The inherent unpredictibility of the future
I am three quarters way through reading Teleb’s “The Black Swan”. What an interesting book! I knew from the reviews about the main thesis that history is dominated by unexpected high-impact events, which we later rationalize as fitting into some post hoc theory. However, there is also a lot of very interesting philosophical background that sent me off to Wikipedia to read more about “empiricism” versus “historicity”. Teleb’s writing style is very informal, more like an after-dinner speech than a monograph – some might find it a little precious, but I found it quite amusing.