[lit-ideas] Black Swans Anyone?
- From: "John McCreery" <john.mccreery@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx, Anthro-L <ANTHRO-L@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2007 15:55:19 +0900
Just posted the following on Savage Minds. Thought some here might
find it interesting.
--------
I wonder if anyone here but me is reading Nassim Nicholas Taleb (2007)
_The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable?_ Taleb's central
thesis is devastating for all of the social "sciences" but not in the
ponderous manner of German philosophers running on about subjectivity.
The description of the author on the inside back cover reads,
Nassim Nicholas Taleb has devoted his life to immersing himself in
problems of luck,
uncertainty, probability, and knowledge. Part literary essayist,
part empiricist, part
non-nonsense mathematical trader, he is currently taking a break by
serving as the
Dean's Professor in the Sciences of Uncertainty at the University
of Massachusetts
at Amherst. His last book, the bestseller Fooled by Randomness, has
been published
in twenty languages. Taleb lives mostly in New York.
His thesis, briefly summarized, is that human beings are, by nature,
inclined to oversimplify and thus to ignore the black swans, i.e.,
unpredictable or, sometimes even unthinkable, events that are, in
fact, the major shapers of both individual lives and history writ
large. We tell ourselves stories that reflect our assumptions and may
even appear logical given those assumptions. But rare, indeed, are
those like the late Karl Popper, the financier George Soros, or Taleb
himself, empirical skeptics who practice the basic scientific
discipline of constantly seeking to falsify what they believe and do
not waste time trying to rationalize the unexpected when it does
occur.
From Taleb's perspective this critique applies not only to humanists
and other qualitative researchers who make up retrospective stories to
explain what they encounter. It applies with equal force to
quantitative researchers who assume normal distributions and exclude
outliers from their data. Taken seriously, Taleb's critique implies
that most of what most "scholars" do is predictably mostly nonsense,
post hoc ergo propter hoc "analysis" that neither predicts the future
nor adequately explains the past.
Taleb's argument is not ethnographic, though it does reflect his
personal experience as the descendant of a prominent Lebanese
Greek-Syriac family brought up to believe in the natural harmony of
the ethnic groups making up Lebanon—before, that is, the Lebanese
civil war—and a trader who has made a comfortable personal fortune
that allows him to pursue academic pursuits without having to worry
about tenure committees and deans. It is, I suggest, anthropological
in an older, four-field sense, spanning as it does evolutionary
biology, cognitive science and cognitive psychology, historiography
and a good deal of classical philosophy that appears to have been read
in the original languages. It has, in this respect, a positively
Boasian sweep.
Highly recommended as a source of intellectual challenge.
--
John McCreery
The Word Works, Ltd., Yokohama, JAPAN
Tel. +81-45-314-9324
http://www.wordworks.jp/
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