Black Swans, Instantons, Hedge Funds and Network Collapse

On my flight to Europe last July, I read The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by N. Taleb. Unfortunately, I found the book irksome for several reasons:

• I already knew the mathematical underpinnings of the metaphors used in the book (more on that below).
  
• Taleb's writing style is unnecessarily condescending toward others mentioned in the book and to the reader.
  
• Some rather obvious points are labored. The weirdest of these comes in the form of a entirely fictitious character to which an entire chapter is devoted.
  
• Many of his often poor and sometimes inaccurate examples kept reminding me of something a Stanford mathematician once told me: "Economists are mathematically unsophisticated."
  
• He describes a general problem or syndrome related to how people assess risk incorrectly, but he doesn't really offer any solutions (or maybe I missed it in the chapter entitled, "How to Look for Bird Poop" ... seriously).
  

I must say this book was a disappointment because it was a stark contrast to seeing him interviewed months earlier on PBS, where he came across as more thoughtful and measured. My opinion notwithstanding, you might find the book worth reading because it's an easy read, it covers many topics (mostly with a financial slant—the author's background), and he's also warning the reader about the dangers of things like high-risk hedge funds. Moreover, as I shall try to demonstrate here, these same concepts also impinge on performance analysis (not that Taleb is aware of that) and whereas they might otherwise be impenetrable to the non-mathematician, possibly they are made a little more accessible in a book like this. In a nutshell, I believe he is saying: Think wild, not mild; easy to say, hard to do, as I shall try to explain.