Tuesday, June 10, 2008
Nassim Nicholas Taleb: the prophet of boom and doom
Bryan Appleyard in The Sunday Times, June 1, 2008, on the author of The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable.
To explain: black swans were discovered in Australia. Before that, any reasonable person could assume the all-swans-are-white theory was unassailable. But the sight of just one black swan detonated that theory. Every theory we have about the human world and about the future is vulnerable to the black swan, the unexpected event. We sail in fragile vessels across a raging sea of uncertainty.¶ 6/10/2008 08:13:00 PM
