| I stopped reading at Taleb's first example. I've seen very similar stories from both Richard Feynman and John Littlewood. Here's Taleb: "I was thinking about calling my third cousin Antiochus this morning when the phone rang. Miracle! It was him on the other line; this confirms my developed sixth sense! This is a great omen except that perhaps I should wake up and take into account the number of times when I thought about calling him without his calling me; the times when he called me without my thinking about calling him; and, most significantly, the numerous occurrences of my not thinking about him, and him not trying to call me." Feynman has several variations on this theme. Here's one: "I remembered the time I was in my fraternity house at MIT when the idea came into my head completely out of the blue that my grandmother was dead. Right after that there was a telephone call, just like that. It was for Pete Bernays-- my grandmother wasn't dead. So I remembered that, in case somebody told me a story that ended the other way. I figured that such things can sometimes happen by luck--after all, my grandmother was very old--although people might think they happened by some sort of supernatural phenomenon." And another: "You know, the most amazing thing happened to me tonight. I was coming here, on the way to the lecture, and I came in through the parking lot. And you won't believe what happened. I saw a car with the license plate ARW 357. Can you imagine? Of all the millions of license plates in the state, what was the chance that I would see that particular one tonight? Amazing! " There's an extended quote in the Feynman biography "Genius" (by James Gleick) which is a closer match than both these. I don't have an easy cut-and-paste, alas, but here's a link on Google books (it's the third page link): http://books.google.ca/books?id=j42RD66g72oC&printsec=frontc... Taleb basically reads as a reorganized and edited version of this last quote. Edit: I couldn't resist reading on. Taleb's article is embarassingly bad. Half his "original examples" I'd heard before from statisticians and other scientists, often years before Taleb's books. I will say this: there are a few instances in there where Dobelli should be genuinely embarassed. But Taleb should be at least equally embarassed by presenting, Wolfram-like, well-known truths as his deep original thought. |
Also this paragraph:
Note that correspondence of content doesn't imply plagiarism. There is a book EXTREMELY similar to Fooled by Randomness called The Drunkard's Walk. Yet not a shade of plagiarism. Why? the examples and terminology were very different. Some ideas can be rediscovered by two people. And when asked, the author said: Had I known about FBR I wouldn't have written that book. An honorable man.
EDIT in reply to above edit: Note that Taleb isn't saying he's the originator of all the examples. Many are attributed in his footnotes, and he's not claming authorship of them. Many of the examples, as you say, are already in the common consciousness. Taleb is using these examples to drive other points. The only thing he is saying - in this article - is showing how Dobelli is obviously plagiarizing what he has written.