So, I email Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of the phenomenally successful book, The Black Swan. Its thesis is that almost all consequential events in history come from unexpected directions. The implication is that pretty much anything you hear, believe or hope about the future is wrong. We know nothing.

I think this sounds a little Socratic. After all, the gadfly of Athens went around saying the more he learnt the more he realised he knew nothing. His definition of wisdom was not based on how much you know but on how well you understand how little you know. Plus, he was killed for pointing that out to those who thought they knew a lot - a downside, though the upside is that he did leave a legacy which defined a civilisation.

He didn't convey his insights via probability, Taleb's modus operandi, though he did have a kind of inner voice that told him what not to do, the negativity of which seems a little black swanish to me. He also believed that philosophy springs from experience not ideas, which sounds a little like Taleb's notion of tinkering too.

True, Taleb deploys Plato's name for one of his bête noires, namely Platonicity: 'the focus on those pure, well-defined, and easily discernible objects like triangles, or more social notions like friendship or love, at the cost of ignoring those objects of seemingly messier and less tractable structures.' But he probably can't be blamed for the association since most academic philosophers talk as if Plato was a Platonist and loved triangles more than he loved life.

So I email, to enthuse about Socrates. After all, as far as I can see, Socrates doesn't feature in The Black Swan. Maybe my email will be a revelation.

Within an hour, Taleb gets back:

He is the main character in my next book. Ciao, NNT

Is this some kind of scoop, I wonder...