I like to buy a book at the airport before a flight. The random element of what I might find in the airport bookstore amuses me. My most recent airport purchase was Nassim Taleb's
The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. Usually I provide a link when I mention a book, but this book does not merit a link. Indeed, to aid someone in purchasing the book, even inadvertently, would require that I do penance to expiate my guilt. This book made such a splash a few years ago, that though I doubted it could live up to the hype, I thought it must surely have some merit. But it took only a few chapters to persuade me that the only merit in this book was in its engorgement of Talib's bank account.
According to Talib, a black swan is a highly improbable event, one that cannot be predicted. Those events are not just important, but are apparently the sum total of meaning in the world. They explain nearly everything, and nothing is explained in any other way. The thesis seems to grand, too sweeping, to be seriously entertained, yet Talib can hardly suppress his enthusiasm for it. I penciled in my first question mark on only the second page of the prologue, by the claim that
A small number of Black Swans explain almost everything in our world...
