COPING WITH THE BLACK SWAN: THE UNSETTLING WORLD OF NASSIM TALEB

Nassim Taleb rightly points out that although people may acknowledge in the abstract that the world is uncertain, they still behave as if a large enough sample size is all that is needed to predict, and model, the future. He also rightly notes that ever-increasing quantities of information are relevant only in simple situations, such as in predicting the range of human height, but are misleading in more random arenas, such as financial markets. However, while Taleb decries the use of narratives for falsely forcing the facts to fit a given story, we need narratives in order to make sense of a complex world. Further, Taleb fails to take sufficient heed of the fact that human narratives themselves become objects that act on subjects in an ever-increasing web of complexity.