The Black Swan (Nassim Nicholas Taleb); Thoughts on the book:
You can black swan other people (slaughtering turkeys)!
Black Swan Thesis:
Rare unpredictable consequential events (Black Swans) dominate reality; What you don’t know > what you do know. How much of life is a trick question?
Great Stories / Examples:
- A casino spends hundreds of millions of dollars on surveillance and security to protect from cheaters. Fear of cheaters taking their money is their biggest concern. Ask the casino what the single biggest loss in its entire history was? A tiger from magic show mauled an entertainer and the casino lost hundreds of millions in revenue. No one bothered to notice that an entertainer sleeping with a live tiger was a bad idea. The mauling is a black swan; the most significant loss that no one predicted.
- Fat tony and Dennis the engineer are asked, “A coin has a 50% probability to give you heads or tails, after 99 consecutive tails flips what is the probability the coin will give you heads on the 100th flip? “50%, exclaims Dennis the engineer.” Fuck no you idiot, the coin is obviously rigged says Fat Tony… The moral of this story is that experts suck… Don’t be a sucker…
To Avoid getting Black Swanned :
Keep an open mind; Is your environment unpredictable? (The answer is Yes).
Think on long timelines.
Avoid forecasting into those timelines.
Avoid over specialization.
Avoid Action Bias – (Doing something when doing nothing is better).
Break stuff early, kill projects early.
Use simplicity.
Black Swan theory in Science:
Negative data is more valuable than positive data – * I personally caveat that this is only true if you can determine that the experiment functioned properly; IE… CONTROLS in PLACE?
Many who win prizes are idiots.
Good science/technology development is exploiting positive black swans others cannot see.
Specialization is weakness. Generalists will adapt as funding runs dry.
Be aggressive to hit positive black swans and conservative to avoid being hit by negative ones.
Redundancy, trying 10 ways to do something is not wasted investment. * I have even heard of successful PI’s giving two students the exact same project to let them fight it out!
Learn to thrive in ambiguity. Much of science is entirely ambiguous and unpredictable. We like to pretend it is not…
Negative “Grey Swans” of Science – (Grey Swans are identified Black Swans that will DESTROY your career): Here I tried to think of grey swans to AVOID:
Non reproducibility… Counter with redundancy…
Alcohol and Students… Just say NO…
Bad Student… Deep personality evaluations BEFORE you take on students…
Safety Violation… Some rules are NOT worth breaking…
Loss of Passion… Exercise every morning to start each day in the Hunter mindset…
Social Media Mishap… Carefully manage your humor ?… But I like to play…
Stolen Project… I haven’t quite figured out rules for the road here… Keep your data tight or share it?
Divorce… Keep your wife happy… Buy her things… Bring her flowers… Tell her she is beautiful… (Shawna… You are beautiful!) If you can’t be there during your assistant professorship tell her how much you appreciate her… She is the rock of your career!
Personal Crisis… Stochastic shit-storms seem hard to prevent… Nothing you can do here except read stoic philosophy and become steel.
Car accident… Walk/Bike to work… Leave early and late to avoid traffic… FLY, don’t drive!
Recorded Conversation… EVERYTHING YOU SAY IS ON RECORD… ALWAYS…
Positive “Black Swans” of Science:
Here I tried to list things to TAP; You can black swan other people (slaughtering turkeys):
Develop a new technology or your own field… you will be the only one who sees it coming… unless you kindly inform a few lucky people…
Work on things that might make you RICH! A monetary black swan could set your research career for life. Imagine never writing a grant again! Why don’t scientists emphasize more learning about the importance of money!? Develop your side gig! Get paid!
Go to meetings in DIFFERENT fields to see things and connections no one else has yet seen… interdisciplinary research or at least scholarship will pay off!
A student recruit could be your own positive black swan… Get DOMINANT recruits! Get the Hunters!
My Critiques:
*Merely staying alive isn’t necessarily the goal… Taleb cites Nietzsche often, but Nietzsche would agree with me; some of us are driven for glory, to surpass!
*Lots of intelligent pessimism.
*Nature likes specialists too – In entomology there is debate about whether it is better to be a specialist or a generalist. Philosophically I agree with Taleb, that generalism seems better adapted for survival; but I’m not sure that Darwinian selection always pushes towards generalism. In insects, we find drives toward specialization to be very common! Talk to Nate Hardy about this!
Other Thoughts:
Humans are uncomfortable with unpredictability.
What we think of as “random” is bell-curve predictability. Real randomness is difficult to model.
You can black swan other people (slaughtering turkeys)…
Humans are over-confidant.
Technology drives history and future technology is an unknown.