We love the tangible, the confirmation, the palpable, the real, the visible, the concrete, the known, the seen, the vivid, the visual, the social, the embedded, the emotionally laden, the salient, the stereotypical, the moving, the theatrical, the romanced, the cosmetic, the official, the scholarly sounding, the verbiage, the pompous, Gaussian economist, the mathematicized crap, the pomp, the Academic Francais, Harvard Business school, the Nobel Prize, the dark business suits with white shirts and Ferregammo ties, the lurid……
These are the concise painful words of Nicholas Taleb, in his philosophical meditation The Black Swan, which trashes the nature of unscientific projections; How do we know what lies around the corner? How do we mediate, prepare, console and prosecute? Simple answer. We can’t. Taleb is smart, well read, irreverent, tough and iconoclastic but guess what he’s vain and as we say in these parts a bit chippy about something cultural, something established, something that has nothing to do with him, all of which makes me like him and his book even more. The above quote is Taleb at his best, direct, uncompromising, full of a singular hate…magnificent stuff. The Black Swan is the unpredictable and in a world which the media paints as being entirely predictable it’s refreshing to read someone who writes that we should not listen to the broadcasters and forget about the journalists they are all full of shit….got it, agreed, affirmative, cancelled the papers, fuck the news!!!!