I met Nassim Nicholas Taleb last year, briefly, at a lecture he gave on the impact of highly improbable events: Black Swans. I’m just reading his book now.
And then along came my own Black Swan.
Against all expectations, improbably yet explicably, but hopefully inconsequentially, I have been adopted as DK’s Blog Mascot.
As Taleb might point out, I shouldn’t be surprised. I didn’t expect to be in Parliament now either. Whatever next?
I just finished two other books which discuss the improbable in sociology and economics: Mandelbrot’s The (Mis)Behaviour of Markets: A Fractal View of Risk, Ruin and Reward and Dowd and Hutchinson’s The Alchemists of Loss: How Modern Finance and Government Intervention Crashed the Financial System. Combined with Popper’s critique of historicism and Postrel’s The Future and Its Enemies: The Growing Conflict over Creativity, Enterprise and Progress, these ideas may make a potent mix.
I’ll mull them over and see what comes out.
