Reviewing the Reviewer

I always enjoy perusing Michael Allen’s blog, Grumpy Old Bookman, which features numerous insights into the world of publishing. Allen is also a publisher, and his e-book The Survival of Rats in the Slushpile is an intriguing reality check on the business of getting into print--well worth a read. (You can download it for free here.)

In Survival of Rats, Allen references the work of philosopher and financial mathematician Nassim Nicholas Taleb, in particular his “Black Swan Theory,” which is a major feature at Taleb’s Web site.

Also available through Taleb’s site is a piece he wrote about the book-reviewing process. (Scroll down until you locate the heading, “Wittgenstein’s Ruler--The End of the Writer as a Sitting Duck”). In it, Taleb remarks:

Writers had to sit down and be subjected to the randomness of the choice of reviewer, his or her mood, and whether they are vicious or not, whether they were envious or not, or whether they had a bad day. The history of book reviews is depressing. By the narrative fallacy, anyone can say anything arbitrarily mean or wrong about a piece of work--the readers have no choice but to take it as is. Because of contagion effects, subsequent book reviews will be likely to follow previous ones, causing contagion chains and cascades ... The only option authors had was the wimpy letter to the editor. Well, no more of that writer-as-a-sitting-duck business, thanks to the Web and the long tail mechanism. Every reviewer can be now subjected to his own review, which thanks to the web, will follow him for life, in a “Googlable” way, particularly when there is intellectual dishonesty on his part. It is not my style to moan; I’d rather do nothing or, randomly, expose the perpetrator destroying the message of a book I like. If someone goes unfairly ad hominem into someone else’s background, you go into his. This is my style of deterrence: overreact to what you find intellectually unfair beyond the tit-for-tat, or ignore completely--and randomly. I wrote 11 years ago a review of a review of a book by my friend Victor Niederhoffer, which I found unfair, misdirected, and uninformed. The review is dead but my second-order review still crops up!

Grumpy Old Bookman’s Allen reports that Taleb is particularly displeased by the distortions, which have appeared in print, of his own ideas--ideas which were expressed in Fooled by Randomness, which Allen reviewed here back in 2004.

From my own modest experience of applying Taleb’s ideas to the book trade, I can testify that people do tend to misread what authors are saying. Or, to put it perhaps more tactfully, it is very difficult to ensure that a reader always knows what you mean. In fact, in the case of some readers, it’s nearly impossible to ensure that they do.

Taleb’s newest book, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, is due out in the UK from Random House come May.