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The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

by: Nassim Nicholas Taleb

February 28, 2008
Reading these reviews leads me immediately to the realisation that this work may possibly be little better than plagiarism. Siméon-Denis Poisson first examined the statistical modelling of low-probability events in 1838, within a much wider corpus of scientific research in pure and applied natural and social sciences. One immediate conclusion is that the probability of low-odds events occurring (where there is no impedement to frequent possible events) is much higher than normal binomial probability suggests. As this is the heart of Taleb's thesis, he's at best reinvented the wheel.
On the basis of his introduction, examining the work of Umberto Eco, I suspect he falls into a trap of his own pretentiousness, insofar as Professor Eco sometimes ... Read More: