“ The author seems to fall into ludic fallacy(page 182) which he wants to dispel
page 14: I still do not understand why the author thinks that an educated person is supposed to guess better than a layman about the outcome of a war. In fact any person is as much expert in that endeavor as any other.
page 21: I still can not see the relationship between war and finance in the context.
for a philosopher examining problems in induction the boundary between true/false is not well drawn.
page 44: I wonder if he is naive. What does he expect in finance business, all reasonable people?. It is finances, it is almost expected that some people take unreasonable risks(with diabolical intentions sometimes) out of greed or out of wishful thinking. These factors are often excluded from his analysis.
I guess he also confuses the word "actuarial science" with "science". He frequently uses the word "science" for "finance" that has no roots in any of pure sciences, nor there are any independent mechanisms connecting the past and present.
From a person guarding against certainty it is ironical to see evolutionary psychology in use on page 53.
page 56: While talking about negative empiricism Taleb says "If I see someone kill I can be practically certain that he is a criminal". No, by no definition of "criminal/crime", killing necessarily implies crime (e.g. self-defense), all the while ignoring the gender bias. I do not want to be a killjoy here, but when accusing people of faulty logic in one paragraph, one can not afford to make an incorrect implication right in the next paragraph.
It is weird for a self-declared skeptical empiricist to resort to psychology while attacking mathematicians.
The references are not cited in the text, though listed in bibliography, which means its not clarified which piece is taken from which reference.
When the author generally ridiculed "fitting equations to something happened in the past" he swept all of cosmology into irrelevance with one stroke of pen.
page 87: We are social animals; hell is other people. // Nice quote
page 97: Got it wrong about hippo campus. This is where short term memory is translated into long term one.
He wants to attack actuarial mathematicians most of the time but ends up generalizing to all mathematicians. As a self-declared skeptical empiricist he is skeptical about truth in mathematics, what he does not understand is that even pure mathematics has engineering applications (e.g. control of hard drive motor). Nature does, to some extent, follow mathematics. This shows lack of depth in analysis.
page 107: Taleb criticizes "hardened by the gulag": The report is probably talking about psychological hardening which is supported by a neurobiological process described in "In search of Memory" by Eric Kandel. The author assumes it to be physiological hardening and refutes it with the rat example. In the next paragraph he calls himself philosopher.
page 129: In what Taleb describes "scientific mentality that is arrogantly called Enlightenment" agrees with Samuel Huntington's claims in The Clash of Civilizations that "the orthodox people do not share with the West the principles of Enlightenment".
page 129: He shouts "Life stands outside Platonic fold". No. pretty much all of engineering and many of pure sciences lie within and are verifiable and/or testable at the same time. These fields pretty much changed the society/culture for almost a century now.
page 154: Towards the end of the page - the author's question has geography in it and it is not surprising that the answers had that too, yet he complains about it.
page 182: He wanted to dispel Ludic fallacy and here is one instance he falls right into it. Talking about left and right handedness of people he brings Plato into picture, ridicules him and then says that the left and right handedness of molecules (stereo isomerism) matters considerably in this. There is no known evidence that stereo isomerism plays a role in this and he does not present any.
What he fails to realize is that for people money is not the most important aspect of life. It is important but only after family and relationships, so even if his analysis is right(I think it is) his calls may go unheeded.
He also does not realize that people, whatever profession they are in are partly there due to financial security and not always to do their jobs perfectly. If the system is staying afloat with Guassian approach they would not need to change it. If they are shown tangible benefits with some results of the fractal analysis they may listen to the author. After all, at least some are after money.
chapter 18: He complains why philosophers are not questioning financial experts when they invest their money. A philosopher's job is not about figuring out details of finance, it is about figuring out details in philosophy which may or may not interfere with finance. A philosopher need not necessarily act upon his/her own arguments.
page 296: If what the author says about uncertainty is assumed to be truth about uncertainty(I do), even then in the authors own words towards the end of book, people may not necessarily heed his advice, especially as author says he put lots of things like culture, before truth, let alone acting on the truth.
As the author puts earlier, the Black Swan helps in getting rid of a big player and benefiting masses; so why fight (even negative) Black Swan in the first place, (for nationalists) as long the money stays within the country.
The author really does not make it clear early in the book the boundary between what he is attacking and what he is defending. Since the author mentions Richard Dawkins' book The Blind Watchmaker, he can take a cue from Dawkins' books about defining the boundary strictly and at the beginning so that the reader stays focused during the reading. Only after reading half the book was the boundary clear to me.
He claims himself to be humble at times but there are times where he delivers unreasonable and unfair criticism, sometimes just jumping to conclusions, like the on page 107.
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pavan k wrote this review Monday, September 1 2008.
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