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Comment by mikeyouse | Hacker News Reader

If Taleb had published the Black Swan and then retired, he would have been a legend. Instead he keeps talking and it becomes clear that there isn't much difference between him and someone like Peter Schiff.

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I think this is a sound, critical review of the Black Swan & Taleb in general. Funnily enough, the criticisms of him are more relevant/prominent now than nearly a decade ago when this was written.

http://falkenblog.blogspot.com.au/2009/03/review-of-talebs-b...

Great review, thanks for posting this. To anyone considering reading the book I would recommend this article instead. I quit Black Swan part way through because, like the talk quoted above, it was long on invective, but seemed short on verifiable predections or generalizable methods. I just couldn't make it through the trolling...

I recently read his newer book "Anti Fragile" and liked it a lot, generally good advice that as humans we can recognize if businesses and social institutions are robust to random events, while, we can not predict low probability events.

I agree though that he was somewhat disappointing in this video.

I'm just reading Antifragile. It's interesting as well.

It appears his claim to faim was 2008, which imo wasn't a black swan event at all (to anyone watching private sector indebtedness figures).

That's a very small pool of people.

As he is fond of saying, Thanksgiving isn't a Black swan event unless you're the turkey.

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