A Black Swan is an event that comes as a surprise, has a major effect, which can be normally understood after the event with hindsight. This Black Swan theory was developed by Nassim Nicholas Talebin 2001 and it makes perfect sense.
There’s no sense in being precise when you don’t even know what you’re talking about. After all, the only way you can label something as a Black Swan is after measuring its impact on the surroundings.
John von Neumann was a pioneer of the application of operator theory to quantum mechanics, in the development of functional analysis, a principal member of the Manhattan Project and a key figure in the development of game theory, and the digital computer. He once said that “Anyone who attempts to generate random numbers by deterministic means is, of course, living in a state of sin.” Obviously what is the point of randomness if you already know the result?
The world is governed by chance. Randomness stalks us every day of our lives. Lot of uncertain and unknown events take place which are stealth to the radar of human predictability and forecasting. Let’s take iPhone’s 2007 launch for example. Blackberry was incredibly successful back then and was in process of adding more keys to their mobile keyboards on devices. Here is another famous quote of Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s current CEO on iPhone. “There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance. It’s a $500 subsidized item.” The rest is history. Steve Jobs and his team would have built the iPhone hoping it to be massively successful but even they could not have predicted that Apple’s iPhone business would become larger than the entire Microsoft. For most people outside Apple the whole process was random and unique. It’s not that every product Apple builds is a success because they also have had spectacular failures in the past. Over 12 Epic Apple’s failures include devices like Apple III, Apple Lisa and Apple Newton. Capital Markets realized later that the iPhone was a black swan triggering the success of Android and over all changing the PC Market into a mobile market which has created lot of other implications like Cloud and Location Independence for businesses and governments. Every investor, entrepreneur and corporation wants to invent the next big thing which will take him to the Unicorn club. (Unicorn club comprises of billion dollar value companies which are about .07 percent of total venture-backed consumer and enterprise software startups.)
People think that visionaries know all this before time. That is partially correct because they know what an invention might do but even they can’t predict the scale of its success in most cases. Google guys wanted to sell Google’s search algorithm for $750K. Their misfortune in closing that deal was the reason of their current fortunes. Many greatest scientific inventions were accidents guided by the hand of chance and randomness. We all experience many unexpected events and you have to be open to suffering a little. Many philosophers have talked about how out of the randomness, there is an apparent intention in the fate of an individual that can be seen later on. When you are an old guy, you clearly can see all the black swan moments in your life. All missed opportunities knock on mind’s door from time to time and you can only connect the dots looking backwards.
Now consider the following problems Man has been trying to solve for centuries now and I wonder whether Humanity would ever be able to answer these three questions? The answer to all three lie in the randomness of Universe itself.
Problem#1: How universe was created and the dynamics of quantum mechanics?
Einstein once famously said that” Quantum mechanics is certainly imposing. But an inner voice tells me that it is not yet the real thing. The theory says a lot, but does not really bring us any closer to the secret of the ‘old one.’ I, at any rate, am convinced that He does not throw dice.” By “He” I am assuming Einstein meant God. Quantum mechanics describes the behavior of very small things like atoms and subatomic particles. Aspects of quantum theory can appear strange or counter-intuitive. Wave-particle duality, which is the idea that all things have both a wave- and particle-like nature. But how a particle chooses to become a wave or particle at one time is random and unknown to us. Scientists are now looking for a way to combine quantum theory with the theory of gravity to produce a so-called ‘theory of everything’. They are also hoping that by understanding quantum mechanics better they would figure out more about the Creation of Universe. Large Hadron Collider with a budget of over $9 billion has tentatively discovered the Higgs particle. The only problem is that all its theoretical properties are exhibited randomly. How a Graviton comes into existence or how Higgs determine the mass of any particle or object is totally random? The many-worlds interpretation is an interpretation of quantum mechanics that asserts all possible alternative histories and futures are real, each representing an actual “world” (or “universe”).
Problem#2: Out of all the children born in 1991 or any year, who and how many of them will be geniuses and in what areas?
