Purposive Drift

Few and Far Between

Nassim Nicholas Taleb has a challenging manifesto up at ChangeThis, "Few and Far Between: Black Swans and the Impossibility of Prediction". In it he argues that our world is shaped by rare, unpredicatble shocks and that we might as well accept this rather than maintaining the fiction that we live in a predictable, ordered world.

You ought to read the wholoe thing, but a passge I particularly like is this one:

"Go through the following exercise. Look into your own existence. Count the significant events, the technological changes, and the inventions that have taken place in our environment since you were born and compare them to what was expected before their advent. How many of them came on a schedule? Look into your own personal life, to your choice of profession, say, or meeting your mate, your exile from your country of origin, the betrayals you faced, your sudden enrichment or impoverishment. How often did these things occur according to plan?"

Had it been published a few months earlier I might well have quoted it in my manifesto, "Purposive Drift: making it up as we go along", which has a different, but complementary, take on prediction and planning.