Scott Patterson
Review via The New York Times
The world Patterson portrays is largely divided among two camps: investors who subscribe to Taleb’s “Black Swan” philosophy of financial markets as vulnerable to unforeseeable shocks and those more convinced by the French researcher Didier Sornette’s “Dragon Kings,” anomalous but somewhat foreseeable events. Sornette, who steadfastly believes in “pockets of predictability,” finds Taleb and his partner Mark Spitznagel’s credo a touch too woo-woo. “Quants,” the financial engineers who trust complex formulas to tell them what the future holds — and who are the focus of another book by Patterson — are the extreme foil to both groups.
“The Black Swan concept is dangerous,” Sornette tells Patterson. “It puts us back at the time of pre-science where the wrath of nature, the lightning, the storms were the expression of the anger of the gods.”
