The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (Incerto, #2)

by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Popper generated a large-scale theory around this asymmetry, based on a technique called “falsification” (to falsify is to prove wrong) meant to distinguish between science and nonscience, and people immediately started splitting hairs about its technicalities, even though it is not the most interesting, or the most original, of Popper’s ideas. This idea about the asymmetry of knowledge is so liked by practitioners, because it is obvious to them; it is the way they run their business. The philosopher maudit Charles Sanders Peirce, who, like an artist, got only posthumous respect, also came up with a version of this Black Swan solution when Popper was wearing diapers—some people even called it the Peirce-Popper approach. Popper’s far more powerful and original idea is the “open” society, one that relies on skepticism as a modus operandi, refusing and resisting definitive truths. He accused Plato of closing our minds, according to the arguments I described in the Prologue. But Popper’s biggest idea was his insight concerning the fundamental, severe, and incurable unpredictability of the world, and that I will leave for the chapter on prediction.*