Einstein also thought that everybody is a genius. And if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid. This theory is no good to any HR Manager or any person who is looking to make an investment in a person or a team. We all meet lot of people on daily basis who are not geniuses at anything. Some of them are not even good at performing repetitive tasks. Forget about out of box thinking. A genius according to Wikipedia is an exceptional intellectual or creative power or other natural ability. This definition of genius normally starts another debate on the nature (Some People are born natural leaders) and nurture (People can be nurtured/trained to become leaders). Neuroplasticity is an interesting concept that random Learning Physically Changes the Brain. Similarly drugs and alcohol can also randomly change your neuron connections. The biological basis of intelligence is founded in the degree of connectivity of neurons in the brain and the varying amounts of white and grey matter. This connectedness of neurons ensures higher intelligence in humans as compared to chimpanzees. Those whom the god wishes to destroy, HE first makes them mad. Frankly, the fall of all empires are logical results of bad decision making and over extension. Since the formation and dilution of neuron connections is totally random in any brain, there is no real way to predict the hidden genius or stupidity in any person or his latest decision. The empires of the future are the empires of the mind. Good luck predicting which minds will build what empires.
Problem#3: How death works through Infinite means?
Man has been trying to cure death since his birth. These days Silicon Valley billionaires and many oligarchs are obsessed with solving death and blocking its infinite means to catch humans. Sirtris Pharmaceuticals, a Cambridge, Mass., company built around a promising drug called SRT501, a proprietary form of resveratrol, the substance found in red wine once believed to have anti-aging properties. In 2008 GlaxoSmithKline acquired Sirtris for $720 million. By 2010, with no marketable drug in sight and challenges to existing research, GlaxoSmithKline shut down trials. Other anti-aging initiatives exist purely as nonprofits with no serious breakthroughs. I have heard numerous theories that human consciousness would soon be able to get uploaded into a cloud which will then control the machine exoskeleton. Humans would end up living forever as part of machines. The problem with these theories is that Death is the cessation of all biological functions that sustain a living organism including consciousness. How can you upload something which you don’t understand in the first place? Phenomena which commonly bring about death include biological aging, predation, malnutrition, disease, suicide, murder and accidents or trauma resulting in terminal injury. Man has not been able to resolve any of these death causes. Then how will it cure the death itself? Secondly, most of organ failures in any deceased patients are random. Multiple organ failure can be associated with sepsis. Sepsis (putrefaction and decay) is a potentially fatal whole-body inflammation caused by severe infection. Sepsis can continue even after the infection that caused it is gone. Severe sepsis is sepsis complicated by organ dysfunction. 50% of all sepsis cases start as an infection in the lungs. No source is found in one third of cases. The infectious agents are usually bacteria but can also be fungi and viruses. Now let’s take a look at how cancer functions in a biological environment. All cells accumulate mutations, but cancer genomes tend to be particularly riddled with errors — in part because cancer involves the deactivation of the cell’s own repair mechanisms, and because tumor cells reproduce at a faster rate than those in healthy tissue. Most mutations do not affect the cell’s life cycle, however, and thus are probably not involved in cancer.To determine which mutations are important drivers of the disease, researchers compare the genomes of many tumors and look for mutations that occur more frequently in cancerous tissue than one would expect due to random chance.
One key thing you will observe in all these problems is that our lack of in-depth knowledge grows our belief in randomness. May be Einstein was right that God doesn’t play dice and this is a plan laid to its perfection. Increase in our knowledge can bring down our feeling of randomness in events around us. But our knowledge and new inventions also depend on total randomness of events. Economists now think that behavioral analysis in addition to pattern recognition in numbers/big data can help us predict the cycles of economy but human behavior is also totally random. How can we predict a person sitting in his lonely apartment would cause the next 9/11 or build the next great invention?May be it is best not to look at the future anyway because any time we look at the future which is also an event causes it to change due to the very nature of quantum mechanics. We can’t predict the next Black Swan because random numbers determine and govern our lives. Plato oncesaid that “A good decision is based on knowledge and not on numbers.” But most acquisition of knowledge is determined by random numbers which creates random events like black swans or accidents such as invention of penicillin, Coca Cola, x-rays or microwave ovens.
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