Customer Rating:
Summary: A book which can change your life for the better
Comment: This book answers some questions which I had been struggling with - for example, how do pollsters in India manage to get away with predicting most elections completely wrong? Why do the pundits on TV have 10 reasons to explain why a market crash happened, after it happened? Why don't they admit that they didn't see it coming one day before?

I am following Taleb's advice - not subscribing to a newspaper or to cable TV and spending more time reading books!

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Customer Rating:
Summary: deceptively simple
Comment: "The Black Swan" may seem to be a simple concept, but the implications are more complex and deep than may appear at first glance. The leap from commonplace beliefs to the realization that many of them are just that: commonplace and wrong is as difficult as the leap was for physics from linear Newtonian systems to Quantum physics and non-linear systems. This means waking up to the fact that market crashes, bankruptcy are not freak events but part of the system, it mean that the heroes and idols are due to a perverse feedback mechanism of the media, it means, more importantly, that our complacency about how we treat nature and the environment carries with it risks we cannot even imagine.

I recommend it.

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