Anton Savage: When it comes to worrying about the future, let’s cut ourselves some slack

Originally published in the Business Post.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb is an interesting chap. He’s a financial trader, philosopher, academic and mathematician with a predilection for power-lifting and a hatred of honours, awards or inclusion in ‘Top 100’ lists (which he maintains “turn knowledge into a spectator sport”).

He describes his most recent work, Incerto, as “an investigation of opacity, luck, uncertainty, probability, human error, risk and decision making when we don’ t understand the world, expressed in the form of a personal essay with autobiographical sections, stories, parables, and philosophical, historical, and scientific discussions in non-overlapping volumes that can be accessed in any order”.

Finally. We’ve all been waiting ages for one of those.

He’s odd, but hugely influential, largely because in his early years - prior to disappearing up his own fundament with five volume collections of parables and philosophy - he wrote a number of books challenging how most of us looked at life.

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