Have you ever checked a reference from a book? I don't think hardly anyone ever does, really. Much less than reading an article on the web (when it's just a lin

Have you ever checked a reference from a book? I don't think hardly anyone ever does, really. Much less than reading an article on the web (when it's just a link to click). I did, once, for an anecdote in Black Swan about statisticians goofing a relatively trivial statistics riddle. Something I found a tad hard to believe, plus the book had been a bit thin on theory[0] so I was itching for some meat. After locating the "cited" paper, it turned out Taleb changed some major "details" to fit his narrative, claiming something entirely different than what the research actually investigated (roughly: they weren't statisticians, but psychologists picked at a psychology convention, and the quiz question was not at all trivial, more like a tough exam test question, and not even vaguely similar or of the same "shape" as the story's riddle--making exactly zero elements of his anecdote actually truthful). It is harder to check a book's bibliography, though. Sometimes the cited paper isn't publicly available, or sometimes the author cites a book you don't have (often their own books), and really in this day and age it's a little bit much to ask your audience to make a trip to the library just to check if an author isn't taking an extreme artistic license or even just making shit up. I got a bit disillusioned after this tale. And definitely a lot more skeptical about "these types of book", you know the kind that weaves a lovely narrative "supported" by actual (pop) science research. The juicier the anecdotes, the more skeptical you should be. And apparently this is still a pitfall even if the general premise of the book is right! (the core idea behind Black Swan I pretty much agree with--it just happens so that the very first reference I picked at random to check, turned out to be full of shit) [0] One of Taleb's previous works, Fooled by Randomness, is roughly about the same topic, but goes into (a little bit) more technical detail. I enjoyed it a lot better. Also, it doesn't feel the need to make a stab at the French every third page or so (something that really puzzled me in Black Swan, maybe it was an in-joke between him and Mandelbrot?).