I have always had deep seated confidence issues. Most people think it is a bad thing, but on most days I prefer it. Most people’s confidence is entirely unearned. It took me many years to figure this out, and it has led me to a pretty strong interest in epistemology. I now tend to have a chip on my shoulder about there issues.
It turns out I am not the only one. Taleb’s Black Swan is a crying out of the false confidence that is shaping our society for the worst. Or at least, that is what the animosity of the book is geared towards. Just imagine the wall street financier who were convinced that everything was fine with their weird derivative stocks before sinking the economy the the third time in my lifetime. That’s the confidence we are talking about. Taleb seems to think that most of our society’s predictive models fail to include rare events that come in and change everything in an unprecedented matter. He tries to develop a better model for what our society looks like based on Mandelbrotian fractals, but I was not sure I really followed what he was getting at, and this is from someone with a strong appreciation for Mandelbrot and his work.
I don’t relish when non-fiction books have too much of the author superimposed into the text. This book is horrifically guilty of that. Taleb’s superbia rings on a lot of pages – which isn’t to say that the superbia isn’t deserved. From everything he mentions throughout the book, I think he has deserved some bragging rights. And ultimately, Taleb’s call is for our society at large to have a lot more humility about our undeserved belief. If that message come soaked in it’s own (ironically enough) confidence, so be it. Arrogance and superiority may well be deserved in Taleb’s case, but as a stylistic choice I tend not to like it. Taleb was ringing my bell with this book, and so I did forgive it somewhat. But it didn’t make me run out to want to get more of his books.
Tiny vindication that made me smile: Taleb used Benoit Mandelbrot’s last name as an adjective Mandelbrotian, which I once used in a paper during my Master’s only to have a profesor tell me it was not a real word. Eat shit, I now found it in print.
Failures in Polymathy 