SUNDAY, 1 JUNE 2025

I’m always behind the curve in terms of the books I read because I can no longer afford the full price when they’re fresh off the printing press, so I have to pick up what I can from a charity book sale near where I live, where I can get them for the princely sum of one euro each. Or go to my little local library in the hope that they have added a book I would like to read to their stock, but they can’t afford new books either. This makes serendipity a key factor in my reading habits, which is kind of fun.

Recently I found a copy of Taleb’s The Black Swan, which was the hottest ticket in town when it came out almost twenty years ago, and I’ve spent the last fortnight slowly working my way through it. Books, and indeed any cultural products that become popular and trend, tend to go through a life cycle. This begins with a period when they’re on everyone’s lips, top of the Amazon rankings and Book of the Month in the New York Times. This can happen to a specific book or author or artist, but there is also a more general zeitgeist which shapes our thinking and our approach to the age-old questions that haunt us. For instance, neurology, evolutionary psychology and big data have been go-to ways of understanding the world during our century to date. This brief moment when something is cutting-edge is followed, around a generation or two later, by a phase when a work or way of thinking seems outdated because the herd has moved on and nothing is as antiquated as yesterday’s revolution. Then finally, at a still further point in time, books or writers or art-works settle into what becomes their established position and overall historical significance which generally rarely changes unless they are suddenly rediscovered and become fashionable again. In this process, a lot of the trends that were hottest end up as mere footnotes (I suppose we should say endnotes these days, but I don’t think this works as well as footnotes as a metaphor).

Being behind the curve is not always a bad thing. When something is at the height of its popularity, it’s very difficult to take a measured view towards it, and the temptation is either to jump enthusiastically aboard the bandwagon or criticise it too harshly, perhaps because it goes against our own long-held assumptions or because we want to make clear that we’re independent thinkers who don’t just go with the crowd. Although many academics and intellectuals like to believe they’re much too smart to fall prey to herd thinking, unlike the hoi polloi and dippy fashionistas, most of them are no different from the rest of us. Compare, for example, what was being read by thinkers when I was a teenager and what is on the reading list these days for someone who hopes to be considered erudite, and how things have turned so radically in the general direction of materialism, so that anything that isn’t rooted in the physical immediately gets relegated to the category of ‘pseudo-science’. If ever a foreign word needed to be imported into English, surely it was zeitgeist.

We all tend to see our own preconceptions and obsessions in books and cultural products, so it’s not surprising that the main point I personally took from The Black Swan was how much we overestimate our ability to predict the future and, more generally, how little we actually know and how limited our ability is to control our destiny. We may give people who make predictions in what they believe to be a scientific way a fancy title such as ‘futurologist’ to separate them from astrologers or Nostradamus, but a glance at historical predictions suggest these self-styled experts often fail just as badly: think of all those forecasts that nowadays we’d be popping a nutrition pill each morning, putting on our bakelite clothing, and flying around the city in our private spacemobiles. Rumsfeldt was widely mocked for his talk of known and unknown unknowns, when this was actually one of the most (few?) perspicacious things he ever said. In the real world beyond the simplifications of abstract thinking, there are way too many variables for us to make confident forecasts, and we can only polish them up later by deliberate fudging and manipulation.

For example, as a complete amateur who knows almost zero about meteorology, I could put myself forward as a brilliant weather forecaster by a nifty bit of cherry-picking the data. I live on the small island of Gozo in the middle of the Mediterranean and if I predict that this year between the start of June and the end of August, the weather will be hot every day with no rainfall at all, almost certainly I could claim a statistical accuracy of almost 100% by September 1. But in the far more unsettled and unpredictable days of April, May, October and November, when a weather front can either hit or miss this tiny island, I would struggle to make a good forecast (except perhaps for predicting the same weather as the day before, which would probably earn me a decent strike rate). So when people really need guidance, making the difference between a wonderful day out and a ruined picnic, all the sophisticated knowledge of our experts may not be enough to deliver it.

If this sounds like an attack on science, that’s not what I intend: a meteorologist’s expertise is real and a prediction will be correct most of the time and certainly perform better than chance. I only wish to suggest that when we really need them, predictions will often fall short because reality is complicated and the best science in the world may not be adequate despite our best attempts to pin it down with quantitative precision. We are loath to admit this, though, because one thing futurologists and astrologers share is a desire for, and a belief in, patterns and predictability. These work much of the time but fail when we need them most, which I take to be the key message of Taleb’s book. It is in the nature of black swans that we can never see them coming, which puts our claims to prophecy into perspective.

