In his brilliant book “The Black Swan. The Impact of the Highly Improbable. Penguin Books, 2007″ Nassim Nicholas Taleb argues that unlikely, unforeseeable events are of extreme importance, much more so than probable ones, in history, politics, science, etc. However, attention is usually paid to the latter. This reinforces my view, expressed in several earlier posts, on the importance of nonequilibrium conditions in ecology, and on the danger of making political decisions based on equilibrium assumptions (click Nash equilibria in politics). In this post I briefly draw attention to his views on developments in modern philosophy, which agree with what I said about the hairsplitting in discussions of the “Nonidentity Problem”, and about “Postmodern Philosophy”.
Here are some extracts from his book (Prologue: pp. xxvii-xxviii):
“Talk is cheap.”
…
“Indeed those who read too much Wittgenstein ……. may be under the impression that language problems are important. They may certainly be important to attain prominence in philosophy departments”, but for not much else.
“Thus I rail against sterile skepticism”, the kind we can do nothing about, and against the exceedingly theoretical language problems that have made much of modern philosophy largely irrelevant to what is derisively called the “general public”. ” One reason, according to Taleb, is that academics in abstract disciplines depend on each other’s opinion, without having any external checks.
(Taleb is Professor in the Sciences of Uncertainty at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and author of the bestselling (in 18 languages) “Fooled by Randomness”)
I have just started reading the book and may return to it later. I know little about Wittgenstein, hence comments by professional philosophers and others would be most welcome.
