Black Swan Thinking: Brain Evidence Rethought

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Black Swan And Science

Just received a very interesting note from my friend: Ben Dean PhD, Founder of MentorCoach and Coaching Toward Happiness -who is often found constructively thinking out-of-the-box. 

Ben was enthusiastically talking about The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, and was reading it on summer break.

Ben is an innovator, facilitator, and mentor to many hundreds of mind professionals, – and when he loves a book, I listen. So I went over to Amazon, read this review piece there by Chris Anderson [The Long Tail author and editor of Wired] and thought to share a bit of it with you:

Nassim Nicholas Taleb first made this argument in Fooled by Randomness, an engaging look at the history and reasons for our predilection for self-deception when it comes to statistics. Now, in The Black Swan: the Impact of the Highly Improbable, he focuses on that most dismal of sciences, predicting the future.

And check out this part – relevant to the evolution of thinking in applied brain science:

The problem, Nassim explains, is that we place too much weight on the odds that past events will repeat, when unrepeatable chance may offer a better explanation. Instead, the really important events are rare and unpredictable. He calls them Black Swans, which is a reference to a 17th century philosophical thought experiment. In Europe all anyone had ever seen were white swans; indeed, “all swans are white” had long been used as the standard example of a scientific truth. So what was the chance of seeing a black one? Impossible to calculate, or at least they were until 1697, when explorers found Cygnus atratus in Australia.

So what's this…? An endorsement without reading it? – yes it is, -and yes, Black Swan is on my short list.

-Just wanted to share Ben's heads up.