Before the discovery of the Australian black swan, all Europeans were convinced that the swans were all white without exception, and for them, the discovery of the first black swan was a surprising experience that subverted cognition. This rare, impactful, almost unpredictable event (but people like to rationalize it after the fact) is what we call the "black swan phenomenon."
The author of the book "Black Swan", Nassim. Nicholas. Taleb was born in the Levant (a city on the eastern Mediterranean coast) in 1960. For more than 1,000 years, this place has given birth to more than a dozen different religious denominations, races, and beliefs. This "unique historical stability, Taleb says," bears a strange resemblance to that of planets in "equilibrium" in the night sky.
Finally, after nearly 13 centuries of miraculous coexistence, a fierce civil war broke out between Christians and Muslims, and the black swan that came out of nowhere turned the Levant from heaven into hell, and the tranquility and elegance of the past no longer existed.
At the beginning of the war, the adults kept telling Taleb that the war would only last "a few days", and people were so confident in their predictions that some people stayed in hotels in Cyprus, Greece, France, etc., waiting for the war to end, but in fact, it lasted for nearly 17 years.
In 1978, when some Iranians fled from their homeland to Paris and London, they thought that the departure was only a temporary vacation. However, more than 20 years have passed, and some people are still waiting to return home...
Looking at the present, at the beginning of 2020, when the new crown epidemic just broke out, almost everyone thought that the epidemic could be completed in a few months, and in the blink of an eye, it was nearly the end of 2021, the epidemic did not fade, and it became more and more intense in many cities, and in nearly two years, most cities were closed and opened, opened and blocked... Every time the seal is lifted, everyone generally believes that the epidemic is over... My city was sealed off for 278 days, making it the longest city in the world to be locked down by the epidemic, and it is unknown in the future...
In the past and in the present, people have always had good intentions, ignoring their own serious intellectual limitations and making false predictions about the infinite future.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="77" > we always take the little things we know too seriously! </h1>
A turkey, for the first 1,000 days of his life, was fed to it at the same time every day, and as the number of feedings increased, the turkey felt safer and safer, in fact, the danger of it being slaughtered was getting closer and closer. When the danger is greatest, the sense of security is at its maximum. If we infer an infinite future from a finite known, it cannot infer the hand that fed it, or it could be the same hand that broke its neck.
Smith, the captain of the Titanic, once said: "In all my experience, I have not encountered any danger, I have not encountered any accident worth mentioning, I have only seen a ship in distress once in my entire maritime career, I have never met a shipwrecked, I have never been in danger of crashing, and I have never been in any danger that could turn into a disaster." Captain Smith's ship sank in 1912, making it the most frequently mentioned shipwreck in history.
After World War I, in order to avoid another German invasion, the French built a fortification along the route where the Germans had invaded, after which Hitler bypassed this line effortlessly.
It turns out that paying too much attention to what is known and learning the past with too much precision doesn't make much sense in preventing accidents from the future. Knowledge acquired through observation or experience has serious limitations and vulnerabilities.
From the perspective of the turkey, the slaughter on the 1001st day is a black swan event, which is inevitable from the perspective of the person who fed it. It can be seen from this that the black swan phenomenon is a problem of stupid people, or it is related to the predictions made by people when their own knowledge is flawed.
For the first 1,000 days of the turkey's life, it lived in the moderate average stan, where people were ruled by collective events, routine events, known events, and people did not have to consider the appearance of black swans, so living in the average stan was easy and comfortable. Platonic knowledge works here: that is, pure and well-defined things get attention, people simplify things through methodical generalizations.... One side effect of this beautiful form is that when they occupy your mind, you concretize them and at the same time ignore the chaotic, elusive things.
In fact, the modern world is extreme, and it's swayed by rare events that throw a black swan after countless white swans. At the clash of Platonic mind and chaotic reality is an explosive frontier where, as you know≠ you think you know, is where the phenomenon of black swans originated.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="78" > influenced by platonic thinking (perfecting, organizing, simplifying things), we often forcibly associate some irrelevant events to make them look more reasonable through so-called causal, logical relationships. </h1>
On December 1, 2003, Saddam Hussein was arrested. Boom News made the headline at 13:01 titled "Rising U.S. Treasury Prices: Saddam Hussein's Arrest May Not Curb Terrorism." At 13:31, they published the following express report, "U.S. Treasury Prices Fall: Saddam Hussein's Arrest Inspires The Appeal of Risky Assets." The news media always feels obligated to give a reason. It is clear that it is extremely wrong to use the same arrest to simultaneously explain another event and the opposite of this one.
