tomorrow i will run faster...

I recently finished Nassim Taleb’s Black Swan and Isaac Asimov’s Foundation and Empire. It’s purely coincidence, but these two books are inadvertently related to each other in a fundamental way.

First, let me say that I enjoyed both. Black Swan‘s most attractive point was highlighting the human need for a unifying and “low-dimensional” narrative with which to explain inherently complex and “high_dimensional” data. Taleb’s point in my office-mate‘s terms is that if you squint hard enough, you can always find a low-dimensional manifold in a high-dimensional data set . . .  especially if it helps you sleep better at night. Foundation and Empire is just plain good. Asimov’s ability to make the reader care about characters quickly and forget about them just as quickly is amazing. I really like how each subsequent storyline makes reference to the previous storyline without being obnoxious. I also like how he was able to envision a future of space travel six years before Sputnik 1 which still remains driven by characters and plot and not by in-your-face hard scifi.

It is very interesting to me that Hari Seldon’s psycho-history is essentially a statistical physics approach to history. Essentially, when there are enough people acting collectively, individuals don’t matter because Society acts in aggregate as a much lower dimensional and more easily described creature. However, given what we now know about chaotic determinism, it’s hard to imagine a field such as Seldon’s emerging. In a sense, that’s what Taleb is highlighting in his own writing: the trajectory of history is hard to describe precisely because of unexpected individuals.

Summary: I highly recommend reading both Black Swan and Asimov’s Foundation trilogy (in order: Foundation, Foundation and Empire, Second Foundation).