The Black Swan’s author may have at last given postmodernism something to hang its hat on. In particular, Taleb puts forth the notion that narrative-in-science, i.e., bell curves, misunderstood probability theory, confusing no-evidence and evidence-of-no, etc., lead to mass delusions regarding risk and leave us all with great big fat blind spots that cause us to be fleeced, killed or impoverished. Science is nothing more than a way of knowing subject to human error. The way to be least wrong, but still subject to the human editorial impulse. Simple proposition, hard to believe.

The problem is not his work, which, while a pastiche of other thinkers and well-known pomo tropes, is quite nice. The problem is Taleb. He thinks he’s witty, but he’s droll. His disdain for academia seems to come from working at its skirts, living its lifestyle, while sharing none of its honors. He considers himself a paradigm-shattering narrative stylist, but he’s a self-indulgent hack–he used, without irony, the word nondull. That alone should result in a public ass-whipping. His thesis is not new, but borrowed, cobbled, focused and popularized, despite his obvious yearning to be considered a philosopher.

In better news, an old student of mine, Nick, reminded me that he came up with a great story premise that I managed to finagle from him in some semi-binding quasi-contractual way. He sent me a line encouraging me to get off my fundament and get to writing the thing, and I surely should.

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Taleb, Nassim. The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. Random House, 2007.