Taphonomic Hyperthymesia

TIME’s person of the year is Mark Zuckerberg. Sorry Julian Assange, I guess you didn’t violate enough people’s privacy.

Taleb introduces the Hayekian and almost taoistic metaphor of the anti-library: A library of the books you haven’t read, of the things you don’t know. A massive collection of unknowledge, the anti-library contains all the books that may still change your life. Most of your favourite books are there, hidden and forgotten. It has facts you need to know, authors you’d worship. Only people who read very little can think the anti-library doesn’t matter. To book-lovers, and especially generalists like me, who jump all over the place without focus, the stacks of the anti-library loom higher and darker for every book we read. Every book that changes me reminds me of the ones that still might. The Black Swan is not about unread books as such, but about all the important, life-changing, world-changing information that we don’t have. Unknowledge is an unsettling concept. Like the Death of Discworld, our eyes glaze over it and hurriedly find something more comforting to focus on. Taleb asks us to look at it, and acknowledge that it’s there, a massive source of wild randomness that will eat your predictions for breakfast, and change your world again, and again, and again. As it has done so often in the past.