I recently reread 'The Black Swan' by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Much of what he says in three hundred pages could've been said as well in a hundred. He is exasperatingly ignorant and downright condescending about the insights of modern science, game theory and extreme value theory. He ties himself in contradictory knots about epistemology and empiricism. Which explains why when I read it the first time, I felt it to be a waste of my time. But his main point about our ignorance of high-impact, low probability events is more or less true. We overestimate our ability to predict and serially assign lower than warranted probabilities to extreme events.
The Black Swan and Oil Markets
The Black Swan and Oil Markets
The Black Swan and Oil Markets
I recently reread 'The Black Swan' by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Much of what he says in three hundred pages could've been said as well in a hundred. He is exasperatingly ignorant and downright condescending about the insights of modern science, game theory and extreme value theory. He ties himself in contradictory knots about epistemology and empiricism. Which explains why when I read it the first time, I felt it to be a waste of my time. But his main point about our ignorance of high-impact, low probability events is more or less true. We overestimate our ability to predict and serially assign lower than warranted probabilities to extreme events.