No book I know has granted this much gratification. Or thought-provoking wisdom.Fooled By Randomness by Nassim Nicholas Taleb was bought off the shelf (randomly, I must add) while travelling through India during mid-2008 for about SG$10 (which is less than half the Singaporean price).
I bought it without knowing who the author was or what the subject matter dealt with. I was barely numerate (which means being illiterate when it comes to dealing with numbers) when I first started reading it, but it prompted me to take a full-semester class in probability and statistics.
Not that it required numeracy to understand its central treatise. Taleb presented the topic of probability and statistics so fascinatingly well, it was a sin not to delve into the topic further.
Otherwise, written in Taleb's well-known idiosyncratic style and laced with his hallmark sarcasm, FBR should be read (note the normative stance) by any undergraduate, particularly those majoring in a social sciences or humanities, and with a knack for buggering lecturers with hard questions.
Taleb's scathing attacks against social scientists, philosophers and economists, in particular, is an indictment of the social sciences/ humanities department and the parent knowledge enterprise, otherwise known as, the university.
His criticism? These departments rely heavily on pseudo-scientific methods of knowing, while relying too much on explaining the past and committing the narrative fallacy of retrofitting explanations, all the while forgetting that history flows forward. The ghastliest mistake is to derive evidence from the highly visible past, with a blatant disregard for the unknowable, which is far more potent in its delivery of truths.
To rephrase Taleb, universities are the same as governments. They are not necessarily interested in the Truth (emphasis mine, and capitalised for intellectual posturing). They are more interested in self-perpetuation with their own narrow interests in mind. (But like governments, universities are necessary sometimes, and in my case, it can be shown that my ability to critique the system is conditional on me having been through the system in the first place. Hence, if no university, then no me as I am now. Note the clever use of conditional probability as an example and part of the argument.)
Which rings a bell for me because after three years of meandering through sterile corridors (and sometimes, equally sterile classes), intellectual ferment is not producing the desired concentrated spirit of inquiry. Rather, it's just a matter of mass fermenting of minds (like the process of producing the beer that is drunk by the undergraduate community on a weekend out, but without the beer as the payoff. It is just rot.) And I found it in a book and out of all places, from a book store while on an aimless holiday.
On hindsight, though, it wasn't such a chance occurrence to have randomly picked up a book on randomness after all, even considering the fact I managed to, while wandering through the Indian subcontinent.
First published in 2001, FBR established Taleb as a prophet. (It sold big, but perhaps not as big as, say, Malcolm Gladwell.) In 2004, the second edition was published and the word count was bumped up. It continued to sell big, so it made sense to continue to display the book in book stores (due to the fact it is a winner).
And add to the fact that India has always been famous for its outstanding variety of cheap books, it was just my sheer ignorance of this fact then, and this particular type of literature that has always been in existence, which foiled any earlier forays into this particular subject matter.
where's today's entry?
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