Draw Breath

In a comment to Tuesday's post on the deaths in Wexford, Frank McGahon linked to Neil Ferguson's review of Nicholas Taleb's new book, Black Swan. Taleb's basic point is that we're very good at providing narratives for shocking events in hindsight, but that very often they're just down to utterly unpredictable or inexplicable 'black swan moments.'

Anyway, I see that Oliver Burkeman has another review of the book in yesterday's Guardian. I don't think that the point is that the narratives we construct are necessarily untrue. It's more that they cohere around the landmark event and so are not apparent until afterwards. So, the conditions for the First World War were in place when Franz Ferdinand entered Sarajevo. But that doesn't mean that anyone could have predicted that this spark would set the whole thing off.

I like the Taleb's comment about Rumsfeld's famous 2002 unknown uknowns speech (see also here). Taleb had apparently set his thinking out for Rumsfeld's people and so was the inspiration for the speech. But he now says that "I don't want to be advertised as someone who's too close to these people." I'd say. Anyway as Burkeman has it,

"Rumsfeld's "unknown unknowns" speech made perfect sense. The problem, Taleb says, was that Rumsfeld himself didn't understand it. The black swan way of thinking should have prompted the defence secretary to be cautious about his capacity to predict the future in Iraq. Instead, he fell, again and again, into the prediction trap."

That is, he constructed narratives to explain past events and in his arrogance inferred from that that, being smart enough, he could spot the narratives leading to future events too.

Another lesson that the real gobshites in life are not the stupid people. It's people who are not nearly so clever as they think.