Anton Savage: When it comes to worrying about the future, let’s cut ourselves some slack
The unpredictable is likely to impact us more than even the worst things we are currently obsessing over
Originally published in the Business Post.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb is an interesting chap. He’s a financial trader, philosopher, academic and mathematician with a predilection for power-lifting and a hatred of honours, awards or inclusion in ‘Top 100’ lists (which he maintains “turn knowledge into a spectator sport”).
He describes his most recent work, Incerto, as “an investigation of opacity, luck, uncertainty, probability, human error, risk and decision making when we don’ t understand the world, expressed in the form of a personal essay with autobiographical sections, stories, parables, and philosophical, historical, and scientific discussions in non-overlapping volumes that can be accessed in any order”.
Finally. We’ve all been waiting ages for one of those.
He’s odd, but hugely influential, largely because in his early years - prior to disappearing up his own fundament with five volume collections of parables and philosophy - he wrote a number of books challenging how most of us looked at life.
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