I was going to write a review of this book, but I haven't finished it, and I simply can't wait.I just finished an Honours degree in Political Science. The honours advisor, a professor of political philosophy and an expert on Hobbes, is a fascinating guy who describes himself occasionally as an expert on bullshit. I must admit that I very frequently felt in the course of my studies that bullshit ought to have been in the course descriptions. But it wasn't really clear to me why.On having read these two posts over at The Freakonomics Blog, my interest was piqued. (I note now the coincidence that the author of the first of those posts was unable to refrain from commenting on the book after getting only 1/3 of the way through. I wonder if getting people to write about your book before they're done reading it is a good sign.) A couple of days ago I went to Chapters and spent some gift cards I'd gotten for Christmas on The Black Swan.The Black Swan so far, in its first half, has accomplished two significant things for me. First, it has explained to me the reason most of the things I thought were bullshit in school actually were bullshit (and pointed out a good number more instances about which I was previously unaware). Secondly, it has dove-tailed nicely into my world view, which I have been struggling unsuccessfully to express in writing.The author is concerned with the large and under-appreciated effects of randomness in the world. That matches closely with how I understand the world ontologically. It is rewarding to see someone getting literary success explaining an idea to which I ascribe, and which I thought was so rarely held. The idea? The world is basically random, and we do not understand it as well as we think.Consider this simple idea on which one of the early chapters is based: When you read a biography, or a history, you get a list of events that have happened in the past, linked together with a bunch of relatively straightforward causal implications. For example, the Second World War started because of X, and was won by the Allies because of Y. But consider how obvious those causes were to people immediately prior to when they happened. No one knew the war was coming, and once it started no one knew how it would end. We don't write narratives of the future, and neither did the people just prior to WWII. Why?Why do we presume that we understand what has happened before when we demonstrate virtually no capacity to predict the same sort of events into the future? Is there that much of a difference between what has happened until now and what is to come in terms of its causality? No. There's nothing special about now. We're just deceiving ourselves. Our presumption that we understand what has already happened is (largely) bullshit.The implications for politics (for me, everything is about politics) are significant. I'm particularly interested to see if I can determine whether or not voting behaviour is susceptible to Black Swans. I'm also particularly interested in what the second half of the book is going to say on the topic of statistics, and how that will relate to the techniques of political polling. I'll let you know what I find out.Perhaps most confusingly, the book has not only corroborated my own world view, but completely discredited the concept of corroborating evidence. I strongly suspect that this will be the first book I have read in my adult life that I will read repeatedly.