( Current works by other researchers using the ideas as a
starting point). For references in books, see here.

SPECIAL ISSUES of ACADEMIC JOURNALS

International Journal of Forecasting, 2009 — Decision Making under
Low Levels of Predictability – Articles by Makridakis, Gigererenzer, Taleb,
Goldstein, etc.

The American Statistician, 2007, Black Swan Articles  –Brown, Lund, Wesfall, Hilbe, and
Taleb

Critical  Review Black
Swan Symposium, 2010,  Blyth,
Callahan, Jervis (some idiot), and Runde

BOOK LENGTH WORKS

Lecturing Birds on Flying 
Pablo Triana, Wiley 2009

The Blank Swan, The End of Probability   Elie Ayache, Wiley 2010

The Art of Credit Derivatives: Demystifying the Black Swan , Joao
Garcia & Serge Goossens. Wiley 2010

On the Survival of Rats in the Slush Pile  Michael Allen (on the Casanova problem in the publishing
industry)

Informing Business: Research and Education on a Rugged Landscape T.
Grandon Gill 2010

Leuko Kotsyfi, Mauro Karavi, M. Androulakis, Athens, 2010

MEDICINE & HEALTH CARE

It’s the Unknown Unknowns That Matter , AJ Senagore – Diseases
of the Colon & Rectum, 2010

Flash Crashes, Bursts, and Black Swans: Parallels Between Financial
Markets and Healthcare Systems BJ West… – Journal of Nursing
Administration, 2010

No readers of The Black Swan, Fooled By Randomness or any of Taleb’s academic writings about economics, probability, risk, fragility, philosophy of statistics, applied epistemology, etc, will question whether he is qualified to dish out wisdom. And none will be surprised that Taleb, unlike the inspirational writer he calls “my compatriot from a neighbouring (and warring) village in northern Lebanon, Kahlil Gibran, author of The Prophet,” can be blistering. His observations concern superiority, wealth, suckerdom, academia, modernity, technology and the all-purpose, ignorant “they” who dare to doubt him.

The last aphorism is one of Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s favourite, or rather the one “he likes more than others”.
Taleb, a Lebanese “technical philosopher”, likes turning things on their head and, he confesses, that he is not too popular for it (especially with economists). The 50-year-old author of

the bestsellers, Black Swan and Fooled by Randomness, was in Mumbai on Friday with his latest offering, The Bed of Procrustes, a book of aphorisms.

While religion and ethics might promote the idea of good and imbibe fear of retribution, for Taleb the idea is that one does good because they are good. “This is pre-Christian thought. It is part of your nature to do something regardless of the pay off. This is unconditional but these values are lost today,” said the former Wall Street trader, risk expert and practitioner of mathematical finance.

Shared by JohnH

HatTip to Dave Lull

Take one of Taleb’s aphorisms: ‘The fool generalizes the particular; the nerd particularizes the general; some do both; and the wise does neither.’ A summary would seek to neutralise the potential for paradox and ambiguity: Taleb is not “against” the idea of moving between particularity and generality (this is, after all, the space in which aphorisms roam). He is merely opposed to a way of thinking that regards the particular and the general as discrete concepts; both the nerd and the fool seek to impose the form of one onto the form of another, when it is precisely the case that both universals and immediacies are essentially bound up with one another in the same instance. This relates to Taleb’s wider suspicions of the epistemological concepts with which we divide the world into normative states. It only took the discovery of a black swan to disprove the certainties of the concept ‘all swans are white’, thus disturbing our world vision.