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Dave Wilson
Dave is a the editorial director at DelMio.com. He was an editor for 10 years at the Akron Beacon Journal and eight years at the (Myrtle Beach, S.C.) Sun News. He holds a bachelor’s degree in journalism from The Ohio State University.
He lives in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, with his wife, DeAnne, and son Matthew, 12, and daughter Lindsey, 8.
Thoughts? Comments? Let Dave know. E-mail him at dave.wilson@delmio.com.
Old blogs
One entry
(These postings were written in August and September 2007)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb can be an intimidating writer. He’s well-read, highly educated, opinionated, and expects you to be as well (actually, he’d probably prefer you keep your opinion to yourself). To see him on video (daring to appear on The Colbert Report, of all things), he comes across as much more accessible.
He has a deadpan sense of humor, which really enriches The Black Swan. Just when you think you’re mired in thoughts over your head, he’ll toss off a joke about the French. Or evolution. “We humans have the largest cortex, followed by bank executives, dolphins, our cousins the apes.” He could have said journalists instead of bank executives (and might have in other circumstances) and I’d have still laughed out loud. He writes about one time being in an airport in Frankfurt and receiving a deutschmark days before switching to the euro and how currency traders “like this (more or less) humble author…” (his parenthetical) would miss the deutschmark.
The Black Swan is a highly technical book, debunking such scientific tools as the bell curve, which Taleb calls “that great intellectual fraud.” Even names a chapter for it. But for such a technical work, he manages to inject a lot of personality into it.
He doesn’t want to be a sucker. Or a turkey. Here’s why.
The farmer feeds and waters the turkeys every day, without failure. This goes on for nine months. This could lead a turkey to conclude (if it were an empirical turkey) that the farmer is concerned about its well being. But the turkey is missing a key datum: Tomorrow is the slaughter.
He has a dim view of journalists, newspapers in particular, to which I take great exception. How dare he!!!
Well, he has a point. He noticed during the Lebanese war of the 1970s, where he lived as a teenager, that journalists there conducted what Robert Fisk calls “hotel journalism.” They tended to all see things through the same lens, from the same vantage point.
Guess what’s happening in Iraq? Where do all those reporters, camera crews and photogs hang when they’re not in the field? They stay in a hotel in Mediocristan, and just outside those hotels are territories of Extremistan, with their IEDs, goon squads and other fun stuff.
I was particularly annoyed with the Washington press corps in the run-up to the Iraq war. Nobody seemed to challenge the false assumptions (lies or just bad intel) that 1) Saddam Hussein had operable WMDs at that time 2) Saddam was remotely connected in any way with Sept. 11, 2001, (he’d have sooner gassed Osama bin Laden than be associated with him) 3) Saddam posed an immediate threat to anybody (except his own countrymen–most of them are probably glad he’s dead). And it took this nation two years or so to figure out that this was a colossal screw-up.
But I digress.
The Black Swan is all about randomness, how we can’t control everything; in fact there are many factors we have no control over, even though we may think we do. That’s an arrogant fallacy.
I give you my personal experience in ludic fallacy. When layoffs at the Akron Beacon Journal were announced during the summer of 2006, I felt reasonably sure that I’d survive the cuts. I was worried a little, and felt bad knowing that people were going to lose their jobs. But I didn’t think it would be me. After all, I rationalized, I was the newest manager promoted in the newsroom (January) and way, way cheaper than some editors who had been managers for 20 years or more. Surely they’d go first. After all, I further rationalized, some of them aren’t even involved in the daily production of the paper. I mean, come on. I was making the widgets.
What I didn’t know was that I was chosen in part precisely because I was the newest hire. The company was applying the same rules to management that it had to the union employees. Last in, first out.
That was my black swan.
Another entry
Fooled by sloppy planning
So I headed out today to meet DelMio producer Hannah Schaefer at a Borders (or was it Barnes & Noble?) store to discuss her next Exploration.
It was a place conveniently situated between her home in Medina (pronounced Meh-DIE-nuh, not funky cold Meh-DEE-nuh) and my spot in Cuyahoga Falls. These two lovely communities, to the non-Ohioan, are near Akron, Ohio, a bit south of Cleveland.
