

Review of Taleb's The Black Swan, by David Aldous - billswift
http://stat-www.berkeley.edu/users/aldous/157/Books/taleb.html

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chunkbot
I particularly enjoyed Mr. Falkenstein's review of Mr. Taleb's Black Swan.

<http://www.efalken.com/papers/Taleb2.html>

It's a long but illuminating read:

\----

Martin Gardner wrote a popular column for Scientific American, and in the
process received a lot of mail from ‘cranks’ telling him about perpetual
motion machines and the like. So he wrote a book called Fads and Fallacies. In
the book he describes "cranks" as having five invariable characteristics:

1\. They have a profound intellectual superiority complex.

2\. They regard other researchers as idiotic, and always operate outside the
peer review.

3\. They believe there is a campaign against their ideas, a campaign compared
with the persecution of Galileo or Pasteur.

4\. They attack only the biggest theories and scientific figures.

5\. They coin neologisms.

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drallison
Aldous's review and Falkenstein's review (cited here in the comments) are both
worth a read as are Taleb's books. There is plenty of hubris to share amongst
the three. Taleb's observations are accessible, provocative and cautionary and
worth pondering.

