For the last 12 years, I have been telling anyone who would listen to me that we are taking huge risks and massive exposure to rare events. I isolated some areas in which people make bogus claims --epistemologically unsound. The Black Swan is a philosophy book (epistemology, philosophy of history & philosophy of science), but I used banks as a particularly worrisome case of epistemic arrogance --and the use of "science" to measure the risk of rare events, making society dependent on very spurious measurements. To me a banking crisis --worse than what we have ever seen -- was unavoidable and NOT A BLACK SWAN, just as a drunk and incompetent pilot would eventually crash the plane. And I kept receiving insults for 12 years!
For the last 12 years, I have been telling anyone who would listen to me that we are taking huge risks and massive exposure to rare events. I isolated some areas in which people make bogus claims --epistemologically unsound. The Black Swan is a philosophy book (epistemology, philosophy of history & philosophy of science), but I used banks as a particularly worrisome case of epistemic arrogance --and the use of "science" to measure the risk of rare events, making society dependent on very spurious measurements. To me a banking crisis --worse than what we have ever seen -- was unavoidable and NOT A BLACK SWAN, just as a drunk and incompetent pilot would eventually crash the plane. And I kept receiving insults for 12 years!
(http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/imbeciles.htm)
In other places I've seen Taleb acknowledge that he was not the only one who predicted the problems.