Black Swans: Stories

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The world is not fair. Unfairness and inequality are no epiphenomena but part and parcel of reality. Picture a turkey cared for by humans. It has been fed every day for its entire life by the same humans, and so it has come to believe the world works in a certain, predictable, and advantageous way. And it does...until the day before Thanksgiving. In 1963, her first brush with notoriety came through Julian Wasser's iconic photograph of a nude, twenty-year-old Babitz playing chess with the artist Marcel Duchamp, on the occasion of his landmark retrospective at the Pasadena Art Museum. The show was curated by Walter Hopps, with whom Babitz was having an affair at the time. The photograph is described by the Smithsonian Archives of American Art as being “among the key documentary images of American modern art”. Monaco, Alex (September 2, 2020). "9 Books About Your Life That Will Make Your Life better". alexmonaco.net . Retrieved December 20, 2020.

In my mind mathematicians, trained for certainties, had no business dealing in randomness." By which he means non-Gaussian statistics. Which is an area of mathematics. Very much the mathematician's business!

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Taleb, Nassim Nicholas (November 1, 2010). "Benoît Mandelbrot". Time. Archived from the original on October 26, 2010 . Retrieved November 5, 2017. Babitz’s writing is also like the jacaranda tree in glorious bloom—bewitching an entire city, but all too brief.”— Los Angeles Review of Books Taleb is actually on to something important if you can tolerate his self-importance enough to filter his verbage to get his good ideas. A central idea is that we assume everything in the world is Gaussian and then we base all our decisions about life on our Gaussian models. But the significant, life-changing, society-changing, events are outside the Gaussian. Things like 9-11. They belong to Extremestan, not Mediocristan. Hume ... puts to shame almost all current thinkers, and certainly the entire German graduate curriculum."

The author's tone throughout the book, slightly irreverent, didn't annoy me as much as it seems to have bothered other readers. I enjoyed learning a new way to look at reality, but, as I mentioned before, this is a dense read and I wouldn't consider it "fun" reading either. Shortform note: It’s unclear how Taleb defines “predicted.” Plenty of science-fiction writers and cultural commentators anticipated recent technologies like the Internet and augmented and virtual reality.) I guess that if someone loves Eve Babitz right now it is a red flag for me. Her writing style was not the problem for me but what she was talking about. I read SEX AND RAGE last year and LOVED IT so much I knew I HAD to read this! First off, I’m obsessed with the new cover! And second, I’m still obsessed with Eve’s writing! She is a keen observer and has a way of drawing you in. She writes without judgment, without apologizing, and with so much confidence. Because experts both (1) “tunnel” into the norms of their particular discipline and (2) base their predictive models exclusively on past events, their predictions are inevitably susceptible to the extremely random and unforeseen.Statisticians, it has been shown, tend to leave their brains in the classroom and engage in the most trivial inferential errors once they are let out on the streets." Chevallier, Arnaud (2016). Strategic Thinking in Complex Problem Solving. Oxford University Press. p.88. ISBN 9780190463908. Consider the fate of Giaccomo, the opera singer at the end of the 19th Century. In his day, there was no way of storing his work, so his presence was required for every single performance, so the pie was evenly split, relatively, as inequalities existed but were mild. At this time in history, there is no scalability yet, no way to double the largest in person audience without having to sing twice. Babitz’s talent for the brilliant line, honed to a point, never interferes with her feel for languid pleasures.”— The New York Times Book Review I don’t know how I feel about “the writer” being involved in the observation. Observing themselves in the observation of an event/making both things the focus? It’s a unique writing style apparently popularized by Didion. However, as I’m reading The White Album right now — I just feel like give me the goods, I don’t wanna hear about what you were doing at the same time. Just tell me that story or tell me yours. My brain is tired and I can’t do no mo’!

Babitz's writing is also like the jacaranda tree in glorious bloom—bewitching an entire city, but all too brief." — Los Angeles Review of Books The ideas are interesting. Many are quite compelling. But it really seems Taleb's main point is "everyone else is an idiot." It seems the details why are secondary to that point.Babitz’s talent for the brilliant line, honed to a point, never interferes with her feel for languid pleasures." — The New York Times Book Review If you skipped your Systems, Statistics, or Random Variables classes in college, or if you think you know more than everyone else on Wall Street, then read this book. It will reaffirm what you already know. To the rest of you: this book will reaffirm what you thought you knew when you were 5 or 6...with an updated vocabulary.