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HatTip to Dave Lull!

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Halfway into our conversation, Nassim Taleb’s gray-bearded Levantine face tightens. “If I talk about finance, it corrupts my whole day,” he protests. “Don’t corrupt my day.”

We’ve strayed from a topic Taleb is eager to discuss to one he is anxious to flee. We are here in this French café in Morningside Heights to talk about Socrates, Seneca, Averroës, Pascal, La Rochefoucauld, Chamfort, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein. These are his forebears in the art of the aphorism, a form he took up for several months earlier this year, resulting in his new book, The Bed of Procrustes, a compendium of Talebian witticisms and skeptical philosophizing: “You are rich if and only if money you refuse tastes better than money you accept.” “Education makes the wise slightly wiser, but it makes the fool vastly more dangerous.” “You are only secure if you can lose your fortune without the additional insult of having to become humble.”

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HatTip to Dave Lull

Every aphorism here is about a Procrustean bed of sorts – we humans, facing limits of knowledge, and things we do not observe, the unseen and the unknown, resolve the tension by squeezing life and the world into crisp, commoditised ideas, reductive categories, specific vocabularies and pre-packaged narratives, which, on occasion, has explosive con­sequences. Further, we seem unaware of this backward fitting – much as if tailors who take great pride in delivering the perfectly fit­ting suit did so by surgically altering the limbs of their customers. For instance, few realise that we are changing the brains of schoolchildren through medication in order to make them adjust to the curriculum, rather than the reverse.

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Strange to see NNT making ANY kind of prediction, in principal. I am reminded of Marshall McLuhan- he thought of his ideas as ‘probes’, not meant to be taken literally, but to serve as areas of intellectual energy he felt should be better examined. My sense is that that is what NNT is doing here.

Paradoxically, one can make long-term predictions on the basis of the prevalence of forecasting errors. A system that is over-reliant on prediction (through leverage, like the banking system before the recent crisis), hence fragile to unforeseen “black swan” events, will eventually break into pieces. Although fragile bridges can take a long time to collapse, 25 years in the 21st century should be sufficient to make hidden risks salient: connectivity and operational leverage are making cultural and economic events cascade faster and deeper. Anything fragile today will be broken by then.

The great top-down nation-state will be only cosmetically alive, weakened by deficits, politicians’ misalignment of interests and the magnification of errors by centralised systems. The pre-modernist robust model of city-states and statelings will prevail, with obsessive fiscal prudence. Currencies might still exist, but, after the disastrous experience of America’s Federal Reserve, they will peg to some currency without a government, such as gold.

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It’s great to see NNT’s ideas put to use. Raise the standards!

Nassim Taleb, author of The Black Swan, has written about this. He calls it the “narrative fallacy” which is a fancy way of saying the news media takes the facts at hand and weaves together a story line that either a) they think readers/viewers want to hear or b) reinforces the reporter/editor’s point of view.

International or not, all breaking news reporters – this one included – are guilty of this. Even magazine journalists can make such mistakes – Maclean’s magazine’s “Too Asian” story is a recent, ripe example.

Taleb writes in his book:

The way to avoid the ills of the narrative fallacy is to favor experimentation over storytelling, experience over history, and clinical knowledge over theories. Certainly the newspaper cannot perform an experiment, but it can choose one report over another – there is plenty of empirical research to present and interpret from … Being empirical does not mean running a laboratory in one’s basement: it is just a mind-set that favors a certain class of knowledge over others. I do not forbid myself from using the world cause, but the causes I discuss are either bold speculations (presented as such) or the results of experiments, not stories.

So with my most recent piece on China’s scientific publishing industry – and in a forthcoming analysis on China’s mental health problems, I am steering clear of narrative fallacies and striving to produce more analytical stories, backed up not by anecdotes but by empirical research. But empirical research takes time, you see. It’s not something a political scientist, doctor or economist can always drum up in time for a reporter’s deadline.

These days, this reporter is enjoying a more flexible deadline. The result, I hope, is for a better, a smarter and a more accurate story for you, dear readers.

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Up to 21 questions so far. HatTip to Dave Null.

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The former trader gained international acclaim with his best-selling books Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in the Markets and in Life and The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. His writings examine uncertainty and errors in human knowledge and explain how to deal with unpredictability. Taleb is currently a professor of Risk Engineering at New York University’s Polytechnic Institute. His latest book The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms goes on sale Nov. 30. Submit your questions for Nassim Taleb below, then read the interview in an upcoming issue of TIME magazine.