Black Swan author Nassim Nicholas Taleb teams up with the authors of Dance With Chance: Spyros Makridakis, Robin Hogarth and Anil Gaba — and discusses with them key concepts common amongst all of them. The four authors are advocating a certain kind of activism to bring the public to awarness of irrational expertise, our overreliance on experts, and how we naturally downplay the role of luck and randomness in our lives.
Apart from financial markets, they cite healthcare and medicine as potentially affected fields where the ‘expert problem’ is rampant.
I like this very much. We not only underestimate the randomness around us, we like to underestimate ourselves by putting 200% of our innate powers on experts, some of whom forget to note the element of luck, the so-called wild card, which is here called chance. Not to give false hopes, at the same time not to expect the worst as to question one’s existence, this is for the most part the tremendous balance that must be struck. I’d love to read the whole book though.