Few months back I picked up a book called The Black Swan. I must say I was quite excited to read this considering the fact that it spoke about subjects such as unexpected events, luck factor, changing society and other such interesting topics. Considering the fact that the book was quite small in size, around 280 pages I was sure to complete it in couple of weeks, a month at the most.
The book started pretty well, with 9/11 example cited to explain how the things which are most improbable make huge impacts on our lives. This was continued with another fictitious example(a good one though) about how a turkey which is to be devoured on thanksgiving is kept well fed before it's sold. From the turkey's perspective everything is going on well, and with each passing day it gets sure and sure that the things will continue to be the same, except that it gets sold and eaten on the thanksgiving. This was the example given to show how an unexpected event can bite you when you are least expecting it.
The above two good examples along with few more of these set the tone well, but after few tens of pages the books get redundant, the author(Nassim Nocholas Taleb) seems to be on a mission to disgrace statisticians of all forms and he is most critical of those who use bell curves for their studies. The argument given by him is that the bell curve reduces our insight of unexpected events and we tend to live in a normal world where there will be normal events, a fair enough argument I must say but NNT is adamant to beat this point to pulp and bore his readers by bringing it up again and again. He is also on the lookout of people who predict things and severely criticizes them.
Due to all these shortcomings(IMO) it took me around 3.5 months to get close to the ending of this book, but with couple of chapters still remaining I don't have courage to pick up this book again, would like to surprise myself sometime by finishing this book.
However, that said there are many points which are really based on some good insights, like:
1) The 80/20 rule(my favorite): roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. This can be applied in other areas as well such as: world's 80 pc of wealth in hands of 20 % of people etc.
2) The narrative fallacy : Our predilection of summarizing and simplifying things which may leave out some crucial nuances. We do this to reduce the dimension of the information as more the randomness the more is the dimension of the information to store. NNT brings out interesting perspectives on this point.
3) The silent evidence: A very good example to bring out this point: There is a ship about to drown and some people are praying to their gods while others don't believe in GOD. Some people are rescued from drowning while others could not be. Its found that all the people who were saved prayed during the ship was drowning and one can argue that those who prayed were rescued, but a good observer will note that "what about people who prayed and drowned".
GoodReads link : http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/242472.The_Black_Swan
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
