Spiritual Black Swans

Just read “Black Swan” by Nicholas Nassim Taleb. He’s quite the man around town these days. He happens to have predicted the whole financial mess way back in this book. His book is all about the limitations of human knowledge and the prediction business as a whole.

A black swan was assumed to be impossible as Swans were “known” to be white. Well, black swans were discovered in Australia showing the limitation of our knowledge. A “Black Swan” event according to Taleb is a huge completely random event that is never predictable. The reason we get hit the most by these “Black Swan” events is that we never expect them or are never ready for them. Even after they happen we don’t accept them has random events of fate. Instead we tend to formulate “logical” explanations for them. All this stems from the fundamental limitations of our modes of thought.

Taleb systematically examines the limitations. We form mental models of the world and tend to reinforce the models we already have. Anything that challenges the model is rejected and anything that reinforces is it is actively sought out. Now this model we have to remember is not reality. The map is not the territory. It is just a hazy limited representation. But we behave as if it is actually the complete reality. We assume the world is predictable and look for “causes” for everything. All these patterns of thought make us blind to black swans.

In addition to the problems with our minds is the problem of “Extermistan”. Taleb classifies reality into “Mediocristan” where events are predictable, mediocre, without any large degree of randomness and “Extremistan” where things are fundamentally extreme and unpredictable. Human physical attributes such as height would be within a predictable range and hence in “Mediocristan” while individual wealth would have an extreme range and thus be in “Extermistan”.

The fundamental message of the book is the world is far more complicated and random that we think it is. We should just accept that whatever we know is tiny and that fundamentally we don’t know.

What should we do then? Adopt an empirical approach and be as skeptical of conventional wisdom as possible. In fact be skeptical of your own knowledge as well. The remedy is to suspend the mind and....Experiment, tinker, explore! Try lots of experiments in order to maximize positive black swan events or what we would call Serendipity. We can never know what will work. Another google might be just round the corner. But… be ready for negative black swans.

Taleb explains all of this convincingly but totally leaves out one thing that could explain all of this – Spirituality.