I've written a little bit about Nassim Nicholas Taleb before. In particular, I posted a short snippet to implement Monte Carlo simulation in Python. Anyway, I've lately been reading Wittgenstein's On Certainty. In this book, published after his death, he writes about the connections between human language and logic - and the nature of knowledge itself. Especially these days, with absurdly complicated financial crises and so on taking place, and with seemingly no good understanding of the situation, the field of epistemology (theory of knowledge) seems quite practical and relevant indeed. Of course, Taleb has written extensively about epistemology applied to finance, in particular with his black swan "theory". In this context, its very interesting to take note of Wittgenstein's writing in On Certainty. For example: 80. The truth of my statements is the test of my understanding of these statements. 81. That is to say: if I make certain false statements, it becomes uncertain whether I understand them. It would seem to me that many people have forgotten these rather fundamental ideas. Why are we still paying any attention to people like Henry Paulson and 'Helicopter' Ben Bernanke? An English translation of On Certainty is freely available on the web.
Niall O'Higgins is an author and software developer. He wrote the O'Reilly book MongoDB and Python. He is the co-founder of BeyondFog, Inc which makes Strider Brilliant Continuous Deployment. Strider is a hosted Continuous Integration & Deployment service for Node.JS and Python.
