Living with Uncertainty

Living on our planet, today, requires a lot more imagination than we are made to have. We lack imagination and repress it in others. Our world is dominated by the extreme, the unknown, and the very improbable (improbable according our current knowledge) all the while we spend our time engaged in small talk, focusing on the known,and the repeated. This implies the need to use the extreme event as a starting point and not treat it as an exception to be pushed under the rug. In spite of our progress and the growth in knowledge, or perhaps because of such progress and growth, the future will be increasingly less predictable, while both human nature and 'social science' seem to conspire to hide the idea from us.

Nassim Taleb

I grin to myself whenever I see a detailed five year plan. Whether that be for a business, career, life - whatever. I have already prejudged the author. A conformist who has no balls to examine premises or to question authority.



We hate to acknowledge how seemingly random, unforeseen (based on current knowledge) events end up shaping much of our lives.



Maybe because it is a frightening thought.



What we call the internet today started out as a queer , small networking project - like a gazillion other queer, small projects. In about two decades it will revolutionize or dramatically alter how much of humanity lives.



If you were working in Sony's Walkman or Creative's music player division and thought of any five year plan, you should also have foreseen that a 60s hippie would get back his job and create and steal an entire market from right under your nose.



Conventional wisdom would suggest that as all applications are moving to the web, and so too would the operating system. So, M$ is playing the wrong game with Vista.



Well, not so fast. The frank answer is - we don't know though the trends point to that. Maybe they will be around for more than a few decades like mainframes have been despite being a laggard technology.



If there is a book I have been really looking forward for a long time to get my hands on, it is the Black Swan.



Nassim Taleb might have written one of the most important books ever.