Search This Blog

Sunday, October 15, 2017

Memo From Mediocristan

     During the last four years at my most recent employer, I worked on risk management issues. His discussion of risk is what initially brought me to Nassim Nicholas Taleb's The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. Although Taleb's focus is on financial risk -- among other topics -- and mine was on insurance, I would recommend this book to anyone in either field.
     Perhaps the main argument of The Black Swan is that the modern world has become a place that Taleb calls "Extremistan" but that the tools most thinkers use to understand it -- for example, the bell curve -- come from the ancestral place he calls "Mediocristan."
     However, as a former history major, I was pleasantly surprised by Taleb's extensive discussion of ancient Western thinkers. At the risk of oversimplifying his complex arguments, the Greek philosopher Plato is the ancient villain of The Black Swan, due to his tendency to place everything into pure, well-defined, and rigid conceptual categories. (Note that there is no shortage of modern villains in the book, including mainstream economists). Taleb's ancient hero is the pyrrhonian skeptic Sextus Empiricus, who arguably has the best philosophical name ever, and who believed that the only route to tranquility was via the suspension of judgment.
     But I was also surprised by the fact that the Greek philosopher Aristotle -- although he is referenced in a few other places in the book -- is not mentioned by Taleb during his discussion of "Golden Mediocrity" (in chapter 15 of The Black Swan).  My understanding is that Aristotle was the first Western thinker to systematically discuss moderation, and it is to that discussion -- from his Ethics -- that I will turn in my next post.
__________

References:
     Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (New York, Random House Trade Paperbacks, Second Edition, 2010).
   

1 comment:

Procrastination

     I want to begin by apologizing for the time that has elapsed since my last post; sadly, I have been guilty of procrastination. Like mos...