Headlessness

“I am not relying in this book on the beastly method of collecting selective “corroborating evidence” … I call this overload of examples naive empiricism—successions of anecdotes selected to fit a story do not constitute evidence.”

— Nassim Taleb - The Black Swan.

I was nervous about buying The Black Swan a few months ago, and more nervous still picking it up this morning to begin. It comes from the most terrifying stand in the bookshop: the one headed Popular Science. I’ve received a number of books from these shelves as gifts over the last few years, and many are intellectual candyfloss. The author has a point of view, and he wants you to share it. They’re persuasive at first glance, entertaining, but intellectually poisonous. They trick you into thinking you’re thinking, when really you’re just having your cranial erogenous zones massaged. They’re not all like this, but many are, and usually the authors will be falling over themselves to recommend each other’s books on the back of the covers. It was towards the end of the prologue of Black Swans, that I came across the above quote, itself part of a longer passage that is unmistakably a swipe at some authors in the popular science genre. It has given me higher hopes for the book than I held previously.