Beware the Black Swan

Nassim Taleb's book, The Black Swan, is all the rage at the moment, and I can't help but feel the irony, given that his message is loud and clear - stop looking for stuff that isn't there. So we are being recommended a book that advises us not to adopt advice? This sounds like free money to me, and, as always, I wish I'd had the gall to write it first.

The other amusing aspect lies in how badly the newspaper reviewers cope with the concept. Mostly, they wither away under the sheer mass of their own lack of imagination. In The Guardian, Oliver Burkeman even kicked off with an eroneous criticism of Felix Dennis (for Dennis is well known to value luck above all else in explaining his 'arrival').

And luck, of course, is just another way of labelling the things that happen to us and what we do about them. If it works to our advantage, it is good; otherwise bad; unless it is neither one nor the other, in which case it becomes fate. Things happen to us pretty much entirely without reason, though that is not to say that they are inexplicable.

Being able to explain why things happen is comforting; not knowing is scary; finding out is paramount; making things up often does as well. So knowledge and belief are never that far apart, which is why, of course, Richard Dawkins is very comfortable as an anti-theist. It's his belief system and he's happy with it. Try believing in absolutely nothing and you get very glum, believe me. I've tried.

Nassim Taleb is an ex-Wall street trader and writer who points out the seemingly obvious: life is unpredictable. And he has made a financial killing from this tenet. Surely there is more to it? Well, yes and no - what Taled reminds us of is true and we know it, but he also points out the extent to which we try and ignore the fact, and that is interesting and funny, mostly because it all seems so blindingly obvious.

The idea is basically this - "Swans are white" seems like a true statement. Mostly, it is. But black swans DO exist, and imagine the surprise of those western explorers who first found one in Australia. The truth is overturned and people are taken aback.

Taleb takes this concept and applies it to our everyday world - we cannot predict the future. It's a popular theory now (see also D Rumsfeld's unknown unknowns). Taleb even used it to his advantage in playing the stock market, although no-one seems very clear how. Apparently he simply stopped trying to predict eventualities and bought entirely at random. I could see this working as well as, but how it actually allowed him to profit while others failed is not explained.

Neither does it seem very explicable to suggest, as Taleb does, that consuming news items actually reduces your knowledge because the information flow isn't filtered for irrelevance. Well, what does that matter? And where is the perfect knowledge set anyway?

The strength of Taleb's argument lies in his merciless attack on hindsight and faith masquerading as fact, and in his championing of us admitting our shortcomings and accepting that, actually, we have no idea what is going on a lot of the time, nor why. I guess that is why journos get excited by the subject.

The rest of it is hogwash, because, of course, we can, if we are careful, figure stuff out and even predict what will most likely happen next (that fire will almost certainly burn your hand if you stick it in there). And we also are very good at figuring stuff out and then forgetting about it. I wonder what Taleb would make of Jung's collective conscious? Or finches and milk bottles?

Finally, I was extremely entertained by the thought of the hideous historian Niall Ferguson having his Black Swannish approach to thinking about our past indirectly described as 'unhistorical shit' by EP Thompson. He was right, you know.