What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures

Notes

1

Taleb has since become famous. His second book – published a few years after this profile – was called The Black Swan, and it became an enormous bestseller. And the financial crisis of 2008- 2009 made a staggering amount of money for his fund. I ran into him at a conference in the spring of 2009, in the midst of the financial turmoil. “We have billions under management now,” he said, “and we still know nothing.” Typical Nassim. When I was reporting this piece, we would have lunches that would last for hours. The delight I took in his company was offset only by the dread I felt at the prospect of transcribing all those hours of tapes. Neiderhoffer, by the way, has lost and made and lost a number of other fortunes in the intervening years.

2

Sometimes the gap between hearing an idea and figuring out how to write about it is substantial. In this case, it was almost a decade. While he was in medical school, my friend Chris Grover once pointed out to me that, from an evolutionary perspective, the experience of modern women was profoundly unusual. Up until the beginning of the nineteenth century, women of childbearing age rarely menstruated. Today, they menstruate all the time. I found that fascinating. But how on earth do you fashion a story around that fact? Then I discovered John Rock.

3

By today’s standards, of course, Enron barely meets the threshold for financial scandal – not after the multitrillion-dollar financial meltdown of the past few years. But I wrote about it twice – here and a few years earlier in “The Talent Myth” (which you can find in part 3), because I felt it was really the paradigmatic scandal of the information age. History has borne this out. Had we taken the lessons of Enron more seriously, would we have had the financial crisis of 2008?

4

This article was written during the 2008 college football season. Missouri ended up finishing 10-4, and Chase Daniel – who at one point was considered one of the favorites to win the Heisman Trophy – faded down the stretch. He was not selected in the 2009 NFL draft but signed as a free agent with the Washington Redskins.

5

Not long after this article came out, I debated John Douglas on NPR. I expected him to have some kind of well-thought-out response to the criticisms of Alison and his colleagues. But it quickly became apparent that he had no idea who Alison or any of the other academic critics of profiling were.