Just adding to my note on "The Black Swan". It was the best selling non-fiction book on Amazon in 2007. It is no touchy-feely new-agey book but a strong disciplined look at certainty. His heroes are a varied group and include Popper, Hayek and the often misquoted Yogi Berra. These are heroes whom, he says, "get it". There are numerous others that don't.
The following is a quote from a review by David A. Shaywitz which appeared in the Wall Street Journal:
'A humanist at heart, Mr. Taleb ponders not only the effect of Black Swans but also the reason we have so much trouble acknowledging their existence. And this is where he hits his stride. We eagerly romp with him through the follies of confirmation bias (our tendency to reaffirm our beliefs rather than contradict them), narrative fallacy (our weakness for compelling stories), silent evidence (our failure to account for what we don't see), ludic fallacy (our willingness to oversimplify and take games or models too seriously), and epistemic arrogance (our habit of overestimating our knowledge and underestimating our ignorance).
'For anyone who has been compelled to give a long-term vision or read a marketing forecast for the next decade, Mr. Taleb's chapter excoriating "The Scandal of Prediction" will ring painfully true. "What is surprising is not the magnitude of our forecast errors," observes Mr. Taleb, "but our absence of awareness of it." We tend to fail--miserably--at predicting the future, but such failure is little noted nor long remembered. It seems to be of remarkably little professional consequence.'
Clark, whenever I read your posts confirming your faith in value investing and the future of Woolworths, I can't help thinking that you just don't "get it" - just as much as you believe that people on the XJO thread just don't "get it".
The epistemic arrogance which Taleb throws darts at with great accuracy is a problem for most of us. Perhaps even you? Perhaps a little less arrogance and a little more openings to others' points of views might not go astray.
One of the compelling stories that Taleb provides refers to the rather fat, strutting turkey, who, for one thousand days is fed, watered, and protected. The turkey is quite certain about the future. Hasn't he always been fed, watered, and protected. But, on the one thousand and first day, the butcher arrives and cuts off his head. It was the day before Thanksgiving.
