Tinkering with Black Swans

The summer has been unusually mild this year in the pacific north west. A great opportunity to catch up on my reading. I'm halfway through Nassim Taleb's The Black Swan and I am still tackling the concepts Taleb introduces. In short, the book is about randomness and uncertainty theory and that is only scratching the surface. A black swan is a high impact event (i.e. the internet or 9/11), the impacts of which are undirected and unpredicted. Other characteristics of a Black Swan are they are considered outliers, they don't connect to events or trends in the past, they come as a surprise, and they have lasting impact. Taleb further argues that once such an event happens, as humans we are predisposed to retrofitting it to a set of patterns or a story that helps us rationalize it; We effectively concoct an explanation, after the fact, to make the random Black Swan event more predictable and explainable. We rationalize the randomness by not acknowledging it. I'm mentally still tackling this revelation.

Taleb explores the intersection of epistemology and the limitations of our human knowledge to cope with a world that is perhaps far more random (less patterned) than we might think or be predisposed to. What if the past was really no indication of the future? What if our greatest tool (the mind) was limited and could only reduce the randomness to a set of patterns that we put on a pedestal called science and mathematics ? Gosh this would explain so much seemingly irrational human behavior.  He sights examples ranging from 9/11 to economic collapse as events that noone saw coming but that all the pundits and experts understood and predicted in hindsight. The amazing pattern matching tool we call the brain can be a double edged sword in a world where randomness and uncertainty may play a more significant role than we know. There is allot there to think about as I interact with the world around me.