Black Swans: Stories

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If you see an ice cube sitting on a table you can predict the future: it will melt into a little puddle of water. But if you see a puddle on the table, and that's all you see, there could be a thousand stories of what it is and how it came to be there. The correct explanation may be 1001--or one which will never be found. Think of an ice cube sitting on a table. Imagine the shape of the puddle that ice cube will make as it melts. A new reissue by the writer who has been acclaimed by the Boston Globe as a “true original” and by the San Francisco Chronicle as “marvelously witty and wildly observant ” and of whom Joseph Heller has said, “Her words are worth one hundred moving pictures.” The world is not fair. Unfairness and inequality are no epiphenomena but part and parcel of reality. Sandis, Constantine (August 25, 2014). "Interview: Nassim Nicholas Taleb". Philosophy Now (69) . Retrieved December 20, 2020.

Babitz’s talent for the brilliant line, honed to a point, never interferes with her feel for languid pleasures." ― The New York Times Book Review My only other complaint--and it's not one I can really spell out with any confidence--is this: I came away with this diffuse sense of overconfidence from Taleb...that he believes his metaphors and conjectures, etc. apply in more instances than they actually do.The writer Umberto Eco belongs to a small insightful class of scholars with a huge library. People ask him “what a huge library you have, how many have you read?” It turns out he hasn’t read much. He believes that unread books present more value than read books, so he has a lot more of them in his library serving as a constant reminder the extent of his ignorance. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary Nassim Nicholas Taleb is working the same territory as Daniel Kahneman in Thinking, Fast and Slow. While they both have us investigating our thinking, for Kahneman, it's to make us own up, while Taleb has more direct emphasis on avoiding disaster.

Right at the end it occurred to me that this is religion. He tells you how to sustain yourself in the absence of worldly support, how to stand up to others and say your piece, how to wait and be patient, and about the merits of surrounding yourself with like-minded souls. Shortform note: It’s unclear how Taleb defines “predicted.” Plenty of science-fiction writers and cultural commentators anticipated recent technologies like the Internet and augmented and virtual reality.) Taleb is actually on to something important if you can tolerate his self-importance enough to filter his verbage to get his good ideas. A central idea is that we assume everything in the world is Gaussian and then we base all our decisions about life on our Gaussian models. But the significant, life-changing, society-changing, events are outside the Gaussian. Things like 9-11. They belong to Extremestan, not Mediocristan.

Taleb lauds two unexpected types of practitioners: military people and financial managers. They will know if their predictions are wrong or right. If they are wrong, they'll have to face the music. Their predictions matter. Not so the world of talking heads and stuffed shirts: they just adjust their stories and keep on going. In 1997, Babitz was severely injured when ash from a cigar she was smoking ignited her skirt, causing life-threatening third-degree burns over half her body. Because she had no health insurance, friends and family organized a fund-raising auction to pay her medical bills. Friends and former lovers donated cash and artworks to help pay for her long recovery. Babitz became somewhat more reclusive after this incident, but was still willing to be interviewed on occasion. Groarke, Louis (2009). An Aristotelian Account of Induction: Creating Something from Nothing. McGill–Queen's University Press. p.151. ISBN 9780773535954. ISSN 0711-0995. Babitz's writing is also like the jacaranda tree in glorious bloom—bewitching an entire city, but all too brief." — Los Angeles Review of Books

In my mind mathematicians, trained for certainties, had no business dealing in randomness." By which he means non-Gaussian statistics. Which is an area of mathematics. Very much the mathematician's business! It has been more than two months since I read this book and only now I succeed in writing a review about what this book can mean for a historian. That says something about how difficult it is to separate the problematic aspects of this book (the arrogant and polemical tone) from the real content. Because Taleb does have something to say for those who look at the past. This felt like it was trying to be the next The Tipping Point or Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything and just failed spectacularly, on all counts. Most importantly, perhaps, was that it was dull and a chore to read. In the little footnotes suggesting a chapter was unneccessary for a nontechnical reader and could be skipped (read: you are too dumb to understand this chapter, so don't even bother), like Chapter 15, I gladly took his advice because it meant one less chapter to slog through. I finished it out of a perverse desire to finish things, nothing more. Babitz was born in Hollywood, California, the daughter of Mae, an artist, and Sol, a classical violinist on contract with 20th Century Fox.Her father was of Russian Jewish descent and her mother had Cajun (French) ancestry.Babitz's parents were friends with the composer Igor Stravinsky, who was her godfather.Interesting how the author growing up in Lebanon, tipping from a peaceful equilibrium into civil war, tells his story of the world disregarding improbable events through oversimplification and overreliance on the bell curve Taleb 2007 PROLOGUE p.xxvii, Taleb call this human tendency the narrative fallacy: we seem to enjoy stories, and we seem to want to remember stories for their own sake. Ultimately, our world and future are unknowable and unpredictable because of various factors, including:

A key difference between Mediocristan and Extremistan is the scalability. Something is scalable if it can grow exponentially with little/no additional resources. A massage therapist is a non-scalable profession since he/she can only serve so many clients in a day. However, a singer in the digital age is a scalable profession since he/she can perform a song once, record and disseminate it widely. Scalability can create vast inequalities, extremities and winner-takes-all situations. Top singers earn vastly more than average singers, even though they aren’t proportionately more talented.The inherently unpredictable nature of dynamical systems and variables that behave in inconsistent or nonlinear ways With the rapid advance of technology—computer chips, cellular networks, the Internet—it stands to reason that our predictive capabilities too are advancing. But consider how few of these groundbreaking advances in technology were themselves predicted. For example, no one predicted the Internet, and it was more or less ignored when it was created. The combination of the 2 sets of factors above means that: humans are terrible at prediction, yet we keep making predictions without realizing how frequently we’re off the mark. Taleb calls this the “scandal of prediction”. I put this book down after the first chapter, but thought I would give it another chance, that I was being unfair. When I read the second chapter (which is a metaphor for what Taleb thinks is him) I puked in my shirt. This man is the most conceited person I think I've discovered through reading his garbage hypothesis. If I met Taleb, I would recommend that he read some other theories on random variables (why does he use Gaussian distribution as the only example of random distribution?), systems theory, and the scientific theory. He apparently was sleeping though these discussions.