As he points out, we are so much better at looking at things retrospectively and then explaining – perhaps I should say attempting to explain – why they happened. Events that seemed freakish when they occurred are gradually tamed to the point where they start to seem inevitable, and this happens at all levels, from highly academic explanations for financial crises to the reason why someone’s marriage failed. The world is infinitely more complex than the abstracted narratives we concoct, with billions of factors colliding with each other to form a web of perplexity that we can’t begin to untangle.  

So the message I personally got from Taleb’s book was philosophical, and essentially epistemological. Most of the time we are basically just guessing, or, to put it a little more tactfully, we are drawing on what Pierce called ‘abduction’ – narrowing causes down to what we believe to be the most probable. We have to do this simply to survive. We need to make instant decisions in moments of danger, and then there is the psychological need to feel in control if we are not going to crumble mentally. When I went for my walk yesterday, the Soviet space station which the newspaper told me is going to crash to the earth somewhere could have landed on my head (the ultimate black swan, at least for me), but if I go about my life worrying about such things I’d soon be in a straitjacket. We need to believe in a world of rules and reliable guidelines regardless of whether reality is Laplacean clockwork or fundamental randomness.

One of the most interesting features of reading a well-known book from a couple of decades ago is that we have access to lots of reviews from both professional reviewers and members of the general public. On my trawl of these, I found it revealing that so many people focused more on the tone and style of Taleb’s book than on the content: he really hacked off a lot of people with what they saw as his arrogance. He is certainly not a writer who minces his words, he has strong opinions, and he isn’t shy about expressing them forcefully and mocking anyone who disagrees. Personally I didn’t have a problem with this because I prefer his honesty to the fake humility of the English house style. I also got the feeling that some people chose to make an ad hominem attack to avoid discussing the content, perhaps because they felt their expertise was being questioned and belittled but couldn’t deny what Taleb was saying. Another common comment I came across in reviews was that the book is overlong and would benefit from some prudent editing, a criticism to which I am more sympathetic, although I wouldn’t want to be Taleb’s editor because I imagine he could be quite prickly during the editing process.

On the whole, though, I enjoyed and mostly agreed with The Black Swan and I’d like to briefly mention a few of the things that resonated with me the most. The first was Taleb’s recognition that there is a vast imbalance in reward in the arts and humanities and sciences, where a few superstars get a huge slice of the goodies on offer while a mass of unknown others toil and struggle in obscurity. I also agreed with his belief that we often have too much information nowadays and that this is detrimental to our decision-making because there is a point at which extra information confuses rather than adds to our understanding. The book also struck a chord with me as someone who is broadly against the quantification of research in artistic fields, and mistrusts the mathematicisation of subjects like economics and sociology. On a related theme, I share Taleb’s suspicion that data is often used to obfuscate rather than to reveal, and I value his opinion on this because he is clearly someone who has used data all his life so I feel his view carries weight, unlike mine which is intuitive. And a final quirky plus for me is his high opinion of Montaigne. In a field which is drowning in jargon and where simple ideas are often wrapped in an impenetrable thicket of language, I love that I can understand Montaigne without having to read and parse each sentence three times and translate ponderous babble into the everyday language that could often have been used all along. In my opinion, his writing style should be a model for all philosophers.

Although The Black Swan touches on many of the general concerns which attract much of our attention in the opening quarter of the 21^st century, in one way it felt to me like a book that was out of its time. I find it strange that we need someone to argue for the limitations of quantification and to question the epistemological threshold of human beings. At the moment, there is a lot of anti-philosophy from certain scientists, who believe that the subject has become totally irrelevant following the scientific revolution, but I feel we need instead to widen our definition of ‘scientific’, especially when we move outside of the hard sciences, and go back to a definition which returns to its Latin roots and accepts the constraints on our understanding that no amount of vulgar scientism will spirit away. It would be nice if we could show some genuine modesty, recognise our limitations as a species, and place ourselves within nature rather than see ourselves as detached observers studying it from a vantage point outside.