Yes they're very good at "seeming" the part. Until you check the cites/references.
Please excuse me for lumping Kahneman, Tversky and Taleb into the same bin (stating beforehand, feel free to dismiss or form your own opinions because of this). My justification is they cite eachother all the time, write about the same topics and are quoted as doing their research by "bouncing ideas off each other" (only to later dig up surveys or concoct experiments to confirm these--psych & social sciences should take some cues from psi research and do pre-registration).
This is now the second time I notice that one of their anecdotes posed as "research" doesn't quite check out to be as juicy and clear-cut (or even describing the same thing) as the citation given.
The other one was the first random cite I checked in Taleb's Black Swan. A statistics puzzle about big and a smaller hospital and the number of baby boys born in them on a specific day. The claim being research (from a metastudy by Kahneman & Tversky) showing a large pct of professional statisticians getting the answer to this puzzle wrong. Which is quite hard to believe because the puzzle isn't very tricky at all. Checking the cited publication (and the actual survey it meta'd about), turns out it was a much harder statistical question, and it wasn't professional statisticians but psychologists at a conference getting the answer wrong.
Good thing I already finished the book before checking the cite. I was so put off by this finding, I didn't bother to check anything else (most papers I read are on computational science, where this kind of fudging of details is neither worth it, nor easy to get away with).
Which is too bad because the topics they write about are very interesting, and worthwhile/important areas of research. I still believe it's not unlikely that a lot of their ideas do in fact hold kernels of truth, but I'm fairly sure that also a number of them really do not. And their field of research would be stronger for it to figure out which is which. Unfortunately this is not always the case for the juicy anecdotes that sell pop-sci / pop-psych books.
You should read silent risk (currently freely available as a draft on talebs website). It's mathematical, with solid proofs and derivations, so it doesn't really suffer from the same problems as The Black Swan. I had basically the same issues with the Black Swan that you did.
Thanks for the tip, I'll check it out! On that note, I also read Fooled by Randomness, an earlier work by Nicholas Taleb. It covers (somewhat) similar topics as Black Swan does, but from a bit more technical perspective. I found it a lot more pleasant and educational read. IIRC, it talks less about the financial world and rare catastrophal risks ("Black Swans"), and more about how humans are wired to reason intuitively quite well about certain types of probability/estimates/combinatorics, and particularly on how we really suck at certain others.
Fooled by Randomness also doesn't needlessly bash people for wearing ties or being French, like Black Swan does :) ... only later did I learn that Taleb was a personal friend of Benoit Mandelbrot (who was French), which put it in a bit more context (as a friendly poke, I'm assuming), but at the time I found it a bit off-putting and weird, as it really had nothing to do with the subject matter at all.
Please excuse me for lumping Kahneman, Tversky and Taleb into the same bin (stating beforehand, feel free to dismiss or form your own opinions because of this). My justification is they cite eachother all the time, write about the same topics and are quoted as doing their research by "bouncing ideas off each other" (only to later dig up surveys or concoct experiments to confirm these--psych & social sciences should take some cues from psi research and do pre-registration).
This is now the second time I notice that one of their anecdotes posed as "research" doesn't quite check out to be as juicy and clear-cut (or even describing the same thing) as the citation given.
The other one was the first random cite I checked in Taleb's Black Swan. A statistics puzzle about big and a smaller hospital and the number of baby boys born in them on a specific day. The claim being research (from a metastudy by Kahneman & Tversky) showing a large pct of professional statisticians getting the answer to this puzzle wrong. Which is quite hard to believe because the puzzle isn't very tricky at all. Checking the cited publication (and the actual survey it meta'd about), turns out it was a much harder statistical question, and it wasn't professional statisticians but psychologists at a conference getting the answer wrong.
Good thing I already finished the book before checking the cite. I was so put off by this finding, I didn't bother to check anything else (most papers I read are on computational science, where this kind of fudging of details is neither worth it, nor easy to get away with).
Which is too bad because the topics they write about are very interesting, and worthwhile/important areas of research. I still believe it's not unlikely that a lot of their ideas do in fact hold kernels of truth, but I'm fairly sure that also a number of them really do not. And their field of research would be stronger for it to figure out which is which. Unfortunately this is not always the case for the juicy anecdotes that sell pop-sci / pop-psych books.