I recently read The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. In a nutshell, it’s about how improbably events (“black swans”) can be completely unexpected by people who think that events follow typical probabilities, and the mess that results. I enjoyed it, although Taleb won’t be winning award for humility anytime soon.
The main point of the book is the world can be divided into two places: Mediocristan, where things follow a typical bell curve distribution and things that are far outside the mean do not exist (such as people who are 20 feet tall or weigh 300 pounds), and Extremistan, where the improbable can and do exist (stock market crashes, 9/11). Too many people believe things are subject to Mediocristan when, in fact, they are members of Extremistan, and so they underestimate the probability of extreme events.
I was especially drawn in by the part about Platonicism, which Taleb ascribed to small thinkers in Mediocristan. I admit that I am, by and large, a believer in Plato’s forms, and I can sometimes have problems dealing with things that are not nice representation of those forms that I think should exist. Unsurprisingly, this has caused problems in the messy world we live in. I’d like to say that I’m far better at handling these events than I used to be, but I can always be better.
If there’s one problem with the book, aside from the frequent grandiosity, it’s that there is precious little information about dealing with black swan events. Obviously, being improbable, it’s next to impossible to predict these events, but the advice given (be conservative on the downside and aggressive on the upside) isn’t all that earth-shattering.
If you are mildly interesting in the subject of improbable events, then there are at least a few chapters you can take advantage of. It certainly made me think of probabilities in a different way, which is the point.