Review:
I was reading "The Black Swan" on the flight home. It's got some fascinating stuff on the problem of induction, but overall, the author makes so many snarky hits at concepts and ideas he doesn't really bother to completely understand. I'm halfway through, and it seems to be getting a bit better, but I have to see this book so far as infuriating, decontextualized bile in the grand scheme of things that makes a few good points, and I think I will probably read the rest with such a viciously critical eye that I will probably miss any possibility of enlightenment.
You see, the book is about Black Swans, which are defined to be transformative, unexpected, rare events. The one-in-a-million events, like the invention of the wheel, the onset of a war, etc. Now, after a foreword asking us to imagine all such events in our life and in history, the author (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) claims that most of our lives absolutely hinge on these catastrophically powerful Black Swans, that these events are so transformative that they leave in their dust the gradual changes. This is the general assumption of the book, from which all the rest follows. Taleb's history as a trader gives him a wealth of examples to draw upon to illustrate Black Swans, and the consequent failures of predictions. Taleb also finds a number of historical examples: Wars, far from seeming inevitable, actually take almost everyone by surprise in the beginning. We have failures in predictions, and we are governed by unfathomable forces that are unfathomably rare.
I was reading "The Black Swan" on the flight home. It's got some fascinating stuff on the problem of induction, but overall, the author makes so many snarky hits at concepts and ideas he doesn't really bother to completely understand. I'm halfway through, and it seems to be getting a bit better, but I have to see this book so far as infuriating, decontextualized bile in the grand scheme of things that makes a few good points, and I think I will probably read the rest with such a viciously critical eye that I will probably miss any possibility of enlightenment.
You see, the book is about Black Swans, which are defined to be transformative, unexpected, rare events. The one-in-a-million events, like the invention of the wheel, the onset of a war, etc. Now, after a foreword asking us to imagine all such events in our life and in history, the author (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) claims that most of our lives absolutely hinge on these catastrophically powerful Black Swans, that these events are so transformative that they leave in their dust the gradual changes. This is the general assumption of the book, from which all the rest follows. Taleb's history as a trader gives him a wealth of examples to draw upon to illustrate Black Swans, and the consequent failures of predictions. Taleb also finds a number of historical examples: Wars, far from seeming inevitable, actually take almost everyone by surprise in the beginning. We have failures in predictions, and we are governed by unfathomable forces that are unfathomably rare.
