Written by Mihai Dragan on Wednesday, August 19th, 2009 ( One response )
Tags: black swan, book, book review, improbable, prediction, theory
Without hesitation I would categorize this book as one of those mind-boggling, enlightining concepts. At least for me. The impact of the highly improbable.
We humans are used to see the world through patterns and information filters that enable us to comprehend a little bit of the reality arround us. Enough to survive. Self sufficient beings as we are, we like to minimize the importance of the unknown and the impact it has on us.
We, the self-sufficient simians
We are taught to think the circle is one of those perfect geometrical figure and disconsider nature for its inability to reproduce it. We overstate our intelligence and forget we might be unable to understand the perfect compostition of nature’s complicated geometrical figures.
We are taught we can predict and, my God, do we fail. The 1973 Oil Crisis was not only unpredicted but experts stated, in 1972, that 1973 was going to be a steady year in the cost of oil. They even thought it may decrease. It grew ten times. The world was in shock.
This was improbable. It had a huge impact. In hindsight, it was rationalized as expected and even predicted. Just like any other Black Swan event.
So…what’s with the birds?
The term comes from the fact that in the 17th century people assumed that all swans are white. The opposite was impossible or, at most, improbable. The 18th century brought the discovery of the Black Swan species in Australia. The impossible became possible and retrospectively, probable.
Who wrote this?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb, as improbable as it might seem, deals with prediction. He held a job applying financial mathematics that were used to predict stock market evolution in a couple of Wall Street companies.
The book itself describes some of his experiences in the field, some of the interesting people he used to know and autobiographical stories about his path to the Black Swan theory.
Written by Mihai Dragan on Wednesday, November 19th, 2008 ( 2 responses )
Tags: capitalism, concept, internitism, social system, socialism, theory
The world spawned many organizational systems. Be it economic, social, religious or other I doubt we have reached a perfect global organizational system.
Socialism is Nirvana on paper but everywhere it was applied people manged to ruin things up. Working class leaders started and lead revolutions until they made it on top. Once there, they either became the dictators everyone feared (see the Chinese leader Mao Zedong), started revolution after revolution until shot dead (see everyone’s favorite t-shirt icon and political leader Che Guevara) or ruled the country into poverty and famine until stopped by citizens or outside security services.
Capitalism seems to be the wiser choice due to the higher standard living in capitalist countries and better economic trades, based on private property, free markets and investment concepts. Nothing is perfect however, as shown by the recent financial crisis.
Capitalism and socialism are just the tip of the iceberg as these systems can’t be managed without subsystems like the democratic structures, religious beliefs, military structures and others.
As the world gazes upon the ever-rising globalized economy a new low-level, barely perceptible structure arises. It is just a theory but I believe something I call Internitism is being born (don’t look it up, there is no such word. Yet.)
What is Internitism?
First of all Internitism is a full scale social system we are just beginning to understand and actually perceive. It features political structures, a special kind of democracy, its own economic regulations and markets (some that live beyond the off line economy), carefully delimited influence areas and territories.
Internitism does not care about color, geographical location, wealth, social class, religion or sex. In other words it might just be the perfect system.
Internitism is the web space and everyone inside it. Internitism is a new continent where people can (still) think and act freely, uninhibited by the social standards and regulations.
Its ever-growing influence and spread are the proof mankind tends to improve itself and think as one. The Internet is growing at a faster and faster rate, gathering more and more knowledge, having more and more adopters.
Think of Internetism concept as an ideology, rather than a social system, for a better understanding. You might want to see it from a different angle as it is already the ideology with the largest number of adopters in the world.
