THE BLACK SWAN

Taleb, Nassim (2007) the black swan: the impact of the highly improbable, New York: Random House

He spits. He laughs. He makes up terms, but Taleb delivers. This is one of the few books to come along and question our entire perception of reality from the perspective of science.

Best of all, this is not an anti-intellectual screed from a no- nothing.  Nassim Taleb is a  pit trader on Wall Street, a derivative analyst, and a university professor with a PhD from an excellent university. His doctorate is in uncertainty and probability. This book is already a best seller and his last book was translated into 20 different languages.

The greatest error of science is the Gaussian Bell curve. Harkening back to the orderly theories of Plato, the bell curve states that most of us, most of the time fall into the middle. That makes sense with height. After looking all over the world, we believe that we know the smallest human and the tallest. Here, science as we know it today fits

From the measures we construct averages, medians, variations that are standardized and work them into hard number ratio oriented science .We may even construct a regression analysis and tests of significance.  Anything that falls out the Platonic fold is considered “noise” “outliers” “fringe” or some other negative rationalization. Alas, the world is an orderly place.

The hell it is! Let’s take 100 people and do a bell cure on them with their ability to climb a mountain. And to make things more real, we do know everything there is to know about them and their ability to climb and help others  to do so. Not only that but numerous other groups have climbed this mountain and there is a nice restaurant at the top because the backside of the mountain has a road. It has been climbed so many times before. How many make it to the top? An unpredicted avalanche occurs and all perish. How does the bell curve help us? It doesn’t.  

Taleb marches us through history, philosophy, social and physical sciences, and related areas. Then he tells us that WE CAN NOT PREDICT THE FUTURE. Science will help us to walk along with new findings and support. We can see that some strategies are better than others, but we can not stop BLACK SWANS.  Much of what we do is based on chance. Pre-Taleb science is a Gaussian Wonderland. We now enter the world of Mandelbrot which is the reality we face based on yes, hard work and a cautious life with selected risks, but the rest like millions of dollars, fame, and numerous other outcomes are chance.

Taleb spends the first part of the book on criticizing current science. He then discusses issues dealing with prediction and last on extremes in the world.  The most arrogant thing one human can say to another is “I‘ll see you tomorrow!” Really?” I hope to see you

tomorrow “is closer to reality or “I will see you tomorrow, God willing” are acceptable.

Taleb admits but doesn’t advertise that we really need both sciences that of Carl Gauss and the other of Renoit Mandelbrot. Further, we need science especially if we spend more time on collecting evidence than theorizing and looking for evidence to support the theory. He is not opposed to religion either as long as his faith has room for his libertarianism.

Last, Taleb is the first to note that many things that he says will probably be incorporated by science, but forgotten by nearly everyone. We crave order. Taleb reminds us that we do not have it at times. There is a BLACK SWAN in many people’s horizons. We don’t like that. This is the best compliment to chaos theory and it’s explanation of catastrophic change.

Prof. Joel Snell

Kirkwood College