Being in free time mode today I decided to continue reading Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Black Swan book. Nassim Taleb is about as arrogant as I am, so I’m enjoying reading his book a lot.
I for example enjoyed reading how he’s pissed at today’s academic philosophers for having become exercisers in linguistics rather than getting to the point of thinking. Nassim Taleb himself needed about 350 pages of text to basically say that the Gauss curve is useless in extremistan, but usually useful in mediocristan, and that Mandelbrot’s fractals are a little bit more useful for extremistan. But not really.
Anyway, he also wrote things that we should consider thinking about. For example: We no longer believe in papal infallibility; we seem to believe in the infallibility of the Nobel prize winners. That’s a good point.
One more chapter and I’m relieved of this book. Apparently I enjoy the distress of reading Nassim Taleb’s books.
He’s going to tell me in this chapter how to deal with these highly improbable events that have a great impact, referred to as black swans. I have to congratulate Nassim Taleb for succeeding making me a hyperskeptic, which was a highly improbable event. But then again, being a software developer I’m into bottom-up acquisition of knowledge. Which means that for me it’s more easy to be Fat Tony, than to be Dr. John. You need to read the book’s chapter 17 to understand Fat Tony. I was quite a skeptic before I started reading the book. But not (always) about the kind of things Nassim Taleb asks us to be skeptic .