The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (Incerto Book 2)
updated 2mo ago
updated 2mo ago
One would suppose that people living through the beginning of WWII had an inkling that something momentous was taking place. Not at all.*7
History and societies do not crawl. They make jumps. They go from fracture to fracture, with a few vibrations in between.
What can a turkey learn about what is in store for it tomorrow from the events of yesterday? A lot, perhaps, but certainly a little less than it thinks, and it is just that “little less” that may make all the difference.
Indeed, the idea that the left brain controls language may not be so accurate: the left brain seems more precisely to be where pattern recognition resides, and it may control language only insofar as language has a pattern-recognition attribute.
And yet, recognition can be quite a pump. Believe me, even those who genuinely claim that they do not believe in recognition, and that they separate labor from the fruits of labor, actually get a serotonin kick from it.
Ideas come and go, stories stay.
Look into your own existence. Count the significant events, the technological changes, and the inventions that have taken place in our environment since you were born and compare them to what was expected before their advent. How many of them came on a schedule? Look into your own personal life, to your choice of profession, say, or meeting your ma
... See moreI also noticed during the Lebanese war that journalists tended to cluster not necessarily around the same opinions but frequently around the same framework of analyses.
Similarly, the speculator George Soros, when making a financial bet, keeps looking for instances that would prove his initial theory wrong. This, perhaps, is true self-confidence: the ability to look at the world without the need to find signs that stroke one’s ego.*20
But it remains the case that you know what is wrong with a lot more confidence than you know what is right.