A Guide to Surviving This Silly Life and Managing Luck

Review and key points from the book The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

I started reading Black Swan a few weeks before the crisis, not realizing how relevant the book would be now. For some reason, before reading Black Swan, I had an attitude to Taleb's books as airport pseudo-philosophy. I wanted to read Taleb's books after I watched his presentation in which he brilliantly recounts the main theses from Skin in The Game. By the way, the lousy covers of the series must have been such an influence :)

• Taleb's literary style: write the way I like, if you don't like the way I write, go fuck yourself. Which he himself often and gladly says :)

  • chance and risk

• The book consists of hundreds of essays on topics:

  • logical fallacies
  • ideas from philosophy.
  • the human psyche, which requires certainty, consistency and explanation of everything that happens
  • mockery of the U.S. Federal Reserve, bankers, traders, and other supposed “experts”
  • righteous anger toward bankers

• If you like clear structure-reading Black Swan [as well as Taleb's other books] may be physically difficult for you. I tried to get into Taleb's philosophical and associative thinking and got sucked in

• It's great, I'm reading the rest of Taleb's book.

I started reading Black Swan a few weeks before the crisis, not realizing how relevant the book would be now. For some reason, before reading Black Swan, I had an attitude to Taleb's books as airport pseudo-philosophy. I wanted to read Taleb's books after I watched his presentation in which he brilliantly recounts the main theses from Skin in The Game. By the way, the lousy covers of the series must have been such an influence :)