On black swans, markets and experts
Notes on ‘The Black Swan’ by Nicholas Nassim Taleb (2007)
(Ed. This piece was first published at cityofsound.com on 1 January 2009.)
This is a book that I almost didn't read. Like The Long Tail or Here Comes Everybody, for instance. Both books I own but don't feel the need to read, feeling that I've already having experienced much of what lies inside. This betrays my own arrogance I suppose, and I've no doubt I've missed a few profound insights this way. But given the choice I prefer to read about things I don't know, books that don't promise to back up my existing ideas. Then there are those like Gladwell's Blink or The Tipping Point, books whose title more or less says it all. A quick rifle through the pages of these books in an airport bookshop—in that peculiar pre-flight mode of having no time and time on your hands—is enough to get the gist, and speculate as to their point.
The Black Swan almost fell into this category, but a recommendation by Paul Schütze and a few others meant that I did pick it up —at Melbourne Airport, natch—and consumed it voraciously.
It's not so much a popular science book as a popular statistics book, not a genre I would've thought probable to emerge, and thus something of a black swan in itself. Black swans are, according to that back…
