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|March 8, 2008|R220X1OSKAV4LU|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}}
-{{author|Nassim Nicholas Taleb}} is, in equal parts, enthralling and utterly infuriating. He has written a book so sure of its own certitude, that has one effective lesson: there can be no certitude. Taleb makes the enormous mistake of believing (and saying) 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.
+{{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 cloying self-regard with which it is expounded, it’s a pretty ripsnorting read — Taleb is also very, very inconsistent (or confused) about some very, very fundamental things which he doesn’t seem to have read or thought nearly hard enough about. Early doors he praises the virtue of having unread volumes on the shelves of ones library: I was continually struck that it was a pity Taleb hadn’t dipped into one or two of them along the way.
+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.
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 It might, as he points out, seem rational to calculate the forecast proitability of a casino on the odds available through time at the tables, but that is to ignore the risk of something unexpected happening such as a bomb going off in the lobby. But the nature of unexpected things is that you can’t anticipate them. That’s what it means to be unexpected.
-That’s ultimately the conclusion of this unnecessarily long book: “Stuff happens". The interesting material is mostly covered in existing books written by more talented and less egotistical authors (I would highly recommend {{author|Philip Ball}}’’s {{br|Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another}}) and the implication of the power law on the behaviour of markets is the subject of {{author|Benoit Mandelbrot}}’s very good {{br|The (Mis) Behaviour of Markets: A Fractal View of Risk, Ruin And Reward}}.
+That’s ultimately the conclusion of this unnecessarily long book: “Stuff happens". The interesting material is mostly covered in existing books by other authors (I recommend {{author|Philip Ball}}’s {{br|Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another}}) and the implication of the [[power law]] on the behaviour of markets is the subject of {{author|Benoit Mandelbrot}}’s very good {{br|The (Mis) Behaviour of Markets: A Fractal View of Risk, Ruin And Reward}}.

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