A Real Mister Smarty Pants

On PBS' evening nose-in-the-air show tonight were a few worthwhile minutes with a guy named Nassim Nicholas Taleb. He is a person of vaguely Mediterranean lineage with millions of dollars in the bank courtesy of a lucky break on Wall Street several years back, and who espouses a variety of outrageous yet plausible positions about the mess the world is in. Paul Solman who is among the sharper tacks in the drawer of TV economic experts sat transfixed as Mr Taleb painted a black image of unpredictably dangerous times ahead. His expert character witness on set with Paul was the French mathematician who came up with fractal chaos theory; this man seemed more along for the ride or window dressing as Mr Taleb needs no one to cheer lead for him or lend him credibility. His website is www.fooledbyrandomness.com and I will say it looks like quite the amateurish mess thrown together by someone who gives not the slightest whit how the so-called sophisticates might scorn its lack of style. But I believe there are truths permeating and underlying the noise he makes. He has been on lots of TV shows even though he recommends against watching TV. If no one watched, he would sell far fewer books so his intellectual honesty is partly in jeopardy. But like I said, there is truth under the noise and the next book on my reading list is his Black Swan title about the Impact of the Highly Improbable.
Maybe thirty years ago I read a pulp economic science fiction thing called the Crash of 79 which did not prove to be prescient in the least. It nonetheless made a huge impression on me at the time but now I realize I was suffering from that human foible the Vulcans have gotten past: Wishing a thing to be so does not make it so. I think there is a dark and unpleasant aspect of thinking people which makes them want to see bad things happen. It is far beyond schadenfreude; it is more cataclysmic and macro than that and I think it is part of the lemming or school-of-fish programming that lurks deep in our sub-brains. Proceeding from the observation that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, I submit that phylogeny guides and shapes or maybe even limits our higher thought processes in ways we refuse to admit.
I am writing this late at night when my brain has started misfiring in preparation for dreamland and REM, so it is impossible to flesh all this out right now for me much less for you. But it's OK; find Taleb for yourself and learn from him what you will. We can talk later about it at our book club meeting.