The dangers of the rear view mirror
by Paul Miller
'A black swan is an outlier, an event that lies beyond the realm of normal expectations. Most people expect all swans to be white because that's what their experience tells them; a black swan is by definition a surprise. Nevertheless, people tend to concoct explanations for them after the fact, which makes them appear more predictable, and less random, than they are. Our minds are designed to retain, for efficient storage, past information that fits into a compressed narrative. This distortion, called the hindsight bias, prevents us from adequately learning from the past.'
Taleb wrote this in an op-ed piece for the New York Times the same day as Condoleezza Rice gave evidence to the 9/11 Commission. He was also pretty damning of the way that the Commission had been set up and the things it was looking at, basically saying that by focussing on the specifics of that particular black swan it was blinding itself to how to prevent 'future tragedies, which are still abstract in our mind.'
The conclusion he comes to about our ability to handle Black Swans is pretty grim: 'Watching recent events and the politicians and journalists (of all persuasions) reacting to them, I am truly scared to live in this society.'
Read the op-ed piece and an interview with Nassim Taleb at Edge.org.
Read a longer academic article by Taleb about Black Swans (pdf).
John K
When I was younger, I could remember anything, whether it had happened
or not; but my faculties are decaying now and soon I shall be so I
cannot remember any but the things that never happened. It is sad to
go to pieces like this but we all have to do it.
-- Mark Twain
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were Xerox and Apple when Microsoft invented the GUI? Where was Apple's
QuickTime when Microsoft invented Video for Windows? Where was Spyglass
Inc.'s Mosaic when Microsoft invented Internet Explorer? Where was Sun
when Microsoft invented Java?
cialis cialis onlineWhen I was younger, I could remember anything, whether it had happened
or not; but my faculties are decaying now and soon I shall be so I
cannot remember any but the things that never happened. It is sad to
go to pieces like this but we all have to do it.
-- Mark Twain
Stephen Stephen
Thus spake the master programmer:
"When you have learned to snatch the error code from
the trap frame, it will be time for you to leave."
-- Geoffrey James, "The Tao of Programming"
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"When you have learned to snatch the error code from
the trap frame, it will be time for you to leave."
-- Geoffrey James, "The Tao of Programming"
Duncan O'Leary
I’ve been giving this one a bit of thought but not really getting anywhere until the lunchtime seminar that we just had with Rana Mitter, author of ‘A Bitter Revolution; China’s struggle with the modern world’. He talked about the effects of Revolution that took place on 5th May 1919; he suggested that the period of relative liberalism that followed may not have lasted, but that its legacy had.
This made me think about black swan events and their effects, and the analogy that has been floating around Demos since it was introduced in the Long Game. It made me think that whilst Black Swans may be useless in some contexts - as by definition they do not repeat themselves - they do serve a purpose in demonstrating to us that we are not playing ‘finite games’. Black swans demonstrate that the rules of the game can not only be altered – but that the new rules will also not necessarily be respected.
In this way, a black swan cannot be explained through the previous rules which stated that all swans are white, nor can future multi-coloured swans necessarily be predicted just because a black one has cropped up. Therefore the arrival of a black swan doesn’t mean a reappraisal of the rules and the establishment of a new ‘finite game’, but it reinforces the reality that rules will be broken in new and unexpected ways…
…so a couple of useful functions of black swans might be that
a) battles in arenas with black swans cannot easily won in the finite sense
b) any system that imprisons itself inside a set of finite rules after the appearance of a black swan is unlikely to be able to align its approach to its broader objectives.
No idea how helpful that is but i had to get it off my chest!