White Swan, Gray Swan, Black Swan - A critique

Black Swan is truly wonderful book from a man that is pushing himself to think, that is being brave enough to criticize and challenge the orthodoxy. It is an amazing thing from great thinkers that they are often breaking down barriers, they are having to challenge well accepted ways of thinking that they forget to be their own critics and talk about the dangers in their way of thinking. They don't have the time as all their energy is being used in breaking down barriers.

The Danger in Taleb's book is if we can't learn anything useful about the past, it is all stories he says and we can't predict the future so why should we even try. There is a great danger in this everything is a matter of luck, down to chance. Without doubt luck plays an enormous part in life, without doubt we fall for what he calls the narrative fallacy in terms of wanting to put stories around situations when perhaps there isn't one.

He forgets to mention or think about deep time. Ultimately the fate of mankind is predictable we will become extinct like most animals on his planet. We will all die, there will be earth quakes, there will be wars, so in some ways life is incredibly predictable the problem is in the time frames and then applying it to his first reason for investigating this area which is investing.

We should accept that we can't predict when things will happen, over the medium and short we are useless but over the very long with generalizations we are more accurate. He also doesn't talk about the fact there are patterns in life, there are trends, they change and evolve on an incredibly fluid basis, we have issues so really he falls for his own mechanical training.He is unhappy stepping outside of mathematical models and thinking about the patterns that exist in the world and how they move fluidly.

Some people spot these patterns and they use them and they are successful, sometimes the pattern doesn't turn out to be as expected, however, they still exist. The Germans knew the future was around tanks after the first world war, they guessed correctly, it was a correct prediction. Of course something else could have happened, a black swan however, they were correct.

Geronimo hiding in his last refuge with his twelve comrades in Mexico must have known all through his life it was inevitable that the white man was coming. The white man had technology and numbers it was inevitable. Of course a black swan in an epidemic could have come along but still there are patterns and trends to life which some of the Indians must surely have seen.

So in a way Taleb is a child of the thing he criticizes, he criticizes it beautifully with maths, he is beautifully read a wonderful mind, however, he fails to realize that life is full of patterns and the key point is in fact they are tenuous moving, difficult to catch on to prone to black swans and the future can only be guessed at except in certain areas over the very long term. Yet the patterns still exist, there are explanations to events we just don't always want to see them or report them and we make mistakes we are human.

In fact we should accept more vagueness, we should accept a lack of certainty we should acknowledge that sometimes maths is no use, sometimes we should trust fussy, open minded narrative and the human minds ability to spot patterns. They are prone to black swans, they will not be right but patterns do exist and there are reasons and explanations they are just not always the ones we like.

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I don't have f**k**g time, I have to work for a living, if you really must go buy something on Geronimo. If you must know about the tanks go get something on tanks and the first world war. Put Black Swan into Google.Happy?