Review Title:
The Forbidden Fruit grows only on the Impossible tree
My opinion on Nassim Nicholas Taleb is based on a single 3 minute conversation I heard three days ago, May 8, on the BBC program Business Daily. In it Taleb explained what "The Black Swan" was all about.
Out of curosity, I also visited his webpage. My eye caught his unusually refreshing comment on being previously caliberated # 5 on the NYT best sellers' list, as well as his paranthetical admonitions to his "remarks and comments" link.
Towards the end of the May 8 BBC interview, Taleb validly mentioned the disaster of the Soviet Union that chose to plan itself on knowledge rather than the more desirable 'ignorance'. Perhaps, this opinionated 'review', too, will be acceptable to the author because it is offered with large quantities of ignorance about his thoughts and ideas.
His latest opus, The Black Swan, is clearly relevant to his cultural domain; and, considering that this domain 'crusades' around the globe energetically - often with disastrous success - proselytizing the various gospels of 'democracy', freedoms', 'markets' capitalism' one can argue that it is also germane to the 'formatting' of the guiding minds that presume to conduct the affairs on this planet.
But considering that new players (notably China and India with their non-eurocentric languages, cultures and cognitive stances) who, in fact, happen to be more ancient, are economically impacting on this domain, we need to revisit the conditioned reflexes that have hitherto been guiding it.
Thanks to the Greek-German philosophy and thought, rationality, for example, is perceived to be in a kind of linear strait-jacket of sequenced causes and consequences. This has been shown to be highly inadequate and, in fact, irrational. It is for this reason that 'lateral' thinkers and 'Freakonomists' have sought to garb Taleb's 'randomness' in acceptable, precessional clothing.
Half a lifetime ago I had expressed my insights in these aphorisms:
REALITY CONFOUNDS EXPERIENCE and that
SERENDIPITY IS A GREAT HUMBLING BLOCK.
There is, therefore a bigger, more humbling picture that makes me reach out for a paradox and say, "Taleb is right in the essentials, but his argument appears to be flawed in the fundamentals." He can speak of - and listeners can benefit from his thoughts on - Randomness and Black Swans - but hardly any life, other then a miniscule segment of the human species, is apparently exercised by such things because it is more non-evaluatingly accepting of 'what is'.
Most humans, too, still show an affinity for the poetic than the factual version of what envelops their existence. It is in this spirit that I honor and, perhaps, advise Nassim Nicholas Taleb with these recalled words:
"Whelped by the 'wretched woman who counts her periods - mathematics - those sciences exclude, eliminate and terminate with prejudice. In the Empire of Reality, where abstractions casually crystalize and fantasies freely roam, the Forbidden Fruit grows only on the Impossible tree."
Vyôm Akhil 4:50 PM (IST) 5/11/2007
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