Part One: Umberto Eco's Antilibrary, or How We Seek Validation, Chapter 1: The Apprenticeship of an Empirical Skeptic Summary and Analysis

Summary

Part One opened with a description of the library that the writer, Umberto Eco, owned. This library contained over 30,000 volumes, most of which Eco had never read. This was the entire point of having a personal library to the author: He cared not for books he had already read; only the ones that would be read mattered to him.

Taleb pointed out that we consider our knowledge as a thing to be protected and defended, as if it were private property. We have created lists of our experiences and academic accomplishments, but what we have not done was to create lists of what we did not know.

Chapter...