Krishna
Has a startling statement : None of the major advances in science and even major world events (think 9/11) was anticipated or planned for. Yet humans do not seem to learn that there will always be events that will be unanticipated. Black Swan is the symbol. Until Russian swans were noticed, no one thought there would be any swans other than white. Repeated observations established a ‘rule’ that was taken as sacrosanct and so when the exception turned up, it was mind boggling and everything needed to be revised.
True you don’t know what you don’t know, but you should be prepared to accept that your theories cannot account for everything. We refuse to learn that we cannot learn everything!
The book opens, after a longish preface, with his ancestors living in what is now Lebanon. His roots are Greco Syrian and the place was what we would now call a ‘melting pot’ of various ethnic, religious mix of people living in harmony. One Black Swan event swiftly turned this earthly paradise to hell on earth when the amity broke down and the civil war started.
He talks of extreme events (extremistan) that can produce black swans and where a sample may not even come close to representing the average (example - wealth) and mediocrity city where an average of a sample is fairly representative (eg height)
His explanation of the same event being a Black Swan from a turkey’s point of view - being fed and treated royally for years until that fateful day before Thanksgiving - and an ordinary event from the butcher’s - it happens every year - is telling and strikes home the point forcefully.
He also talks about the fallacy of human decisions - going up the escalator to a posh gym and heading straight to the Stairmaister for ‘exercise’.
But you know what? There are two issues with the book when you read it - he repeats the same ideas and he also does it in a semi dry way. Yes, the ideas are interesting and the author is justly famous for it. But he lacks the narrative power of a Gladwell or a Bryson.
It also looks like he has a huge chip on his shoulder for all the influential people - as indicated by his frequent how moronic the investment bankers, the politicians and the company bosses are. He admits that he made his money in the same area with the same lack of skills as the others, so he is not doing a Trump and claiming to be smarter than all of them. He is derisive of those who have ‘arrived’ and have to keep up appearances by wearing suits in sweltering heat and attend operas even if they are really not into it, for the sake of appearances.
He calls the iconic Sydney Opera house (correctly) as a white elephant that cost several times its original budget and says that this is done by an architect to ‘impress other architects’.
Overall, you are not drawn into the arguments (like, for instance Yuval Noah Harari) and just read with a sense of detachment and frequently realize that you are reading the same concept again and again in portions of the book. This is the trouble with writing a large book with a single embedded idea, I think.
He talks about the undervalued philosopher Henri Poincare, whose works were full of spelling errors (which Henri disdained to correct) as the ultimate philosopher who recognized the concept that Nassim calls The Black Swan so many years ago. In his descriptions, he talks about how Poincare repeated himself in his books but instead of seeming redundant, it lends an additional authenticity to the arguments. Seeing that this book is full of repetitions and revisiting of one or two ideas, you wonder whether this one is deliberate, which somehow makes it more awful.
The author makes some strong arguments about how most influential - today you will call them disruptive - inventions were all accidental. And another good point about why it is hard to predict the inventions or technologies of tomorrow because, if you could, you would be working on them today and so they will no longer be future technology.
Another good, if related, point he makes is that the moment you consider people as those with free will and therefore subject to considerations other than ‘maximizing their benefit’, you then realize that all those optimizing models of economists are not representing reality. I personally think that the law of averages still makes them useful but Nasim argues against the entire methodology, the basis of which I do not fully comprehend. Yes, from the point of view of predicting Black Swans they are as useless as any other model but in themselves they are not completely useless. If the fundamental argument is ‘You can’t predict major events in the future and therefore any planning on your part is pointless’, then how do you plan for a period of ‘non Black Swans’ if you abandon all plans? His seems to be the ‘extreme agile’ principle followed in software of ‘Go; do; react; amend’ if I am not misinterpreting the direction.
In addition, he seems to have overly dogmatic and arrogant views on many things - the false conviction that he accuses other ‘experts’ of having. I will give you an example. But first a caveat : I am no fan of Windows or foe of Apple - I am technology agnostic. He claims that though Mac computers are vastly superior, it lost out to Microsoft ‘out of pure luck’. That is bullshit. The reason for Microsoft’s success is its pricing. It was available cheap and without the walled garden approach of forcing everyone to buy from the ‘approved Apple’ ecosystem. True, it was not open source in those days and Microsoft itself tried to kill competition (in its monopoly days of crushing Netscape) but there were many competing products on its platform from innumerable developers and Apple’s diversity was and is far limited. I do agree that the style and the rock steady stability of Apple products are still better but it is still very expensive and does not reach enough people to be a viable alternative - even if Apple’s “my software or bust” approach is removed.
He goes into the Mediocristan world described by the ‘hated’ Bell Curve and the Extremistan world (of Black Swans) described by Mandelbrotian fluctuations. There are repetitions here and really boring mathematics - he warns you to skip those sections to be fair to him.
What you cannot skip is the angry tone against everything he disagrees with, the slavish admiration of those who he agrees with, his diatribes against Nobel prize committee and almost everything else and his arrogant tone of being right, even though he repeats the same (admittedly valid) idea ad infinitum to fill this entire book.
At the end you come away with having learnt one good lesson but having been with a cantankerous uncle who is dangerously angry with the world, prone to eruptions of anger at a moment’s notice, inordinately vainglorious on how he ‘has been there and done that’ as a successful investment banker and so ‘knows what the idiots are talking about and knows that they are blind’ and therefore a whole lot of exhaustion along with that single lesson that could have been established in a five page essay.
2/10
= = Krishna