It seems that whenever I recommend The Black Swan to a friend, the response is “Yes, people have been saying I should read it”, or words to that effect (Rosa and I first heard it recommended by a speaker at a WEF meeting in Dalian, China). In The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, Nicolas Taleb’s theme is the illusion of predictability in a radically unpredictable world, and the fallacy of applying statistical methods to manage risk in realms where most of the last century’s variance occurred in a single day. Although he focuses on the social and financial world, his advice on “how to live in a world we don’t understand very well” seems equally applicable to the unpredictable consequences of predictable revolutions in technology.
Rather than recommend The Black Swan again (17 weeks on the New York Times Bestseller list, translated into 27 languages, etc., etc.), I’ll point you to Taleb’s recent essay at Edge, titled “The Fourth Quadrant: A Map of the Limits of Statistics”. Like his book it’s far from dry, and reading it requires some tolerance for bombast.
By the way, Taleb is a financial trader, and I’ve heard that he made a lot of money in recent months.
