Taleb

Visiting with my good friends Guðný and Hersir in Akureyri this spring I started reading Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Nicholas Taleb - a guy I'd been intrigued by but never gotten around to reading. I borrowed the book (G&H being extremely generous and generally nice human beings), finished it and am now more than half way through The Black Swan (borrowed from the library). Taleb, like Feyerabend is a kind of swashbuckling, arrogant and funny writer - with a deep sense of human frailty. They diverge seriously in their estimation of Popper - Feyerabend loathes him while he is one of the few thinkers Taleb really likes. I sometimes wonder if Taleb has actually read PKF - maybe he is part of his 'anti-library' (the books you've read are less important than those you haven't). Taleb's central concern is to oppose our race's tendency to platonify - to take our theories and ideas, and nowadays they are dressed up in math, and imagine that they represent reality and can help us predict. Taleb shows us very clearly they do neither. Economics pretending to be like physics is the bane of modern finance. Of course it's a bit more complex than this (I'll get back after finishing the book) - but the central message is one of down to earth skepticism - suspend judgement and don't believe long term predictions in any field - they will in every case be wrong. Look out for Black Swans - but don't waste time trying to figure out in what guise they will come - they are unknown unknowns.