(The black swan) illustrates a severe limitation to our learning from observations or experience and the fragility of our knowledge. One single observation can invalidate a general statement derived from millennia of confirmatory sightings of millions of white swans. All you need is one single black bird.
Conventional wisdom is inapplicable to our modern, complex, and increasingly recursive environment. Recursive here means that the world in which we live has an increasing number of feedback loops, causing events to be the cause of more events (say, people buy a book BECAUSE other people bought it), thus generating snowballs and arbitrary and unpredictable planet-wide winner-take-all effects. We live in an environment where information flows too rapidly, accelerating such epidemics.
Later, upon replaying the wartime events in my memory as i formulated my ideas on the perception of random events, i developed the governing impression that our minds are wonderful explanation machines, capable of making sense out of almost anything,capable of mounting explanations for all manner of phenomena, and generally incapable of accepting the idea of unpredictability. These events were unexplainable, but intelligent people thought they were capable of providing convincing explanations for them-after the fact. Furthermore, the more intelligent the person, the better sounding the explanation. What's more worrisome is that all these beliefs and accounts appeared to be logically coherent and devoid of inconsistencies.
Two different types of randomness:
[linear view] "Mediocristan" : When your sample is large, no single instance will significantly change the aggregate or the total [height, weight etc]
[nonlinear view] "Extremistan" : Inequalities are such that one single observation can disproportionately impact the aggregate or the total [wealth, books sold etc]
Mistaking a naive observation of the past as something definitive or representative of the future is the one and only cause of our inability to understand the Black Swan
We are the empirical decision makers who hold that uncertainty is our discipline, and that understanding how to act under conditions of incomplete information is the highest and most urgent human pursuit.
But Popper's biggest idea was his insight concerning the fundamental, severe, and incurable unpredictability of the world.
Another difference between the hemispheres is that the right brain deals with novelty. It tends to see the gestalt (the general, or the forest), in a parallel mode, while the left brain is concerned with the trees, in a serial mode.
If you zap people's left hemispheres, they become more realistic-they can draw better and with more verisimilitude. Their minds becoming better at seeing the objects themselves, cleared of theories, narratives, and prejudice.
The idea that perception of causation has a biological foundation
There are two internal mechanisms behind our blindness to Black Swans, the confirmation bias and the narrative fallacy.
[They also caused the blindness for the nonlinear texture of the world]
[Narrative fallacy is the zip function of our brains to deal with the complexity, as we transform the information coming into our awareness to a more light, more handy and less costly form. Just like the zip at the pc]
[Confirmation bias is our natural tendency to look only for corroboration, we are deeply and intuitively searching for the things that proves us right and not wrong. This is, as we see from Popper's falsification the wrong way of dealing with uncertainty.]
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