Fads
By: Erik Emery Hanberg
I was so right about things when I was 17. At 21, I realized that a lot of those things were wrong, but that's why I was in college-to learn how my bourgeois upbringing had shielded me to the realities of the world. Of course, at 23 and stepping in the working world I saw the immaturity and naivete of some of my college ideals. And now at 28 I marvel at some of the ideas I espoused and choices I made.
At some point you think I would learn that only lesson that has held true over all this time: I don't have a clue what I'm talking about. Wait, I really thought that Atkins diet was a good idea? I called myself a liberal hawk and defended George W. Bush to my friends? I said what to that pretty girl in college?
I seem to treat each new idea like it's the latest fad. I wore Thomas Friedman's The Lexus and the Olive Tree like it was a pair of trendy UGG boots. I hauled Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point around like it was a fashionable Jansport backpack. And right now, I'm driving Nassim Nicholas Taleb's The Black Swan like it was a Prius.
Fortunately, The Black Swan is a book precisely about our lack of knowledge. He takes his title from the British, who believed that all swans were white. After all, why question that assumption? They had never seen anything but a white swan ... until they explored Australia. His point is that past evidence makes it hard to extrapolate what's going to happen next.
Using another bird analogy he puts us in the position of a turkey. For 1,000 days, all evidence would tell us that things are going to be great. We're getting fed, we're cared for by the farmer ... what could possibly go wrong? Unfortunately on the 1,001th day-the Wednesday before Thanksgiving-we get our head chopped off.
Taleb says that we are frequently the turkey. We don't know what surprise is waiting for us around the corner, whether that surprise is September 11, the rise of the Internet, or the rise of a fundamental new idea (like the concept of a nation-state arising after the age of empires). It has given me a certain humility, I hope, as well as a healthy skepticism.
Of course, I suppose it's possible that the next fad book I read will change all this. In fact, Taleb would probably tell me it's likely, if not inevitable. He just can't predict what it will be. But in two years I'll probably look back and think, I wrote about what now?