0-9: What Do We Know, and How Do We Know It? (The Black Swan)

I am about halfway through The Black Swan. I keep thinking about these verses of Scripture:
"Come now, you who say, 'Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a city, and spend a year there and engage in business and make a profit.' Yet you do not know what your life will be like tomorrow. You are just a vapor that appears for a little while and then vanishes away. Instead, you ought to say, 'If the Lord wills, we will live and also do this or that.' But as it is, you boast in your arrogance; all such boasting is evil." (James 4: 13-16, NASB) Taleb's book seems like an exposition of this passage, even more so because one of his main applications is to critique those who build their business models on the confidence that they know something about the future.

 If you want to know Taleb's point, you could save a lot of time by reading just the first chapter here: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/22/books/chapters/0422-1st-tale.html?pagewanted=all. If you want to know what kind of fellow the author is, he'll be happy to tell you here: http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com. If you want a sound critical overview of the book, The New York Times has provided it here: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/22/books/review/Easterbrook.t.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0, but I rather like this analysis from a Berkeley prof, here: http://www.stat.berkeley.edu/~aldous/157/Books/taleb.html.

One thing neither reviewer mentioned was that Taleb has an odd habit of including sentences that don't make any sense or that are very badly composed, and sometimes whole paragraphs that seem completely irrelevant, at various moments in the book. I don't have an example to hand, but it gives me the same feeling that I have when I'm watching a 2.5 hour movie and a scene drags. Come on, you could have saved 45 seconds right there!

One very interesting point Taleb makes in the course of stressing how we don't know anything is this: We are very bad at estimating how long something will take. Sometimes, the further you travel towards a goal, the farther away it may recede. For example, a person who is out of work is more likely to remain out of work the longer he has been looking. Taleb presents this phenomenon as a certainty, which is an example of how statistics lie, but being aware that it is a possibility is useful information. Sometimes there is an external reason for this phenomenon-- employers get nervous about hiring people who have been out of work for a long time. Sometimes it is more psychological; the longer I am out of work, the more discouraged I might get about finding work, and the more comfortable with surviving some other way. But just knowing that the longer you let a project --like finding work or painting a room or writing a novel or going to war-- go, the more likely it is that it will go even longer, is useful information.