William Gaddis

William Gaddis appears in The Black Swan as a case study in herding and information cascades among critics. Nassim Nicholas Taleb cites Jack Green’s Fire the Bastards!, which works systematically through the reviews of Gaddis’s novel The Recognitions and “shows clearly how book reviewers anchor on other reviews and reveals powerful mutual influence, even in their wording.” For Taleb, Gaddis’s reception is anecdotal evidence that expert opinion is path-dependent and socially contagious — reviewers converge not on the book but on each other, an instance of the anchoring and cascade dynamics the book warns against.

Context: William Gaddis (1922–1998) was an American novelist associated with literary postmodernism; his debut, The Recognitions (1955), was initially met with dismissive reviews before later being recognized as a major work.

Where this appears

• The Black Swan — Gaddis’s novel The Recognitions used (via Jack Green’s Fire the Bastards!) as a demonstration of critics anchoring on each other’s reviews