He did not become upset with them but simply let their emotional storms pass. They of course attacked back, but Taleb knew how to handle them. The author attacked his detractors as being frauds and knowing it. Among those listed and explained by the author were the error of confirmation, the narrative fallacy, straight denial that Black Swan events exist, silent evidence, and undue focus on a few well-defined Black Swan events. People have developed several thought habits that helped us to deny the existence of Black Swan events. An example of silent evidence given was the high and unknown number of failed species for which no fossils exist. Determining how anything worked in empirical skepticism was considered a waste of time because not all the variables could be determined, and most of the silent evidence was unknown.
The idea was to discover what worked, not how it worked. Instead of starting with a hypothesis, supporting the hypothesis with observations and experimentation, and then creating a grand theory, empirical skepticism did experimentation first and never proposed any theories. The trick was to maximize luck, and this could best be done in capitalistic markets.Įmpirical skepticism involved turning the scientific method, an inductive way of thinking, on its head. Black Swan events could also be positive, such as making a big killing in the stock market from speculative investing or stumbling upon a product that made a big hit. They were the big surprises in life that resulted in major game changes, such as hurricane Katrina and the 9/11 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center.
These were events that happened without warning and beyond anybody's capacity to detect ahead of time. He explained that true randomness was the unavoidable consequence of living in this place and time, and that it led inevitably to Black Swan events. Nassim Nicholas Taleb built arguments to support his thesis of empirical skepticism, a different way of approaching the randomness in the world.
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