The Black Swan
Until the 19th century, people were convinced that all swans were white, an unassailable belief derived from millennia of confirmatory sightings of white swans…. Then boom! There comes the discovery of mutant black swans in Australia.
The fact that a single negative instance can invalidate a series of corroborative facts illustrates the severe limitations of statistics and empiricism. Since then, people refer to a black swan as a statistically highly improbable event that is unpredictable but carries massive impact.
Old. Very old. The problem of induction is an ancient one. Second century philosopher, Sextus Empiricus, represented and jotted down the ideas of the shoot of Pyrrhonian skeptics. Eleventh century skeptic, Algazel wrote the “Incompetence of Philosophers”, attacking the scientific knowledge. In 1690, a Catholic bishop, Pierre-Daniel Huet wrote “The Weaknesses of the Human Mind”. Historically, many skeptics found solace in religion. However, the idea of relying on faith, not reason is fideism, and that is not what this book is about.
The Black Swan is a book that reveals the severe shortcomings of scientific methodologies and the fragility of our knowledge. Nassim Taleb spent the first 1/3 of the book ferreting out our antilogics such as naïve empiricism, narrative fallacy, silent evidence, and confirmation bias, just to name a few. Then magpie-fashion, in the remaining 2/3 of the book, Taleb marshals many theories from sociology and philosophy and bits and pieces of other wisdom from all sorts of disciplines to advance his case.
I enjoyed the first 1/3 of the book, then fell out of love soon after that, unfortunately.
Don’t get me wrong, Taleb has some useful insights to offer, however, this book could have been shorter. As an analyst, I am an evangelist of books that examines methodologies, some of my top picks are Alex Oliver’s Plural Logic, Feyerabend’s Against Method, and Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow. These books all have persuasive sobriety. Sadly, the same cannot be said for The Black Swan, which despite the great utility of its insights is badly structured and hurriedly written. The author is contemptuous towards entire disciplines (economics, law, social science) without making much attempt to engage with the concepts he is critiquing beyond the broadest levels of generality.
Other than knowing “shit happens” and “shit happens more often than we think”, what is the way of thinking Taleb would like the readers to adopt?
Taleb’s tone throughout the book, slightly irreverent, did not annoy me as much as it seems to have bothered other readers. However, I do not appreciate the author ridiculing distinguished economists while presenting himself as a lonely, persecuted genius. Criticizing the accomplished is healthy; mocking them because they are accomplished is sophomoric.
In a nutshell, do I recommend this book? Yes, but just the 1/3. After that, investing more time will just yield diminishing returns.
