airdog reviewed The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
What a fraud!
2 stars
Did you know that financial forecasters, who are paid a small fortune every year, are totally useless? Yes. It has been proved many times that parrots, crows, dogs and pigs do better or at least as well as them.
Did you know that rare events (what he calls black swans) don't happen often but can have large consequences? Probably.
And to make things much worse, Taleb, being himself the typical example of the Gaussian bell curve, blames the forecasters of being dishonest because they're at worst explicitely dishonest in continuying to be paid for something (using the bell curve) they know is useless. Taleb, being the one among millions failures who succeeded, which is what the bell curve demonstrates very well, writes a book saying that we should get rid of the bell curve.
He's right, but don't write a book about it when you yourself are a case book …
Did you know that financial forecasters, who are paid a small fortune every year, are totally useless? Yes. It has been proved many times that parrots, crows, dogs and pigs do better or at least as well as them.
Did you know that rare events (what he calls black swans) don't happen often but can have large consequences? Probably.
And to make things much worse, Taleb, being himself the typical example of the Gaussian bell curve, blames the forecasters of being dishonest because they're at worst explicitely dishonest in continuying to be paid for something (using the bell curve) they know is useless. Taleb, being the one among millions failures who succeeded, which is what the bell curve demonstrates very well, writes a book saying that we should get rid of the bell curve.
He's right, but don't write a book about it when you yourself are a case book example of it...