I had left early to allow plenty of time to cruise around and find the place and, sure enough, had no trouble finding Barnes & Noble on Market Street. I had some time to spare so I browsed around the store. Ran across a paperback copy of Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Fooled by Randomness. Figured what the heck, pony up $15 and see what gave rise to The Black Swan.
I’m only in the preface, cuz I’m a busy guy, but it’s definitely the same Nassim Taleb: smart, funny, irreverent. Even to himself. He claims to have made major revisions and additions to this edition, but it’s lost on me. He could have flopped two sentences and I’d be none the wiser.
Well, 2 o’clock came and went, and I started to wonder if maybe I had come to the wrong Big Box Bookstore.
I hadn’t brought my calendar book with the pertinent information because, I mean, how hard can it be? Starts with a ‘B,’ sells books and coffee. C’mon now!
But now 10 minutes had elapsed.
I call my lovely-but-harried wife, DeAnne, leave a message. Did I mention our daughter broke her arm last week and was scheduled for a follow-up visit today? Like, right then? She — my wife, that is — calls back, and after a brief but frantic search, finds the book and confirms that, indeed, I am an idiot.
So I spend the next 10 or 15 minutes cruising around the greater Fairlawn area, which is curiously referred to as “Montrose” for reasons that at the moment escape me. Apparently it’s kind of like “Kokomo,” more a state of mind than an actual place.
I arrive at Borders and find Hannah. She was working on her new AppleBook, which apparently she channeled through The Secret, her last Exploration, in part to fund. I start apologizing for being an idiot. Well, she starts apologizing for choosing the wrong Big Box Bookstore, as if this were all her fault. She’s young. She’ll learn soon enough to blame everything on the man/woman who’s not in the room at the moment. So in this case it’s all Mike Needs’ fault. Nevermind that he’s in Italy right now, that’s no excuse!
We chatted a bit about her next exploration, Loving Frank, (limited access for now) in which (SPOILER ALERT! DO NOT READ THE NEXT TWO WORDS!) everybody dies. (OK, IT’S SAFE TO READ AGAIN!) It’s about some guy name Frank Lloyd Wright, supposedly a famous architect. Even though he’s been gone for nearly 50 years, he continues to influence architecture and literature and picture calendars. A curious dichotomy, isn’t it: A home builder shacks up with a home wrecker (Disclaimer: the opinions of this blogger do not necessarily reflect the opinions of DelMio.com nor the publishers or creators of the many FLW books and picture calendars and action figures).
But I have drifted a tad off topic.
So, was my misadventure in Fairlawn/Montrose/Kokomo a Black Swan? Will the course of history be somehow irreversibly altered by this? Was I Fooled by Randomness? Nah. Just sloppy planning and poor memory. But I could be wrong. Just ask my wife.
Yet another entry
Once again, we have reached cruising altitude in the blogosphere. I’ll be your pilot for the duration of the flight. Smooth sailing ahead. And, as always, enjoy the flight.
Today we’re here to talk (well, technically, type) about Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s new book, The Black Swan. I don’t know that I’ve read a book like this before. Taleb is an epistemologist, that is he studies knowledge. Or something like that. He’s also a former commodities trader, scholar, essayist and a voracious reader, or as he describes himself, erudite.
He expects his audience to be erudite as well, which means this ain’t beach vacation fluff. In a nutshell, he tells us to expect the unexpected and we might be able to take advantage of the situation when it (unexpectedly) happens.
What is a black swan? Well, in Nassim Taleb’s book, it’s 1) unexpected, unpredicted and highly improbable. It’s an outlier. 2) Its impact is significant. 3) Our human nature pushes us to try to explain and reconstruct the cause of said event. Sept. 11, 2001, was a black swan. The phrase comes from the discovery of black swans in Australia. Before Australia was discovered by Western explorers, all swans were known to be white. Well, the discovery of black swans changed that reality.
Sept. 11, 2001, changed reality for the United States and, really, the world.
I guess Taleb says the Iraq war is less of a black swan. I’d say it’s more a case of stupidity, but don’t get me started. (Oops, too late).
