas Taleb - The Black Swan
Phil Rosenzweig - The Halo Effect
God's Debris by Scott Adams -- Could change your views on religion and life
You might have already heard a lot about The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb but it was a great read that really made me think about economics, fame and knowledge itself in new ways
This sounds way more exciting than the book!
What about those authors who write best-seller books about business theories, treads and stuff? They thought about their ideas for a long time while observing the world, right? They constructed a theory about their observations, right? Don't you think that whole enterprise is philosophical in nature?
I doubt you could say it's "exclusively" philosophy but philosophy and it's methods are quite applicable in this context and the influence of philosophical ideas are certainly there.
Here I found one:
http://www.amazon.com/Black-Swan-Impact-Highly-Improbable/dp/1400063515
See here or here or read this book, which I am currently reading.
Our brains are wired this way. That's why we vastly overestimate things like stranger rape and abduction, when in reality the vast majority of rapes and abductions are committed by people that the victim knows.
blink is awesome if you want a popular book by Malcolm Gladwell.
If you want a more obscure and more technical book, buy Fooled by Randomness. The same author also wrote Black Swan but Fooled by Randomness is more technical and perhaps would be more to his liking.
No, I did everything in my head at first. Then, during conversations with friends, I would sort of try out what I was thinking on them without admitting that it was coming from my own introspection. For example, I would make general comments about the way I think people should be. After I gained enough confidence, I told my story to younger friends who were going through shit. This helped me reinforce it to myself (in order to remember specifically what it was that bugged me), but I also applied it to friends' situations when I could. In fact, I think their shitty situations, if similar to my former insecurities, helped me remember certain specifics. (Sorry--that came off like a rant...I hope that made sense.)
I'm a fan of validity and logic, but only if a person is ready for it. People aren't very logical, but it's something I believe is nice to strive for. I read The Black Swan on the cusp of my new-found comfort and there was a chapter about theoretical people who Taleb (the writer) referred to as 'epistemocrats' who are very introspective, and, thus, had more robust knowledge about things and themselves, which made the theoretical society in which they lived much better. I feel like that is what I did, and reading about this notion after my whole 'epistemocratic', psychological housecleaning, was a nice sort of affirmation (not that I needed it.) :)
Do you think your boyfriend might be contributing to your insecurity? How often does he point out nice things you do? I don't know your situation at all, so don't take my words to heart. I would assume you're being a bit hyperbolic when you say he points out everything you do wrong. However, I was in a baaaaad relationship during my mid-twenties that made everything a lot worse than it should have been. (Not to say that you are.)
Related:
http://reddit.com/info/n9nt/comments
It sounds like someone has been reading the Black Swan.
The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
Many, but here's 3:
I think this is extremely interesting and could have major implications when it comes to predictive validity of selection tests.
I wonder if Herman Aguinas recently read this.
http://www.amazon.com/Black-Swan-Impact-Highly-Improbable/dp/1400063515
That book was really the first time I heard someone articulate the issues with assuming a Gaussian distribution at all times.
Thoughts?
I'm almost finished with The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb and I'd recommend that one also if you wanted to keep with the sociology type theme. Taleb mentions Gladwell's Blink in his work also. I guess I will be reading some Gladwell next.
I used to read all kinds of fiction but over the years I have switched to non-fiction almost exclusively. I enjoy reading textbooks more than about anything (how I wish I had that desire when I was in high school!)
The following books are three of the most enlightening books I have read in the past few years.
Honorable mentions include:
Freakonomics, :59 Seconds, The Wisdom of Crowds, Taken Into Custody, Griftopia, The Shock Doctrine, Everything Bad is Good for You, and (probably the most scary book I have ever read) The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases In A World Out Of Balance
I'm going to guess no, simply based on something I read in The Black Swan, by Nassim Taleb. The subject matter was different entirely, but he references a study done by Prof. Sir Michael Berry, which apparently measured the force a single electron located 10 billion light years away, could exert on a billiards table here on Earth.
An excerpt from the book, as well as a link to a .pdf of Berry's paper can be found here. I don't claim to have read the entire paper, nor can I claim to have completely understood what I did read, but it would seem that if there is any effect from something so small at such a distance, there could be no place in this universe where an object was "under absolutely no gravitational force."
try this one:
The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
http://www.amazon.com/dp/1400063515/?tag=googhydr-20&hvadid=2707650257&ref=pd_sl_43e5taom08_b
I am also totally dumbfounded by why some inane things have such a profound societal impact. I stumbled on this book a few years back and enjoyed it thoroughly.
Right, but "imperfect models" do not help us predict black swans (as Taleb calls them), which are highly improbable events which have a huge impact. Trying to predict these events (the Great Depression, 2008 financial crisis, etc.), or trying to prevent them, is arguably the basis for having a field of economics in the first place. Since these events keep happening, it's clear that either 1) economists have no idea what's going on, or 2) they do, but the big/central banks are causing the problems and spreading misinformation through economists.
The great thing about decentralized currencies is: now we'll get to do real, controlled economic experiments where we have access to all the data! These are exciting times we live in.
He is consistent in his approach, he isn't a stale zombie stuck on dead ideas. His ideas are part of a growing understanding of the failures of our current methods/conventions. Other thinkers are speaking/writing on relevant and related topics, such as Nassim Taleb - see The Black Swan and Daniel Gilbert's "Stumbling on Happiness".
We cannot turn back time. Any changes in current policy and procedure will have to work with the conditions of NOW. Your arguments/ideas are weak if you rely on false concepts such as someone can enact policies/theories in such a way that could re-create conditions of the past similarly or in some identical way. I do not believe a cutting of spending by the Federal-levels of government would revert us to some previous, less evolved political/social state.
I disagree with your estimation and interpretation of Ron Paul's 'strategies'. I do not think he is for 'burning down the house' as you say, but for serious appraisal and cutting back on a system that is out of control. I do not hear him talking about destroying anything but the false concepts and institutions that are in actuality and quite obviously disgracing and devaluing our country's society, values, and influence. Sometimes, when you leave your garden to be tended by others and forget to care for it yourself, you realize that it's been neglected and mis-used. It is at this time you either walk away or you get up and start clearing the weeds and the trash before you start re-planting and building anew.
What was the context?
Some anti-theists like to act as if their beliefs are superior because they're proven by science, but science can only disprove things and can NEVER prove anything with absolute certainty.
"Understanding the world" sounds, to me, like a claim of know something with certainty. All I know with certainty is that I know nothing, so I think trying to "understand the world" is futile...
http://www.amazon.com/Black-Swan-Impact-Highly-Improbable/dp/1400063515