Tag Archives: Nassim Taleb

book report, Black Swan (Nassim Taleb)

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A book I’ve heard about for at least a decade, but only now got down to reading after my Kindle broke and I decided to get into my many many unread paper books. It’s a great read, albeit one best taken in small doses; you certainly could read the whole thing in a few afternoons but it’s better to read a few pages then think, I think.

Taleb’s central point seems to be that our humanly-devised models of reality cannot predict everything, and we can’t even determine the limits of our competence; so we don’t know what we can’t predict – at the best, we can assume there are things we can’t predict, which stand on the margins of our science like sea serpents drawn on maps – here be dragons, Hic sunt dracones on the Hunt-Lenox globe.

It is therefore imprudent to build systems which will fail too heavily upon contact with the unexpected.

Taleb’s style is not for everyone. He leads to philosophical points through personal anecdotes, usually about unshaven, hairy-handed working men from the 2nd or 3rd-world who can barely read but are smarter than all the Harvard PhDs; there are several anecdotes about Taleb at conferences where he outrages academics with his blunt manner & wisdom. I don’t really mind the near-constant sense of Taleb’s ego, as he has the ballsiness, achievement, and intellect to justify a certain self-satisfaction; I merely withdraw from his worldliness, his lack of a spiritual dimension. He’s an exemplar of Rene Guenon’s Reign of Quantity, a man who sees everything in quantitative terms; thus missing the element of Fate.

There is nonetheless a great deal to enjoy, many passages I marked, e.g. :

In real life you do not know the odds; you need to discover them, and the sources of uncertainty are not defined.

and

The notion of future mixed with chance, not a deterministic extension of your perception of the past, is a mental operation that our mind cannot perform. 

and

Likewise, do not try to predict precise Black Swans – it tends to make you more vulnerable to the ones you did not predict.

Taleb’s worldview is alien to my own; he’s one of these rootless cosmopolitans who lives in major cities – could live nowhere else – even as he talks about his ancestral hometown as the source of his wisdom and clarity. He would probably regard anyone who prefers to be rooted among his folk as a provincial loser and a racist, as if for all his intelligence he cannot quite bear to scrutinise the magic R word (or he doesn’t want to forfeit his conferences and interview requests and literary celebrity).

There is a slight sense of emptiness about his great intellect and learning – I want to ask, what is all this for? why be so smart? just to make more money? But that’s also testament to his greatness – were he a mediocre pop-science writer, the question would not arise.

understanding misunderstanding

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I was reading Nassim Taleb’s Black Swan on my balcony, in the few hours of direct sunlight I can enjoy,

and found myself repeatedly baffled by his mathematical/statistical explanations. To be fair, Taleb provides warning notes like “the non-mathematical reader can skip to the end of this section”, however he also strives to make it explicable enough to the layman.

Each time my brain came up short, I read on with disengaged gears for a while, then realised I hadn’t taken anything in, and paused. I then went back and re-read, to identify and analyse my mental breaking point. It was always a term that Taleb hadn’t defined and a layman couldn’t possible figure out from the context. I realised I couldn’t make head nor tails of it and just read on to the next patch of firm ground.

I would estimate my IQ as firmly midwit, i.e. about 105-110. I have neither aptitude for, nor interest in, logic or mathematics or abstractions. My cognitive resources are definitely limited, in relation to my ambitions & interests; however, I often outperform people who are clearly smarter than me, I think because of some ingrained habits of thought & study: one of which is, when perplexed, to ask Why don’t I understand? What don’t I understand?

There is a great difference between casting the book aside, and analysing the specific point of difficulty. For example, with Plato my problem is broader, more general: I just don’t get his point, as often there is no point, just Socrates babbling and leering about wisdom at some adolescent boy, and the reader is supposed to be positively struck by it all. With Taleb, it’s always just a question of terminology.

I would recommend the exercise of questioning one’s own cognitive limits: for one thing, instead of feeling utterly retarded, one can identify a specific difficulty; and for another, it most likely sharpens whatever intellect one has.

Plague Journal, March 27

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The weather here is very unItalian, cold, windy, grey. When the sun breaks I go onto the balcony to read, at present Purgatorio and Black Swan. I would kind of agree with Bruce Charlton that Nassim Taleb seems “consumed with pride” but then this isn’t incongruous with high talent/genius. Taleb is a good read, even if I sometimes find him a bit of a know-it-all in his Socratic “know-nothing-at-all” pose.

I just saw this video by Coach Red Pill:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jLeakZG7Yig

I’m not as smart as Coach Red Pill of course, and certainly don’t know as much about statistics & forecasts, but it seems to me that he’s making a mistake – he’s projecting a linear (if that makes sense for exponential growth) progression, and saying that major infrastructural services will collapse at such-and-such a point; however, my understanding, as a numerical illiterate, is that things rarely progress in a predictable and stable fashion. For example, as Anonymous Conservative has observed, the R0 (infection rate) will be higher at first as no one is taking precautions, and the toilet-seat-lickers & Springbreakers cull themselves from the herd; but then the ‘rona will meet stubborn, Marine-like resistance, an increasingly stubborn resistance as finally people walk about in full Hazmat suits and bleach spray.

In every real world system, the situation is dynamic as the actors react to stimuli; even the wise cannot see all ends, as Gandalf would say, and Taleb is, I suspect, right to criticise the so-called masters of the universe who sell themselves as prescient rather than haphazardly lucky. I think of this via the offside rule in football – it was originally intended to stop an attacker lurking by the enemy goals, but the defending team can actually provoke an opposing striker into violating the rule, to the defendant’s advantage. Every rule will provoke unexpected responses from the actors within the game, and these responses will trigger additional responses from other actors, until you have a hurly burly largely unmediated by the initial parameters.

Not to mention Black Swan phenomena, which are such precisely because they cannot really be predicted; merely, perhaps, imagined.