[The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable] by Nassim Nicholas Talib is for most of its length a philosopher/statistician's squeal of fury that so many people get things so wrong so often. He is speaking most about those pundits who pontificate about what is going to happen in the economy, politics, and other areas of life without what he would say is proper regard for the real origin of risk. Of course, our recent economic history is the most obvious example of his thesis, although not the only one. And his thesis is that for the most part, statistics is, as Mark Twain said, just the most egregious type of lie. (The quote is 'lies, damned lies, and statistics'.). Talib's opinion is that the famous bell curve, or Gaussian distribution, is no more predictive than sheep's entrails, that no one really understands what the mathematics surrounding it means, and that those who pretend to be able to apply data using it or any other charting method to come up with predictive results are just so many snake oil salesmen.I don't think I'm exaggerating his intention, and certainly not his pique.Whether you would like to believe that or not, his second thesis is scarier. It is that the risks we should really be worrying about are the ones we cannot anticipate, or more ominously, the ones we are unwilling to anticipate. And again, this applies most obviously to the recent economic crisis, but could apply equally to medical research, global warming, weather predictions, etc. These are what he calls the black swans, the things we KNOW can't happen, can't exist, but somehow appear anyway. The term comes from the European conviction stretching back to the Greeks that all swans are white, which was suddenly and magically disproven when Europeans happened upon Australia. It's his way of saying 'never say never'.Eventually, he grudgingly agrees to give some advice to the shell-shocked reader, which mainly consists of: question every assumption, concentrate on safety, don't risk anything you can't lose, and don't listen to the pundits. Not revolutionary. But advising us in that way is not his goal. His goal is to try to make the reader see the folly of prediction, the incompetence of applied statistics, and the childish wishfulness of any hope of predicting the future.OK. I get it. It goes on a little too long, in sometimes numbing detail, with the snarkiest of tones and attitude. Every once in a while he tells the less than superbly educated reader they can skip ahead - they don't have to bother themselves with the technical bits. He is of course the smartest guy in the room, and everyone else (except for a select few mathematicians and icononclastic thinkers) is an idiot. Or a fraud. I like reading some of the works by those other select folks. I like the behavioral economists and their insistence on puncturing assumptions by actually testing them. And I totally sympathize with Talib's quarrel with academic economic theory as just that, academic instead of reflecting real life. But it would have been a little better if he hadn't hit me over the head with these ideas quite so much.