Nassim Taleb is a philosopher who believes that there is an extraordinary gap between what experts say and the reality of what happens in the context of life. On a recent blog-roll he delves into the many contradictions that afflict the public’s understanding of consequences involving risk as well as the estimations of it.

By provoking readers to re-assess their core beliefs, Taleb is able to draw correlations between life events such as the current economic downturn and the failure of standard predictors to intervene, forecast, prevent or even relieve some the consequences of this global crisis. Taleb wants his readers to understand the level of risk they are taking on and how it will impact their lives individually. The repeating theme throughout much of his work is that “we can’t predict rare events but we can live to be protected from them.”

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