I just got back from a long series of airplane rides and
airport layovers (don’t ask – air travel has gotten to be a nightmare!) and so
I spent much of the time continuing my recent trend of re-reading significant books.
In this case I listened to an audiobook version of Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s 2007
book The
Black Swan. I have to report that listening to the book on audio gave
me new insights I had not gotten when I first read the book – something about
its being auditory rather than visual. It encourages me to try audiobook versions
of other books I have found interesting, to see if I get new insights from them
as well.
Taleb writes with a certain arrogant sarcasm which in most
other writers would eventually be wearing, but really I think his arrogant
sarcasm is mostly justified, so it doesn’t bother me.
But this book contains some really important ideas, some of which
I already knew about but which he explains again with wonderful clarity, and
some of which really are new to me. His concept of “scalability” of professions
and its impact on creating inequality and winner-take-all economies is really
profound. And his disdain for the fallacious mathematics used by economists and
bankers and market traders to delude themselves and their customers about the
real nature of the risks they are taking is justified (and in fact is the whole
point of the book).
But beyond that, Talib deals extensively with the nature of
human thinking, and the sorts of systematic reasoning mistakes we humans constantly
make because of our biological makeup – because of the way our brains work.
This is not a mass-market 5-point book for the popular press – it takes hard
work to follow his reasoning, but it is important.
So again, I am re-recommending this book.
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