Curious eyes

Before the discovery of a black swan in Australia, people for centuries believed that all swans were white. A single observation, like the one above, can invalidate knowledge held by us for centuries

What is a black swan? It’s an event with the following attributes

1. Rarity – Nothing in the past can convince us about its possibility
2. Extreme impact
3. Retrospective predictability – You can’t predict the outcomes in the future, but once the event has occurred, you can connect the dots to see how a past event has led to this future.

A small number of black swans explain almost everything in our world, from the success of ideas to religious events and historical events, etc. Example,

1. Historical — Franz Ferdinand’s Assassination

Rare event → True

Extreme impact → Let to world war I, which led to world war II

Retrospective predictability → Yes, it’s easy to connect dots from the future

1. Spread of ideas — Public adoption of ChatGPT Rare event → Yes, no chatbot could answer Extreme impact → It became fastest growing consumer app [1 Million users in 5 days] Retrospective predictability → There are reports stating even creators of ChatGPT did not anticipate this rapid public adoption

Black swan logic makes what you don’t know far more relevant than what you do know.

Given there are a lot of black swan events and their impact on history is enormous, our inability to predict black swan events robs us from the ability to predict course of history. Black swans being unpredictable, we need not to predict them but adjust to them.

Author says “Contrary to social science wisdom’ almost no discovery or technology of note came from design and planning – They were just black swans”

I don’t completely agree with above statement. XRays, MicroWave, Viagra etc. were accidental discoveries but Polio, Lightbulb, transistor were planned discoveries

Given above insight, the best strategy for entrepreneurs and discoverers is to rely less on planing and focus on maximising tinkering and recognising opportunities when they present themselves. Tinker as much as you can so you can expose yourself to as many black-swans events as possible.

Learning to learn – We learn the precise rules, facts and not the general rule. After WWI, French build Maginot line along previous invasion route to avoid reinvasion in future. But during WWII Germans effortlessly went around it. We don’t learn that we don’t learn.

Silent hero – We are aware of the the Martyr who died for the cause we knew about but we are totally unaware of silent hero who has successfully & silently evaded the problem in the first place. Consider a though experiment, a deadly ransomware hacks company’s network. This hack exposes entire company’s infrastructure, making everyone realise the gravity of a threat from ransomwares. A cybersecurity expert coming up with solution to this problem gains recognition. But what happens when a cybersecurity expert anticipates the problems and solves it before the situation arise? In this case, there won’t be any recognition for the expert instead there is a possibility that expert will be grilled for wasting resources and overengineering. We all know prevention is better than a cure, but unfortunately, many times we don’t reward prevention.

Platonicity – Relates to our idea of considering map for a territory. Manytimes we tend to model messy reality using simple mental models, but often it’s not entire correct representation. Though mental models are mostly right, there is always some error associated with it. tricky part is, often it’s difficult to realise beforehand when the mental model is wrong.