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Black Swan song

The Freakonomics boys interview the randomly intelligent Nassim Nicholas Taleb. His book The Black Swan should be a great followup to Everything is Miscellaneous, which I'm reading now. [Link]

Theorizing is the default activity for our brain; suspension of belief is an active one. Because of the narrative fallacy, our minds default to theory making. It takes more conscious effort – and energy - to suspend beliefs. It also takes more training – we train children to find “explanations” instead of just teaching them to have the guts to say, “I don’t know” in certain circumstances.

In a way, it is Aristotle’s pupils that I am after – the proponents of the superiority of “knowledge” over saying “I have no clue.” I have been trying to revive the class of skeptical thinkers who resisted Plato and Aristotle. I have also tried to revive pre-enlightenment thinkers – people who focused on the fallibility of human understanding.

jon posted this at 8:48 PM
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