Nicholas Taleb has a new book out to follow-up his earlier, intriguing Fooled by Randomness.The Black Swan is must reading for anyone who dabbles in military history, trading, or complexity. One Amazon reviewer does okay summarizing its content:
The themes include: winner-take-all phenonomen, numerous effects of randomness on the world, the invalidity of the Gaussian Bell Curve to most things in world, concepts of scalablity, [structural] instabilities in the world ... people's inability to predict the future.No author speaks more aptly to the fallacies promoted to and by Civil War readers, e.g., "inevitability of the war," inevitability of outcomes, reproduceability of military results, the blessings of risk-taking, and all those statements including the fragment "would have to."
