incomplete thoughts about The Black Swan

[eirias]

So I am reading this book, which my in-laws kindly got me for Fake Christmas (so long had passed since Real Christmas that I'd forgotten I asked for it). The book is about the effect of, as an economist friend put it, low-probability, high-cost events: things whose impact dwarfs the events we can predict, making prediction itself a fool's errand. I am so far really blown away by how he's taken a topic and ideas that are very exciting to me and encased them in a book that deeply annoys me.

• The author is, simply put, a jerk. This is his attitude: "Look at me! I'm a Real Intellectual! Not one of those effete morons who have tenured professorships and publish in peer-reviewed journals, oh no, that's not for me! Tenure is for charlatans! Peer review is for sheeple! Editors enforce mediocrity! The mark of truly Novel and Important ideas is that you develop them on long walks with brilliant people and then publish them on an ugly website!"
  
• Ahem. Anyway, while discussing most of the social sciences in a way that veers past provocation into simple bad manners -- for instance, liberal use of scare-quotes, as when describing economics as a "profession" -- he inexplicably spares psychology. I genuinely don't understand this; I think that to the extent that the criticisms he levels at social science are apt, the judgment and decision-making world he loves has to cope with them also. I'd love to ask him to clarify, but see exhibit A, and also it appears from his site that he's getting a lot of email.

Perhaps I will flesh out my thoughts more thoroughly when I have finished the book, but I just had to vent a bit.

Comments

[eirias.livejournal.com]

It does seem to be a common opinion. I asked one of our program officers in a relevant field if he knew anything about the book and he said he'd once heard Taleb speak and had an impression similar to mine.

Also, reviews of his book seem to fall into two broad classes: (1) "The man is brilliant!" (2) "The man is an arrogant asshat." With most pop science books I really don't think you see nearly so many of (2) even when it's true.

The book, by the way, improved slightly in the last few chapters as he got marginally more specific -- although every time I'd get in a groove of enjoying myself he'd pop out some miserable thing that would annoy me (for instance in one spot he says that he imagines his detractors as "noisy ape[s] with little personal control"). But overall it seemed a bit thin; through most of the book I wanted more idea-explication and less self-indulgent personal narrative.