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Review of Taleb's The Black Swan, by David Aldous
- drallison 16y agoAldous's review and Falkenstein's review (cited here in the comments) are both worth a read as are Taleb's books. There is plenty of hubris to share amongst the three. Taleb's observations are accessible, provocative and cautionary and worth pondering.
- chunkbot 16y agoI particularly enjoyed Mr. Falkenstein's review of Mr. Taleb's Black Swan. http://www.efalken.com/papers/Taleb2.html http://www.efalken.com/papers/Taleb2.html It's a long but illuminating read: ---- Martin Gardner wrote a popular column for Scientific American, and in the process received a lot of mail from ‘cranks’ telling him about perpetual motion machines and the like. So he wrote a book called Fads and Fallacies. In the book he describes "cranks" as having five invariable characteristics: 1. They have a profound intellectual superiority complex. 2. They regard other researchers as idiotic, and always operate outside the peer review. 3. They believe there is a campaign against their ideas, a campaign compared with the persecution of Galileo or Pasteur. 4. They attack only the biggest theories and scientific figures. 5. They coin neologisms.