The Black Swan is a book about the importance of the unexpected. Taleb used the allegory of the Black Swan to explain how people often expect what is known and seem to forget that an unknown event can happen. The Black Swan metaphor was drawn from earlier beliefs that Black Swans don’t exist. Before the year 1697, no one has ever been reported to have seen a black swan. Consequently, people believed that all swans were white. However in 1697, a Black Swan was discovered which proved original beliefs wrong. This is the basis for Taleb’s argument. People make the mistake of believing that something will not happen because it has never happened, but when it eventually takes place it comes with disastrous consequences.
These events occur more often that we would like to think, and they generally have three attributes. They are outliers that are not within the realm of our general expectation and nothing we have witnessed has prepared us for it. Secondly, they come with great impact and thirdly, people usually come up with explanations for why they happen in hindsight. The book is a critic of society for always failing to expect the unexpected (Black Swan), and feigning surprise when one occurs. In his words, “History does not crawl. They make jumps. They go from fracture to fracture, with few vibrations in between. Yet we (and historians) like to believe in the predictable, small incremental progression.”
He used the Extremistan and Mediocristan province to explain our environment. According to him, an Extremistan environment is a Black Swan prone environment while Mediocristan is a “tame, quiet and uneventful province.”(p. 26) In the Mediocristan environment, the individual does not affect the aggregate while in the E...
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...is use of analogies based on fictitious characters did not make him more convincing. Yevgenia Krasnova’s book that became a bestseller cannot be called a Black Swan because events like that are expected in the publishing industry. His rambling also made it impossible to buy into his barbell strategy of safe investment and high risk investment. If he believes experts are frauds then he is also a fraud because he claims to be an expert on making the best of the unexpected
The book offers an insight into the world that is not readily seen by people. It is an interesting read if one is able to organize the jumbled up ideas in the book that indicate an apparent lack of structure. The style of the book makes it almost impossible to understand by mere skimming. It requires dedicating time to go through it chapter by chapter to fully grasped what Taleb is saying. .
This book was a good read for me, but I also read book reviews to help me keep track on what I am reading. These book reviews just made a better understanding of what I was reading.
Sartwell, Crispin. "The Genocidal Killer in the Mirror." Writing and Reading for ACP Composition. Upper Saddle River: Pearson Custom, 2009. 252-54. Print.
I found this book to be a rather interesting read. I enjoyed how Levathes researched this book and wrote it to try to explain about this specific period of time and how it is very non-fiction.
It begins as a very shallow storyline, but as the story progresses, you learn different aspects of the story and interpret different meanings for what is happening. You begin to connect the dots in the story, and understand plotline at the beginning of the book that would have never been understood. I believe that Lois Lowry achieved their purpose to make this book with a storyline that I have only seen made by this author. This writing style used by Lois Lowry creates a sense that you are inferring many aspects of the story that have not been told. Everything that makes up the story has not been told, and this creates a need to keep reading. I would definitely recommend others to read
This book teaches the importance of self-expression and independence. If we did not have these necessities, then life would be like those in this novel. Empty, redundant, and fearful of what is going on. The quotes above show how different life can be without our basic freedoms. This novel was very interesting and it shows, no matter how dismal a situation is, there is always a way out if you never give up, even if you have to do it alone.
The first two lines of the poem set the mood of fear and gloom which is constant throughout the remainder of the poem. The word choice of "black" to describe the speaker's face can convey several messages (502). The most obvious meaning ...
...int he had before elaborating on his main idea. One thing that I really liked in the book was the beginning of the chapter Zebras and Unhappy Marriages. Diamond starts the chapter with “Domesticable animals are all alike; every undomesticable animal is undomesticable in its own way.”(Diamond 157) This sentence is based of off the famous first sentence of Tolstoy’s novel Ana Karenina. I thought that this was a clever way to start the passage and catch the reader’s attention. However, the issue I had with the book was that it was repetitive. Jared Diamond would reiterate what he had already stated earlier in the book or passage. Overall the book was well organized and well written. Jared Diamond clearly stated his thesis more than once throughout the book. He elaborated on every point he made and did a good job in convincing the reader of his standing on the topic.
My overall opinion of this book is good I really liked it and recommend it to anyone. It is a good book to read and it keep you interested throughout the whole book.
This is my personal reflection about this book. First and foremost, I would like to say that this book is very thick and long to read. There are about nineteen chapters and 278 pages altogether. As a slow reader, it is a quite hard for me to finish reading it within time. It took me weeks to finish reading it as a whole. Furthermore, it is written in English version. My English is just in average so sometimes I need to refer to dictionary for certain words. Sometimes I use google translate and ask my friends to explain the meaning of certain terms.
It subtly exposes the tragedies that people with instinct of self-interest could control their own fate in the unpredictable future, while others who paralyzed in past success and unrealistic fantasies could not. It also shows how those who were unable to update themselves from 1.0 finally became the prey of those 2.0, 3.0, 4.0 and so on. It is a story about self-interest is the winner.
The book makes me understand the importance of reading and know how weak I’m in reading comprehension. Not only is my reading speed slow, but also my thoughts after reading are immature. I haven’t fix some time to read English books before so my background knowledge and vocabulary are far from abundant.
This is an odd little book, but a very important one nonetheless. The story it tells is something like an extended parablethe style is plain, the characters are nearly stick figures, the story itself is contrived. And yet ... and yet, the story is powerful, distressing, even heartbreaking because the historical trend it describes is powerful, distressing, even heartbreaking.
I thoroughly enjoyed this novel and believe it to be one of the best books I have ever read. It was extremely well written and challenging for me to understand at times. It conveys that dark side of human ambition very well, and it has given me much to think about.
Overall I enjoyed reading this book, I read it a few years ago in high school, but I took more from it this time and was able to apply it more to my experiences and events I have witnessed. I’m glad the novel was assigned for me to read because it really made me think about the world today and how we interact in the world. It actually brought up questions and connections that I didn’t see when I read the book years ago. This novel will always be relevant and I’m sure will be read years from now.
... to assimilate the concept, argue and this widens our horizons and we try to broom rationalistic and humanistic in nature. When we go on reading books like that we come to know various situations which we may not be experiencing now, but later we can utilize this to handle the situation in a matured way when we actually face it. In today’s fast- paced world, reading has taken aback as modern gadgets and gizmos have made their grand foray in our life. The importance of literature has been overshadowed by media influence. Books are replaced by digital gadgets. But the importance of reading should not be abandoned. Reading novels, magazines and literary work give us a broader prospective of viewing things, improves skills, instills knowledge and makes us aware of various different facets of life. It lays a foundation of an enriched life and adds ‘life’ to the living.