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In Molière's Bourgeois Gentleman M. Jourdain learns from the Philosophy teacher that there is only verse and prose, and that he, Jourdain, has been speaking prose all his life without even knowing it, and that when he says, "Nicole bring me my slippers and fetch my nightcap," he is speaking prose.

We learn from our teacher, the options trader turned philosopher, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, that although we are living comfortably in the kingdom of Mediocristan, our prose world if you will, our long term survival is by no means assured. For, Taleb affirms, we are no less inhabitants of the opposing kingdom of Extremistan, where our seemingly secure and comfortable lives can be and probably will be overwhelmed by unforseen and extreme events.

This fact ought to do away with our assurance, our confidence in our ability to order the events of our lives. This ought to teach us humility at the very least. Taleb's conclusion is not too different from the 2500 year old Platonic maxim that Socrates mostly differed from others in knowing that he did not know.

Taleb knows that he, and the financial experts with whom he worked for many years, don't know, and he doesn't tire of saying it. Most of all berates those who set themselves up as knowing, as knowing more and better than the rest of us, the "tie wearers," the economists, the bankers, the doctors, the experts of all sorts. For Taleb the risks that confront us, financial risks and health risks among others (Taleb himself is a cancer survivor, and the health risk is still very much with him) are always hugely greater than the experts' ability to quantify and thereby lessen their effects.

Taleb's most recent book, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable'' (Random House), came out in May 2007, just months before the subprime fiasco rocked global markets and led banks to announce at least $208 billion worth of writedowns. Did he in fact predict the unpredictable? How did he do that?

According to Taleb the present crisis, came about because we thought we understood the risks we were taking. We didn't, of course, and we fear now that even today Henry Paulson and Ben Bernanke still don't. We fear that our guides are not aware of the road ahead, in particular the additional risks stemming from their own corrective actions.

However, Taleb, like too many original thinkers with good ideas goes too far with his argument. His quarrel with the financial experts, the bankers and others who have by and large created the present financial crisis by their own irresponsible behavior, is certainly a legitimate one. Yes, the experts did overlook the complexity, the random behavior of the markets, and had far too much confidence in their own ability to manage the risks.

But the central images of his book, the black swan and the kingdoms of Mediocristan and Extremistan are clever distractions at best and at worst reveal the author's superficial reading of the place of randomness, of unexpected and devastating events in history.

First, the black swan. Taleb, while defending his choice of the black swan says:

"First, it is an outlier, as it lies outside the realm of regular expectations, because nothing in the past can convincingly point to its possibility. Second, it carries an extreme impact. Third, in spite of its outlier status, human nature makes us concoct explanations for its occurrence after the fact, making it explainable and predictable."

One is puzzled by his statement here that the black swan "carries an extreme impact." What is the extreme impact? An earthquake has an extreme impact, as does a financial bubble (the effects of the housing bubble that are with us right now), yes, but not the first sighting of the black swan, which has had no effect on our lives, and which, by the way, no one ever said was an impossibility.

The apparent non existence of black swans for many hundreds of years, and then there discovery did have a useful application. Philosophers by that example loved to point out the inherent limits of induction: All the white swans in the world couldn't do away with the possible existence of a black one. Taleb should have left the black swan example there with the philosophers.

Similarly with his two kingdoms, Mediocristan, that of the Bell or Normal curve, and Extremistan, that of the fat tails or single all powerful events. Instead, and for his own purposes, he might much better  have referred to the long standing debate in geology regarding the relative importances of Uniformitarianism, or the observation that fundamentally the same geological processes that operate today also operated in the distant past, and catastrophism, that which states that Earth surface features originated suddenly in the past by geological processes radically different from those currently occurring.

These opposing positions have always been with us in one form or another, and Taleb didn't need to reinvent them in the guise of Mediocristan and Extremistan. Furthermore, from within the position of the uniformitarians, within Mediocristan we are often able to know the future. Take, for example, the height of mountains, the flow of rivers. Both measurements, as many others, are fully determined by present processes that we can understand.

Of course there are and have always been extreme events, catastrophies. Of course all sorts of things do happen without our being able to predict them, common examples being weather phenomena, currency fluctuations, earthquakes and other natural disasters including asteroids striking the earth, most notably the giant asteroid that hit the coast of Mexico 65 million years ago and probably incinerated all the large dinosaurs that were alive at the time in only a few hours leaving only those organisms (our forbears) already sheltered in burrows or in water left alive.

Most of all Taleb to my mind is totally unconvincing when he talks of his "black swans" as including such events as the rise of Hitler and the subsequent war, the precipitous demise of the Soviet bloc, the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, the spread of the Internet, the market crash of 1987… fads, epidemics, fashion, ideas, the emergence of art genres and schools… Would that such devastating events had only been black swans, bringing with them only as gentle an impact as that sighting of the first black swan in Western Australia in 1697 by the Dutch explorer Vlamingh.

Maybe there are readers who can follow Taleb's extended use of the image of the black swan. I can't. The internet is a black swan? The major medical discoveries, black swans? Technological innovations including the laser in medical applications, black swans?

While perhaps not forseen in respect to their subsequent huge impact on our lives (for they did have huge impacts, unlike the first sighting of a black swan) these happenings were in no small regard not totally surprising nor totally unexpected.

Why did Taleb use the black swan as the central image of his argument?  What is that enormous impact of which he speaks? Why did he not use insrtead a real devastating and if not unexpected at least unpredicted event such as the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 the inspiration of Heinrich Von Kleist's great story, Das Erdeben in Chili. Or that dinosaur killer asteroid…? Both of much greater significance for his argument.

Now it's true that technological developments will often take us well byond what we had expected, the internet being a good example of this. But then why not call the wheel, the printing press, the automobile, and going back to the time of Prometheus, fire itself, black swans?  You see the problem with his argument. Black Swans are everywhere, and like pigeons and sparrows lose their significance.

In an exceedingly maladroit manner Taleb is attempting to make a much larger place for randomness in our lives. Again, he is only on solid ground when he singles out the risk analysts as
having most covered up the paramount place of randomness, and points out that here correction is needed. This is the correction he was right to make.

He should have stuck with that. Stuck with his opinion, which did appear in his published book of that name, remarkably and unexpectedly (making his book a black swan?) well before the present financial crisis, in March of 2007.

It was, and I expect still is, Taleb's not unreasonable position that the global financial structure was far too complicated for anyone, let alone the so-called experts, to understand, and that the real risks of a global financial collapse, because of the existence of innumerable factors beyond our ken, let alone our control, ought to have made us a bit more humble and pay more attention to the risks that were there.