Black Swan or Gray Rhino?

Economists ponder over pancakes…

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Jocasta: Was the coronavirus a black swan?

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Basil: Some say no. Michele Wucker says it was a gray rhino.

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Jocasta: Gray Rhino?

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Basil: A probable but neglected crisis with a big impact. Not unexpected. The Greek debt crisis. The coronavirus. Warnings had been sounded.

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Jocasta: So what other gray rhinos are lurking?

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Basil: Plenty. Think personal. Illness or accident. At home, a break-in or rodents.

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Jocasta: Yeah. Societal, too. Economic depression and currency collapse. Pandemic, and closed borders. War and terrorism. Earthquake and tsunami.

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Basil: So think, be prepared. Insurance, rat traps.

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Jocasta: Or savings, alternative currencies, gold, even. And higher ground.

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Voice-over

Michele Wucker distinguishes between a black swan which is entirely unexpected and sets off pandemonium, and a visible gray rhino which, when it charges, causes chaos.

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An Online Easter

A digital Easter…

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Susan: How was Easter for you this year?

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Maria: Well, we elderly and vulnerable were not supposed to go out.

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Susan: You missed church?

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Maria: Saw some great entertainment online instead. Jesus Christ Superstar.

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Susan: Andrew Lloyd Webber?

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Maria: Stunning cast. Superb cinematography. Only accessible for 48 hours. But then today guess who sang in the Milano Duomo? With no audience?

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Susan: Andrea Bocelli?

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Maria: A little older, a little thinner, but still he's Bocelli. Intercuts of empty streets of Milano, Paris, London and NY echoing him singing in the deserted duomo; nice production!

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Voice-over

Shopping online, education online, great entertainment online. The virus is a black swan heralding disruption in society as we know it.

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Black swans as unknown unknowns in the matrix

After designing the Johari window, a business in matrixing evolves…

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Joe: We’re on to something with these matrix ideas. Remember Eisenhower asked us to fix him up with one for prioritization?

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Harry: And Rumsfeld just called. He wants to clarify combinations between known and unknown variables.

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Joe: Easy. Known-knowns like increases in world population. Known-unknowns like the earthquakes. Unknown-knowns like revolutions. And Unknown-unknowns.

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Harry: How can you know what unknown-unknowns are?

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Joe: They’re the black swans coming out of nowhere. The good like the internet. The bad like 9/11.

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Voice-over

Prime matrices: four, nine, sixteen boxes and so on. But the neatest and easiest to grasp are the fours.

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Outliers Lurk Before They Leap

Enter the black swan

At ballet rehearsal:

Director: Everything is going smoothly, the four cygnets do their triddle-traddle across the stage, nice contrast with da-dah! Entrance of you as Odile, the black swan.

Svetlana: Very metaphorical.

Director: The black swan was already a metaphor for the unexpected event caused by an outlier. Tchaikovsky put it in his ballet, and Joseph Schumpeter may have been thinking “black swan” when he proposed “creative destruction.” Nassim Nicholas Taleb extended it to history, science, finance and technology and then Clayton Christensen called it by another name, “disruptive innovation” referring mainly to technology.

Svetlana: So the story of Swan Lake is a metaphor for business?

Director: Not yet, but someone’s bound to latch onto it.

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Voice-over

For a short film on "Disruptive Innovation" go here

http://youtu.be/itEn46Pcq_Y

What more can we say?

Art foreshadows science. 
Outliers lurk before they leap. 

Yevgenia Krasnova and surprises

Bill has only just begun Taleb’s Black Swan and Ray disabuses him of one of his assumptions.

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Bill: You’ve read the Black Swan?

Ray: I have.

Bill: Just begun it but I particularly like the story of this woman neuroscientist who wrote a book but no publisher would touch it, it didn’t seem to be either fact or fiction, so she put it on the Internet and there a publisher found it and he published it and before long her book was out in 40 languages. Just shows, the “experts” are not always right. Great story!

Ray: Great story, indeed. I suspect you have only read up to the chapter on Yevgenia.

Bill: Yeah. How did you know?

Ray: If you turn the page, you’ll find a footnote. “To those readers who Googled Yevgenia Krasnova, I am sorry to say that she is (officially) a fictional character."
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Voiceover

Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan) is a writer who surprises you on every page. Near the beginning of The Black Swan (he uses the black swan as a symbol of the unexpected since in the northern hemisphere swans are conceived of as all being white), Taleb tells the story of Yevgenia Krasnova, which has the reader believing it to be a true tale, for it is narrated matter of factly, yet on the first page of the next chapter, Taleb informs us that the story was a mere tale, a fiction. Yevgenia’s story is another manifestation of the black swan syndrome.

Isaac Singer said, "A story means a plot where there is some surprise. Because that is how life is - full of surprises."Taleb goes one better, heaping surprise on surprise. He tells the surprising story of Yevgenia and then surprises us with a comment on the story. As if he has taken Yogi Berra’s “Surprise me” to heart.
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