The Black Swan
From the critically acclaimed author of Fooled by Randomness, a book about the impact of improbable events on every aspect of life.
Stats for nerds
263recommend
862mentions
666people
2007–2026years
38% recommend52% neutral10% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- There are a number of good books to explain the main concepts of statistics without getting bogged down in the technical details. As a grad student at a public university in the USA, I worked as a teaching assistant for the undergraduate course Introduction to Statistics. The course used SPSS software to enable the students to perform statistical analysis on data sets. Although we offered a good textbook (listed below), many of the students struggled with the main concepts, so my colleagues and I added a optional supplemental reading list to the syllabus. The following books are the ones we recommended to the students. I have read all these books, and they are pretty good at explaining statistics to anyone interested in learning the material at a conceptual level; anyone can read and understand these books, regardless of their educational background.
Ian Ayres (2007) Super Crunchers: Why Thinking by Numbers is the New Way to Be Smart.
Joseph Healey (2020) Statistics: A Tool for Social Research [This is the textbook used in the class, which I highly recommend].
John Allen Paulos (1988) Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences.
Nate Silver (2012) The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail, but Some Don't.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (2005) Fooled by Randomness, second edition.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (2010) The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, second edition.
- Turns out, some people are taller and if we don't aim for equality of outcomes, they eat all the apples and shit on our short head.
Every HN poster should be forced to read the chapters in the Black Swan where Taleb describes Extremistan and Mediocristan.
With scalable tech almost everything becomes winners take most. Equality of opportunity leads to many people starving.
- Dangerously skip permission is the goat, until it isn’t. I’ve seen so many engineers shrug when asked about how they handle permission with CC. Everyone should read for Black Swan, especially the Casino anecdote.
People seem to think prompt injection is the only risk. All it takes is one (1) BIG mistake and you’re totally fucked. The space of possible fuck-up vectors is infinite with AI.
Glad this is on the fail wall, hope you get back on track!
- There is already philosophy of mind, but it was pretty young when I was in grad school, which was really at the dawn of deep learning algorithms.
I’d say the two most important topics here are philosophy of language (understanding meaning) and philosophy of science (understanding knowledge).
I’ve already mentioned the language philosophers in an edit above, but in philosophy of science I’d add Popper as extremely important here. The concept of negative knowledge as the foundation of empirical understanding seems entirely lost on people. The Black Swan, by Nassim Taleb is a very good casual read on the subject.
- ever heard of The Black Swan? might be worth a read
- While Covid 19 was certainly a "Catastrophe", the market for pandemic insurance in 2020 was minuscule and to my knowledge did not cause any insurer solvency issues. There were a few cases of insurers being instructed to pay out significant claims by the courts on Business Interruption losses which the insurers argued were not covered due to existing policy exclusion.
Product development is usually highly specialized as there are a lot of nuances and frictions within the insurance industry that outsiders may not fully understand. It helps also to be in the industry and have the network with insurers, reinsurers, brokers, etc. This is not at all to suggest there isn't room for clever people to bring innovation to the market though!
Book recs are hard to specify for CAT bonds but for insurance in general:
Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk - Peter L. Bernstein
The Black Swan - Nassim Nicholas Taleb
On the Brink: How a Crisis Transformed Lloyd's of London - Andrew Duguid
The last one is a personal favourite of mine
