A lot of blogs said a lot of nice things about this book, and from this I conclude that most of those bloggers either A) strictly read the executive summary or B) only read other bloggers. This is a pretty terrible book, and while it has one or two good ideas, they are better and more rigorously expressed in books like "Sway" or "The Drunkard's Walk" than they are in this shameless exercise in self promotion. I didn't find him as arrogant as others said he is (try Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion, now that's arrogance), mainly because of his intelligence, and humor which made me snort from the beginning to the end. Yes, he's trashing some celebrities' statements in the field, but the way he does it is quite witty and hilarious (albeit not that nice).

Because experts both (1) “tunnel” into the norms of their particular discipline and (2) base their predictive models exclusively on past events, their predictions are inevitably susceptible to the extremely random and unforeseen. The world is not fair. Unfairness and inequality are no epiphenomena but part and parcel of reality.Massage therapist,” for example, is a “nonscalable” profession. There is an upper limit on how many clients you can see—there’s only so much time in a day, and therapists’ bodies fatigue—and thus there’s only so much income you can expect from that profession. The author's tone throughout the book, slightly irreverent, didn't annoy me as much as it seems to have bothered other readers. I enjoyed learning a new way to look at reality, but, as I mentioned before, this is a dense read and I wouldn't consider it "fun" reading either. You know, there were some moments in here that just felt like navel-gazing, pimping-myself-out (which I love), rich-bitch nonsense. And then there were moments of extreme clarity and hyper-focused lucidity delivered with a cutting twist. Statisticians, it has been shown, tend to leave their brains in the classroom and engage in the most trivial inferential errors once they are let out on the streets." Certain professionals ... don't know more about their subject matter than the general population." Except when they do.

This is a book that raises a number of very important questions, but chief among them is definitely the question of how the interplay between a good idea and an insufferable author combine to effect the reading experience?In scalable professions, you do the same work whether you produce a hundred units or 1000. For a podcast, the effort to reach 10 people might be similar to that of reaching 10 million people. In writing, the same effort is taken to attract one reader, or several hundred million – JK Rowling doesn’t have to write a book each time someone reads it. In Extremistan environments, there can be wild randomness and extreme deviations. Typically, there’re no physical constraints and no known upper/lower limits (e.g. knowledge, financial markets, e-book sales, social media “likes”). Thus, the outliers can make a big difference—if you add the net worth of Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates to a group of 1,000 people, it will drastically shift the average. Taleb, however, offers a new spin on the term. He uses it to describe specific historical events with specific impacts. These events have three salient features:

I guess that if someone loves Eve Babitz right now it is a red flag for me. Her writing style was not the problem for me but what she was talking about. What stands out about Babitz's writing is her voice: smart, unapologetic and knowing, like Dorothy Parker magically time traveling to the modern era . . . Rereading Babitz is a delicious, guilty pleasure." — Alta If you see an ice cube sitting on a table you can predict the future: it will melt into a little puddle of water. But if you see a puddle on the table, and that's all you see, there could be a thousand stories of what it is and how it came to be there. The correct explanation may be 1001--or one which will never be found.While the author has valid points, his writing style oscillates between boring, repetitive, and just plain bad. Plus he uses the pronouns “I” and “me” more often than any other author I have read. Perhaps he is using his gigantic ego to prove the existence of fat tails in the standard bell curve and thus exhibit directly the central thesis which is that the Gaussian curve does not hold up in our modern “extremistan” society (and trust me that that sentence is funny if you read the book). We tend to easily remember the facts from the past that fit a narrative, while we tend to neglect others that do not appear to play a causal role in the narrative. The simple inability to remember not the true sequence of events but a reconstructed one will make history appear in hindsight, to be far more explainable than it actually was, or is. Wherever there is a market move, the news media feel obligated to give the reason. A December 2003, news headline by Bloomberg News : Think of an ice cube sitting on a table. Imagine the shape of the puddle that ice cube will make as it melts.