If you induce a patient to perform a certain behavior, such as raising his hand, laughing, or grabbing something, and then asking him to explain why he is doing it, the patient will definitely provide some kind of explanation about himself, such as seeing something interesting, or because of where he came from, etc., and they don't realize that they are doing it for no reason, but you are tempting him.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="79" > people often make loop mistakes in addition to forcibly associating irrelevant things. </h1>
One day I took a nap on a railroad track in New York and wasn't crushed to death. So I said, you see I'm still alive, and that proves that lying on the railroad tracks is not dangerous. Sounds ridiculous, doesn't it? Let's look at the following example:
Some doctors have found no evidence of cancer in routine cancer examinations of patients, that is, they have concluded that there is no cancer in the patient. In fact, there is no evidence of disease≠ there is evidence that there is no disease. No evidence of disease ≠ Evidence of no disease。
In the 1960s, arrogant doctors saw breast milk as something inferior because it was not found in their labs that breast milk contained something useful. They simply confuse the two different concepts of no-proven no-evidence that breast milk has an advantage and those that there is evidence that breast milk has no advantage.
The same is true for problems with the tonsils, where excision of the tonsils may lead to a higher additional risk. For decades, doctors never thought that this useless organ might have functions they had yet to discover.
In fact, it is precisely because of such simple reasoning confusion errors that medicine has caused a great deal of disaster in history.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="83" > which can also cause us to be intellectually flawed because some of the evidence is silent</h1>
The catastrophic hurricane that struck New Orleans in 2005 brought many politically toy politicians on television, and these lawmakers were moved by the images of the disaster, the pictures of the helpless victims, they made promises to rebuild, they promised to rebuild with their own money? No, it's with the public's money. Assuming that the money comes from somewhere else, then reconstruction is the demolition of the east wall to make up for the west wall, and the money promised to rebuild may have been used for cancer research funds or research funds for diabetes control. But almost no one pays attention to the former cancer patients who lie there alone, who are not reported on television, who not only do not vote, vote, but also do not appear in our emotional system, who die every day more than the number of people who have been killed by that hurricane, and they are the ones who need us the most.
Similarly, about 2,500 people died in the 9/11 attacks. The families of the victims received donations from various institutions and charities. But in the three months remaining of that year, nearly 1,000 people faced a higher risk of death and were killed because they were afraid to fly and turn to driving, according to the results of the study, and there is evidence that road mortality rose sharply during that time, because roads are more deadly than aviation. Those families did not receive donations, and they did not even know that they were also victims of os-laden.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="85" > randomness and gambling</h1>
To Taleb's infuriation, there are always people who confuse randomness with gambling. In gambling games, probability theory can successfully calculate the probability of winning and losing, and gambling has a simplified and domesticated uncertainty. The games in the casino all have their own rules, and the uncertainty here is mild, belonging to the average Stan.
In real life, probabilities cannot be calculated, and "computable risks" basically do not exist in life! That's a lab thing.
We underestimate the role of luck in life and overestimate its role in the game of probability.
Casinos spend hundreds of millions of dollars on gambling theory and high-tech surveillance systems, but the risks come from outside their considerations.
The actual situation shows that there are four types of maximum losses in the casino, all outside the control of cutting-edge equipment:
1. Performers were maimed by tiger bites during the performance, and the casino lost nearly $100 million.
2) A disgruntled builder tries to blow up the casino, and he plans to put the explosives around the pillars in the basement. Of course, he later failed.
3. Casinos must report to the government the income of gamblers. However, the person in charge hid them under the table for unknown reasons. As a result, the casino almost lost its casino license.
4. Other individual dangers. Such as the kidnapping of the daughter and so on.
Glorified things and platonic simplifications are inherently easy to see. Abstract, chaotic things are always filtered out unconsciously... Human beings are inherently superficial, but they don't know it.
If you want to step into a higher life form, it's best to stay away from the sources of narrative fallacies and train your reasoning skills to complete your knowledge and predict the "unpredictable black swan phenomenon" (Black Swan Part II).
![Black Swan Raid! The stock price continued to fall to a halt, Zhang Kun, Gülen quickly investigated[fig]](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAP///wAAACwAAAAAAQABAAACAkQBADs=)