Cover; Title Page; Copyright; Dedication; Contents; Acknowledgements; Preface; PART I; True Confessions; Getting Rich; The Dismal Science; Losing Money; The Axis of Desire and Belief; A Prince of the Realm; Hot Air Rising; Taking Stock; Bi-Coastal: East; Whatever It's Worth; The Boys in the Back Room; Physical, Material, Mechanical; Bi-Coastal: West; The Odds; Russian Roulette; A Farewell to Physics; From Bad to Worse; Information; My Sign; Kolmogorov Complexity; Paris; PART II; As Big as Galileo; Status in Science; Dim Sum; The Gnome; Knowing and Known; Harvard; The Scientific Method.;From the Preface to the Second Edition:?This book will not take the casual reader to the cutting edge of research. Nor is it meant to. What I am after in Black Mischief is the moment in which various lines in an intellectual field of force collect themselves into a kind of dense knot?A number of otherwise sympathetic reviewers have suggested that my aim in Black Mischief was somehow to show the persistence of certain outmoded Newtonian forms of thought in economics, or psychology, or biology, or wherever. Not so. My intention has been to explore a tangle of connected.