I learned from Black Swan about how pervasive power laws and fractals were in social/financial phenomena, and how the important the framing (i.e. the prior expe

I learned from Black Swan about how pervasive power laws and fractals were in social/financial phenomena, and how the important the framing (i.e. the prior expectations) of 'black swan' events are (black swan event for the turkey who gets beheaded, not for the farmer that does it every Thanksgiving). I'm a geophysicist and this stuff is our bread and butter, as a ton of risk and complexity theory applies to earthquakes (self-similarity, power laws, etc.) but I had never really made the connection to the human side of things, which I still thought about on a more atomic/psychological level than a systems level at that point. Since then I've read more widely in complexity, econ, etc., and while Taleb wasn't an introduction per se, or even that influential, I did learn some important things from him by virtue of reading him early on. Your friends might be in the same position. The book itself was fairly repugnant. The few interviews I've read since have been interesting in that you can watch him self-destruct. For example the Edge.org interview where he answers the question of 'what scientific idea needs to be retired' with 'standard deviation'. However, by far the best part of reading Black Swan (or some interview?) was his discussion about how he believed the body adjusted to regular but not random exercise, and therefore the best fitness strategy was to randomly break into a sprint when walking. I haven't been to NY since and would prefer not to but if I do go I really want to see him pinballing through bewildered pedestrians.