Fooled By Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets

Taleb discusses a distinction between scientific intellectuals and literary intellectuals which he traces to a group of Viennese intellectuals in the 1930s, including philosophers Popper and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Taleb claims that these intellectuals “wanted to strip thinking from rhetoric (except in literature and poetry where it properly belonged)” (105). As a result, the notion of deductive and inductive reasoning was advanced, which Taleb claims has been a major influence on philosophy and science.

Taleb argues that the distinction between the two kinds of intellectuals is that in science, true rigor lies in inference rather than in “random references to such grandiose concepts as general relativity or quantum indeterminacy” (107). Taleb later presents examples of these random references in the work of Hegel. He also points out that Darwin’s Origin of the Species was both highly scientific and written in artistic prose. Taleb states that one can simulate a literary discourse with a Monte Carlo simulator but cannot do the same with scientific discourse. He then provides an example of the former. He also argues that much of what passes for business communication is allusions to stock phrases that can also be simulated by a Monte Carlo simulator.