A black swan is a highly improbable event with three principal characteristics: It is unpredictable; it carries a massive impact; and, after the fact, we concoct an explanation that makes it appear less random, and more predictable, than it was. The astonishing success of Google was a black swan; so was 9/11. For Nassim Nicholas Taleb, black swans underlie almost everything about our world, from the rise of religions to events in our own personal lives.

I have listened to the audio version of “The Black Swan” twice. First time at the beginning of the year and the second time just recently. The book is philosophical in a way. It is not very easy to fully comprehend conveyed message as author frequently diverts to fictional stories, terms in French, and thinkers that are long time dead.

There were two striking statements in the book “anyone can be a president” if someone like “these people can get a Nobel prize”. Sounds actual? Think of Trump vs. Clinton presidential race and Bob Dylan receiving Nobel prize in Literature if you are not reading this in Autumn 2016.

This does not mean that Nassim Taleb is any sort of predictor or prophesy maker. He himself says that he cannot make predictions, instead he highlights over and over again that rare events that seem improbable do occur more frequently than most of us would imagine and at the same time it is impossible to come up with mathematical models that would somehow calculate probabilities for these events. Unfortunately, we cannot know what we don’t know, therefore the best strategy for any of us is to build robustness to black swan events.

Application of the ideas expressed in the book is very wide. Starting with building financial portfolio consisting of 90% of very safe investments and 10% of extremely risky ones, therefore exposing yourself to probability of catching a black swan, like Google or Facebook. Ending with applying it to your life by exposing yourself to variety of endeavors. Careful here: event’s consequences are even harder to predict than occurrence of such events.

There is one aspect of the book that I don’t like. The author almost throughout the book despises other people imagining them as aggressive apes and suggesting nasty things like putting a rat down someones shirt. I do not exclude that he imagines his readers in the same way: silly monkeys reading higher caliber philosophical work. This, though, does not disqualify his book from being a really valuable contribution to human knowledge, but, in my opinion, it is only thanks to the black swan event of him benefiting from the 2000 crisis that made him successful and subsequently allowed him to write this and other books.

Conclusion

This book is definitely worth reading. It may make you look at the world as sequences of improbable events that change everything around. It could also make you way more skeptical about the theoretical modeling suggested by economists and other tie wearing experts. The book is not an easy read. On the contrary, it requires a lot of attention and thinking. Maybe leave it for a time when you are in a “philosophical” mood.

I read this book because of the recommendation I found online. It was in one of the Bill Gate’s reading lists. Maybe this post will have same effect on you… and you will decide to pick it for your reading.

“They say there are no stupid questions,” the author writes. “That’s obviously wrong. . . . But it turns out that trying to thoroughly answer a stupid question can take you to some pretty interesting places.”

Indeed, I remember we had a lot of hypothetical scientific discussions with my friends during my university days and these discussion would just go on and on ending sometime around 2AM. It was a lot of fun diving deep and exploring every possible twist. You get to have same fun when you read the book.

Well… it is actually more fun to read the book, since it is very nicely illustrated and thoroughly researched. Basically you don’t get to read rant – everything is cross checked with scientists by Munroe.

I guess this book also teaches to approach problems that require scaling, approximation, simplification, calculation, estimation. It also helps to understand physics better. And if you have some silly question that keeps you awake at nights you can always submit it on the xkcd web site.

This book is pure entertainment and joy. I can surely recommend this book to anyone generally interested in science.

The book “Coders At Work” is a collection of interviews of famous coders. The book takes a reader through 15 career stories. It inspires and gives insight into minds of great programmers.

Most of the selected coders are of older generations, so at times, it is hard or, rather, not exceptionally interesting to follow some of their career endeavours. Especially, if the whole career was around one system or one language that is “dead” today (think of COBOL, Fortran, PDP-1, etc). I don’t mind to know the history of the industry, but I’m not interested in too much of the details (you can blame me if you wish). On the other hand, it was very interesting to try to understand how these people think and how they approached problems they had. I really believe there is a lot to learn from them.

The author, Peter Seibel, starts interviews with a usual but interesting question about how the interviewees got involved in programming. Then, the author proceeds to questions that relate somehow to what interviewees have done in their careers. There are standard questions about debugging, favorite editor, opinion on some programming language, and other.

I liked answers to the question on how they hired people and what advise they can give to the young programmers.

There were a couple of questions that I didn’t like. One was “Do you consider yourself a scientist, an engineer, an artist, or a craftsman?”. I think it is a pointless question. These nouns can be interpreted in different ways and any answer would be just fine.

Throughout the book there was a discussion about the importance of computer science education and one of the questions was if interviewees have read the book “The Art Of Computer Programming”. It was kind of introduction to the last interview with Donald Knuth. I liked the interview with him, but I’m not sure if the author had to put so much emphasis on this personality.

The list of interviews is available at book’s website with short descriptions of who those people are and what they did. To be honest, before reading “Coders At Work”, I only knew about Douglas Crockford, Joshua Bloch, and Donald Knuth.

Conclusion

The book gives insight into how some of the great programmers achieved what they have achieved. It educates and inspires, though some of the stories might not be very exciting. At times, you may think that other big names would have made the book even more interesting. Nevertheless, I liked reading the book “Coders At Work”.