Open doors
Walking to the post office, I passed what I had always taken to be a wall, which today turned out to be a wall with a door in it... and the door was open. I looked in and I wish I could tell you I saw a path to a magical kingdom filled with adventure, but, sadly, all I saw was a woman at a reception desk. Elsewhere, I also passed a door I knew was a door, but which is normally closed. It too was open, revealing packing crates filled with large plastic balls.
So that was mildly interesting.
I've just decided to abandon reading Nassim Nicholas Taleb's The Black Swan exactly half way though. Oh, but it was frustrating. It's an odd experience, reading something that basically makes sense but that makes me want to boil the author in oil. Forgive me for coming over all Kath and Kim, but the only way to describe the author is as loving himself sick: he's brilliant, he's special, he refers to himself in the the third person as NNT, he can beat the market, he knows Umberto Eco, he travels around the world and goes to parties with other special, brilliant people... which is very nice and good luck to him, but he goes on and on and on about it instead of getting on with what he's meant to be writing about.
His central idea is that our systems aren't set up to cope with unexpected outlier events (for example, the belief that all swans were white, which was blown out of the water when Europeans made it to Australia and saw black swans). And that's true enough, although I'm not sure about his assertion that it was unexpected when that white tiger attacked Siegfried (or Roy, whichever one it was); it was a tiger, NNT! Anyway, where he started to lose me was when he spent a chapter describing the runaway success of a book; it was a black swan in that it wasn't expected to sell at all. Only then it turned out he'd made it all up, because, goodness, there are no runaway publishing success stories about boy wizards he could have used as an example. Where he finally lost me was the bit where he left New York and went to a party in London, after which he and some other brilliant, special person wandered the streets shouting, 'Look, that's not a black swan!' at red cars on the basis that if all swans are white, then all non-white things aren't swans. So I said, 'But all swans aren't white, you tedious blowhard' and gave up.
And I did have something else to say on a completely different topic, but thinking about NNT and his black swans has driven it out of my head.
So that was mildly interesting.
I've just decided to abandon reading Nassim Nicholas Taleb's The Black Swan exactly half way though. Oh, but it was frustrating. It's an odd experience, reading something that basically makes sense but that makes me want to boil the author in oil. Forgive me for coming over all Kath and Kim, but the only way to describe the author is as loving himself sick: he's brilliant, he's special, he refers to himself in the the third person as NNT, he can beat the market, he knows Umberto Eco, he travels around the world and goes to parties with other special, brilliant people... which is very nice and good luck to him, but he goes on and on and on about it instead of getting on with what he's meant to be writing about.
His central idea is that our systems aren't set up to cope with unexpected outlier events (for example, the belief that all swans were white, which was blown out of the water when Europeans made it to Australia and saw black swans). And that's true enough, although I'm not sure about his assertion that it was unexpected when that white tiger attacked Siegfried (or Roy, whichever one it was); it was a tiger, NNT! Anyway, where he started to lose me was when he spent a chapter describing the runaway success of a book; it was a black swan in that it wasn't expected to sell at all. Only then it turned out he'd made it all up, because, goodness, there are no runaway publishing success stories about boy wizards he could have used as an example. Where he finally lost me was the bit where he left New York and went to a party in London, after which he and some other brilliant, special person wandered the streets shouting, 'Look, that's not a black swan!' at red cars on the basis that if all swans are white, then all non-white things aren't swans. So I said, 'But all swans aren't white, you tedious blowhard' and gave up.
And I did have something else to say on a completely different topic, but thinking about NNT and his black swans has driven it out of my head.