Nassim Taleb on the Problem of Inductive Knowledge

The überphilosopher Bertrand Russell presents a particularly toxic variant of my surprise jolt [like dropping an ice cube down someone's collar] in his illustration of what people in his line of business call the Problem of Induction or Problem of Inductive Knowledge (capitalized for its seriousness) - certainly the mother of all problems in life.  How can we logically go from specific instances to reach general conclusions?  How do we know what we know?  How do we know that what we have observed from given objects and events suffices to enable us to figure out their other properties?  There are traps built into any kind of knowledge gained from observation.

Consider a turkey that is fed every day.  Every single feeding will firm up the bird's belief that it is the general rule of life to be fed every day by friendly members of the human race "looking out for its best interests," as a politician would say.  On the afternoon of the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, something unexpected will happen to the turkey.  It will incur a revision of belief.

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Let us go one step further and consider induction's most worrisome aspect: learning backward.  Consider that the turkey's experience may have, rather than no value, a negative value.  It learned from observation, as we are all advised to do (hey, after all, this is what is believed to be the scientific method).  Its confidence increased as the number of friendly feedings grew, and it felt increasingly safe even though the slaughter was more and more imminent.  Consider that the feeling of safety reached its maximum when the risk was at the highest!  But the problem is even more general than that; it strikes at the nature of empirical knowledge itself.  Something has worked in the past, until - well, it unexpectedly no longer does, and what we learned from the past turns out to be at best irrelevant or false, at worst viciously misleading.

~ Nassim Taleb, "One thousand and one days, or how not to be a sucker," The Black Swan: The impact of the highly improbable, 2007