Höchst interessante Triade gegen gängige Analysen (2009-04-28)
Höchst aktuelle und interessante Abhandlung eines amerikanischen Analysten, Wissenschaftlers und Traders mit libanesischem Hintergrund.

Taleb betrachtet in einem umfassenden Ansatz gängige Methoden zur Zukunfts- und Risikoanalyse. Dabei stellt er da, warum diese alle fehlerhaft und gängigen menschlichen Schwächen verhaftet sind.

Wesentliche Erkenntnisse sind:

1.) Die "Schwarzen Schwäne": Ereignisse, die nicht vorhergesagt werden können, komplex und exponentiell in ihren Auswirkungen sind. Gemäß Taleb sind diese Ereignisse für fast alle wichtigen Entwicklungen der Menschlichen Gesellschaft verantwortlich. Durch ihre Unvorhersehbarkeit werden Gesellschaftentwicklungen insgesamt nicht vorhersehbar.

2.) Der Trugschluss der Statistik: Durch die Schwäne stellt sich unser Glaube an eine Normalverteilung von Ereignissen als haltlos dar. Die auf diesen Modellen beruhenden Systeme für finanzielle Risikoberechnung sind daher ebenfalls ein Trugschluss.

3.) Die Notwendigkeit einer begründenden Erzählung: Die menschliche Psyche verlangt nach einer Begründung bzw. einer kausalen Ableitung von Ereignissen. Auch wenn diese, wie im Fall der Schwarzen Schwäne, nicht gegeben ist. Daher werden solche Erzählungen rückwirkend konstruiert und beeinflussen unser vermeintliches Wissen über die Vergangenheit.

Leider nur 4 Sterne, da Taleb seine Kernargumente wieder und wieder wiederholt und dabei endlose Triaden gegen Analysten und Historiker abfeuert. Ohne Anfeindungen und mit einem stringenten, weniger redundanten Aufbau wäre das Buch 100 Seiten kürzer gewesen jedoch deutlich lesbarer.

Trotzdem Pflichtlektüre für alle, die sich mit Zukunftsanalysen etc. auseinandersetzen müssen oder dürfen.

Gute Fragen, keine Antworten (2009-04-22)
Der Autor stellt sich die Frage, warum es so schwierig ist, Unvorgesehenes einzuschätzen. Wer wird der nächste Bestsellerautor, Musikstar oder Spitzensportler? Das sind oft eben nicht die Favoriten.
Auf diese zweifellos spannende Frage findet der Autor leider keine Antwort, sondern plappert imerzu vor sich hin.
Aber lassen wir ihn selbst zu Wort kommen, auf Seite 12 schreibt er "I had already read (or read about) the works of Hegel, Marx, Toynbee, Aron and Fichte on the philosophy of history and its properties... I did not grasp much, except that history had some logic... This sounded awfully similar to the theorizing around me about the war in Lebanon."
Das ist der Stil des Autors.

simple ideas made very clear (2009-03-21)
He is telling a very good story, not going to much into detail about math&statistcs, thus it is really a book to read. I very much like his approach to include numerous examples from different fields of life - financial markets are not everything!

Skip this book and read "The Origin of Wealth" by Eric Beinhocker instead (2009-03-10)
Fooled and abused by an overambitious envious soul
This man must have been drunk or doped, when he wrote this book. One would actually have to get paid for reading this insulting pamphlet. Taleb abuses his readers as therapists for his effort of come to terms with his failure to qualify for the bestowal of the Nobel prize (which nobody could have blamed him for (apart from those with an equally overinflated ego, maybe)! Seeking consolation for his overambitious and envious soul, he chose to try bring down his intellectual superiors to his level by belittling and ridiculing them and the scientific effort of systematic trial end error. Fortunate for him, such a levelling-down approach is quite popular, as it takes away the burden to strive. Thus he has attracted many readers which at least allowed him to find financial consolation for his intellectual failure and his amoral pretension, to have generated a single original insight worthwhile buying this book.
Had he limited the claim for his book, its publication may have been more tolerable - for the sake of some nice anecdotes that he has included. Yet this would have required him to admit, that our limitations to forecast evolutionary devolopments or to systematically and sustainably outwit financial markets (index developments) is a long established finding and not at all an original insight. Suggesting that learned people had failed to accept the consequences of GödelŽs incompleteness theorem, of Chaos theory or of George SorosŽ reflexivity-observation is devious. As a consequence of this discernment many investors have actually redirected their holdings away from actively managed stock-holding funds to ETFs. Nevertheless, it makes sense not to give up seeking winning investment-strategies - of course without the illusion of finding them in win-all fool-proof computer models alone. Skillfully done, these efforts shape the markets, improve their efficiency as coordination mechanism and further our understanding of their mechanics. The initiators and the managers of funds have an obvious reason to give currency to the report, that they can actually outperform markets. And investors - similar to gamblers - are willing (for some share of their assets) to accept the odds for the sake of maybe unreasonable, yet not necessarily completely impossible return-expectations.
When Taleb delivers his explanation for the systematic biases and flaws in decision taking (which are evolutionarily implanted into our brains), he comes up with a bad and inadequately abridged recitation of the findings made by cognitive and behavioural scientists. The readers would be significantly better served with the original works or better thought through summaries, such as for example C. RoxburghŽs synthesis published in his crisp and concise article Hidden flaws in strategy". In his book, the Art of the long view - Planning the Future in an uncertain world", Peter Schwarz has gone far beyond TalebŽs bemoaning of the intrinsic planning problem; therein he has described techniques for coping with the challenge of looking into the future and of actively manging risk rather than putting oneZs head into the sand and just seeking shelter with a blind risk-sharing strategy, as suggested by Taleb. Or if you want a comprehensive analysis of the development of economics, ist failures and successive advancements plus an outlook where it is headed, do yourself a favour and read The Origin of Wealth" by Eric D. Beinhocker.
Now back to TalebZs work and his critisism of Probability Theory and Statistics, a field he has obviously completely failed to understand (despite his claims, tob e an expert!) - be it for the reason of his laziness (which he is even boastful about instead of ashamed of) or for his intellectual limitations. Anyhow, it is probably the audacity of a naive and uneducated or of a doped person, which enticed him to falsely claim that an inadequate choice of probability models by some practitioners in the trading room (or In other real-life applications) may be charged against deficiences in the theory. Taleb fails to even recognize (not to mention acknowledge), that the methodology for model testing is a core part of the field of probablity-theory and no educated scholar is let to believe, that the Gaussian distribution ruled the world! No way does probability theory suggest or even legitimize to blindly hold on to a preconceived model-assumption. Quite the opposite, it offers tools to overcome the human perception-trap through systematic testing of our inductive interpretations.
When Taleb notes that some authors better read a little more before starting to write a book, one cannot get around thinking, that he himself should probably have followed that rule. Yet, seeing the list of authors and their publications, he seems to be very biased in his reception of their message (although I doubt that he has actually listed all of those authors/books he seems to have piggybacked on - eg. Senge/The Fifth Discipline).
The therapy of wirting this book seems to have worked for him - not only financially. In the final part, he finds consolation in his acknowledgement, that following our archaic program to outperform all the others and to seek dominance, is a lost cause easily destracting us from enjoying what we have and only with extremly remote chances, to in exchange finally gain what we have been aiming for.

Ganz interessant (2009-02-14)
Habe bis jetzt erst das erste Kapitel gelesen. War bis jetzt ganz interessant. Allerdings für einen denkenden Menschen nicht alles so brandneu.