One of my must-read blogs these days is Boing Boing. It's this perfect mix of quirk, geek and thought-provocation. A recent post about an interview with Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of The Black Swan, is a case in point. Cory Doctorow points us to an interview between Taleb and Bryan Appleyard that appeared in June 2008 in the Times Online.
Taleb is nothing if not provocative. I saw him at TED last year. His talk wasn't one of my favourite because I felt he didn't quite focus what he was trying to say. He's definitely gotten better at making his point, especially for a lay audience (or maybe I've just gotten to a point where I can hear what he is trying to say).
TED hasn't posted his talk yet, but there is a great video of him on FORA.tv - giving an overview, at the Long Now Foundation, of the concept of the black swan and then being interviewed by Stewart Brand. It's comprehensive and understandable and informative. And now, almost a year later, provides an interesting lens onto our current economic climate. (Side note - that FORA.tv has it going on. They provide a transcript that runs alongside the video - plus you can download it on its own. And lots of great socializing tools. Well done, FORA!)
Taleb's talk on FORA.tv is 90 minutes, so here is a 4 minute snippet which includes the definition of a black swan.
In the interview with Appleyard, Taleb gives his top 10 tips for living a life of dignity. As most good "top 10 lists" are, Taleb's is controversial - the comments are BoingBoing are definitely worth a scan.
Taleb's top life tips
1 Scepticism is effortful and costly. It is better to be sceptical about matters of large consequences, and be imperfect, foolish and human in the small and the aesthetic.
2 Go to parties. You can’t even start to know what you may find on the envelope of serendipity. If you suffer from agoraphobia, send colleagues.
3 It’s not a good idea to take a forecast from someone wearing a tie. If possible, tease people who take themselves and their knowledge too seriously.
4 Wear your best for your execution and stand dignified. Your last recourse against randomness is how you act — if you can’t control outcomes, you can control the elegance of your behaviour. You will always have the last word.
5 Don’t disturb complicated systems that have been around for a very long time. We don’t understand their logic. Don’t pollute the planet. Leave it the way we found it, regardless of scientific ‘evidence’.
6 Learn to fail with pride — and do so fast and cleanly. Maximise trial and error — by mastering the error part.
7 Avoid losers. If you hear someone use the words ‘impossible’, ‘never’, ‘too difficult’ too often, drop him or her from your social network. Never take ‘no’ for an answer (conversely, take most ‘yeses’ as ‘most probably’).
8 Don’t read newspapers for the news (just for the gossip and, of course, profiles of authors). The best filter to know if the news matters is if you hear it in cafes, restaurants... or (again) parties.
9 Hard work will get you a professorship or a BMW. You need both work and luck for a Booker, a Nobel or a private jet.
10 Answer e-mails from junior people before more senior ones. Junior people have further to go and tend to remember who slighted them.
Clearly, you need to take them with a grain of salt - but to me there is some truth in all of them. I learned a variation of #4 a long time ago - that truly, the only thing we can control in this world, are our own actions.
And a variant of #7 is something I've learned as well; if someone is always saying "no" or "impossible", well, where's the use in that? I prefer to see the possible, the "yes" - to use my imagination and assert "what if". (Though I don't like his language of "losers".)
for_dprefect has created this neat mindmap of the ideas in the article and the sum-up of Taleb's 10 points.
Oh, the other thing that caught my eye in all this is that Taleb is described as a "belletrist". For example: "NNT is an essayist, belletrist, & researcher only interested in one single topic, chance (particularly extreme & rare events, the “Black Swans” i.e. outliers)". I had never heard that term before. A quick trip to Wikipedia let me know that ...
A writer of belles-lettres is a belletrist. [Ed - oh, THAT's where it comes from] ... However, for many modern purposes, belles lettres is used in a rather narrower sense, to identify literary works that do not fall into other major categories such as fiction, poetry or drama. Thus it would include essays, récits, published collections of speeches and letters, satirical and humorous writings, and other miscellaneous writings. The Oxford English Dictionary (2nd Edition) says that "it is now generally applied (when used at all) to the lighter branches of literature". The term remains in use among librarians and others who have to classify books: While a large library might have separate categories for essays, letters, humour and so forth (and most of them are assigned different codings in, for example, the Dewey decimal classification system), in libraries of modest size they are often all grouped together under the heading "belles lettres".
I'm not sure that I'd classify The Black Swan as a belle lettre. However I do like the sound of belletrist more so than essayist or, well, blogger. It's a very romantic writing ideal on a rainy Vancouver Sunday. Or perhaps I've been watching too much Pride and Prejudice.
In any case, whether you agree with him or not, Taleb is worth a second or third look! The article in the Sunday Times is a great summary of his thoughts and the quirky personality of the man. Definitely give it a read!