The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable: Difference between revisions

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-{{review|The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable|Nassim Nicholas Taleb|R220X1OSKAV4LU|March 8, 2008|Bombastic and entertaining, but not as devastating, original or clever as the author thinks it is}}
+{{a|book review|}}
+{{br|The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable}}: {{author|Nassim Nicholas Taleb}}
+==Bombastic and entertaining, but not as devastating, original or clever as the author thinks it is==
 {{author|Nassim Nicholas Taleb}} is, in equal parts, enthralling and infuriating. He has written a book so sure of its own certitude, that has one effective lesson: there can be no certitude. Taleb believes (and says) that he’s solved the eternal verities — that after millennia of philosophical, ethical, political, economic and social debate: thrust and counter-thrust — that mathematics and physics can save the day.
-While there is certainly value in this book — if you can bear the self-regard with which it is expounded, it’s a ripsnorting read — Taleb is  inconsistent about some fundamental things: Early doors, he praises the virtue of having unread volumes on the shelves of one’s library: It is a pity he hadn’t dipped into one or two of them along the way. Subsequent books in the Incerto quintet suggest he did eventually get around to it. Antifragile is a far better book, as is Skin in the Game.
+While there is certainly value in this book — if you can bear the self-regard with which it is expounded, it’s a ripsnorting read — Taleb is inconsistent about some fundamental things: Early doors, he praises the virtue of having unread volumes on the shelves of one’s library: It is a pity he hadn’t dipped into one or two of them along the way. Subsequent books in the Incerto quintet suggest he did eventually get around to it. Antifragile is a far better book, as is Skin in the Game.
-Firstly, he calls himself a philosopher and an intellectual, but writes off people who “took too many philosophy classes” or “read too much Wittgenstein”, and who may therefore be under the impression that language problems are important, when infact such intellectual niceties have “no serious implications".
+Firstly, he calls himself a philosopher and an intellectual, but writes off people who “took too many philosophy classes” or “read too much Wittgenstein”, and who may therefore be under the impression that language problems are important, when in fact such intellectual niceties have “no serious implications".
 This, naturally, makes him look a bit of a Philistine, which would be okay, were it not to bear directly on the content of his book. The principle problem which Taleb sets out to solve is that of the misleading narrative discipline. Better familiarity with Wittgenstein might have helped him here. The Continental view is that we *cannot* make sense of with the world but through one or more narratives. Our daily labour is to untangle and jury rig all our working narratives so they can steer us in a broadly satisfactory path through the data. “The Truth” doesn’t exist independently of our relationship to the physical universe, but rather is a function of our narratives. Narratives can’t get in the way of truths; narratives are containers in which truths are packed and brought to market. Taleb might not like Platonicity, but it is the human (Humean?) dilemma that we’re stuck with it.