When a friend's daughter is unattractive, one often says something like, "she has such pretty eyes", or "she has such pretty hair". Nothing screams louder than a sympathetic evaluator who can only manage a lame compliment.

So I laughed when Tyler Cowen tried to praise Nassim Taleb's Black Swan over on Slate:

In The Black Swan, he preaches a bracing sermon in favor of an angst-ridden, but socially beneficial, plunge into wrestling with the unknown.

Such as...when you see a tiger and you run away (!), or embrace a new paradigm. Then Cowen brings up some practical examples:

Oddly [sic], Taleb's argument is weakest in the area he knows best, namely finance. Only on Wall Street do people seem to give proper credence—not too much, not too little—to very unlikely events. It is easy enough to use hindsight to identify the black swans Wall Street has missed, such as stock-price crashes. But it is harder to argue that the market undervalues surprise more generally...Yet "long-shot" strategies are well-studied, and they do not yield extra profit.

[That was my main critique when TBS came out.] You see, it's a great book, except when the author talks about his area of greatest experience, or anything specific (power laws? Old news says Cowen). It's great talking about 'the next Harry Potter', and paradigms, embracing randomness (how?). But Taleb does skewer those Platonist fools who 'confuse the map for the territory' as the hippies used to say [if only I had a nickel for every article that expanded on the fuzziness of categories, noting that every conceivable concept--black race vs white race, nature vs nurture, introvert vs extrovert--involve overlap and exceptions.]. As a self-described empiricist, you would think this might bother Taleb, but to his acolytes his vagueness and inconsistency is a sign of Hegelian profundity as opposed to mere confusion.