Not surprisingly, though still exciting, Clint Mansell will be scoring Darren Aronofsky’s upcoming film Black Swan. Mansell has teamed up with Aronofsky on all his past projects including Pi, Requiem For A Dream, The Fountain, and The Wrestler. Mansell has also said a few words regarding his score plans for Black Swan,

“Well it’s all really embryonic at the moment, one of the main ideas we’ve got is building the entire score out of elements from ‘Swan Lake’. I mean it would have to be vastly screwed with, but that’s a starting point. Sometimes we’ve had ideas in the past and you put them into practice and they just suck, so we’ll see. Darren only just started shooting so for now it’s about doing the nuts and bolts really and providing him just what he needs to shoot with and in January I’ll start to mess around with some of the things we’ve talked about.”

Black Swan centers on a veteran ballerina, Nina, played by Natalie Portman, who finds herself locked in a competitive situation with a rival dancer, Lilly, played by Mila Kunis. With the stakes and twists increasing as the dancers approach a big performance it becomes unclear to Nina whether or not her rival is a supernatural apparition or if she is having delusions.

The film is set to be released some time in 2010 by Fox Searchlight.

from Financial Advisor Magazine:       Advisors need to consider how catastrophic events could help portfolios outperform.

More than one year after the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the subsequent meltdown in the financial markets, many long-held investment tenets are now being questioned. The validity and utility of modern portfolio theory as the prescription for prudent portfolio management is being re-examined. Dealing with this issue and developing solutions to cope with the revelation of newly uncovered risk is imperative if we are to successfully guide our clients through this tumult. It is equally imperative for our own survival to meet this challenge directly and develop strategies to navigate the financial minefield.

With two major declines over the past eight years, the stock market is on pace to underperform every decade over the past century, including the 1930s. During this time, modern portfolio theory represented the investment methodology most widely employed by advisors. It mandated a strategy of allocating funds to a wide array of asset classes in an effort to lower risk. The Holy Grail was to identify lowly correlated or even negatively correlated assets that would allow a portfolio to withstand the most severe declines.                    More -> http://www.famag.com/component/content/article/4615.html?issue=115&magazineID=1&Itemid=73

FORA.TV:

Nassim Taleb & Daniel Kahneman: Reflection On A Crisis

Author Nassim Taleb and Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman discuss the intricacies of the financial crisis and its far-reaching influence. Looking forward, they offer proposals to remedy the situation and prevent it from ever recurring.

Second Financial Economic Crash Coming!

To my surprise no humans were mauled in the making of this film. I waited all day to record a swanny smackdown but it never came. The lakes of downtown Lakeland, FL are loaded with swans and I saw them put up with unruly children, friendly ducks, clumsy Ibis, joggers and curious naturalists, even while sitting on their nests. BTW it has been English law for five centuries that all Mute swans, wherever in the world they dwell, belong to the Regent.

About a month ago, I mentioned Black Swan author Nassim Taleb’s designation of what amount to two types of randomness, Mediocristan and Extremistan. Here is a chart Taleb provided comparing the two:

Mediocristan is where we must endure the tyranny of the collective, the routine, the obvious and the predicted; Extremistan is where we are subjected to the tyranny of the singular, the accidental, the unseen and the unpredicted. “

In some strange way I keep seeing Mediocristan as representative of man’s viewpoint, man’s ways, man’s attempt to control his world, and Extremistan as God’s ways, at least as they are perceived by man.  At one point Taleb says that our problems in general are that we believe we live in Mediocristan but we really live in Extremistan. That statement in particular resonated for me.

We think we can know, we think we can plan and predict and circumvent disaster. We think everything will continue as it has been. We think we have control of things. When we don’t. And it won’t. And we can’t.

 It’s an illusion. A deception.

Mediocristan is that which puts forth the idea that we are all the same, all equal, should all be treated alike.  That all will be routine, ordered, safe, controlled. It’s a place where there can’t be fear because there’s nothing to fear. It’s the world without God. The world wrestled under control of men, to be good and fair and equal. If you just do x and y, z will happen. Simple. It all depends on you. Safe.

Extremistan is what challenges us with our inadequacy. The fact that we don’t have omniscience, nor omnipotence. That we don’t know everything. That, in fact, we don’t even know half as much as we think we do because most of the knowledge we do have is flawed. (Did you see that it’s okay to drink coffee, now? It prevents diabetes and isn’t so hard on the heart after all. Apparently) It reminds us that even though we’ve spent 1000 days walking without incident along a certain path, the next day an airplane can fall out of the sky on you.

We don’t like to contemplate Extremistan because it’s scary and unpredictable so we pretend it’s not so.

Paul K. Van Riper

In Adam Elkus’s excellent article Operational Art and Modern American Strategy, he referenced this article by retired U.S. Marine lieutenant general Paul K. Van Riper entitled EBO: There Was No Baby in the Bathwater. Van Riper, the hero of the Millennium Challenge wargame in 2002, is an astute student of “interactively complex systems”. His grasp of this idea coupled with a deep understanding of the concept of wicked problems raises him head and shoulders above most contemporary military thinkers. The essence of his insight was offered in testimony to Congress in 2007:

America is a nation filled with problem solvers who seem to favor analytical or engineering methods. An analytical approach is a powerful one for those difficulties whose underlying logic or organizing system is linear. Authorities sometimes refer to these systems as “structurally complex.” Structurally complex systems can have many diverse elements. In fact, the more elements or parts in the system the more complex it becomes. As an example, an airplane Is more complex than an automobile. However, in these systems the freedom of action of the parts is limited. In fact, too much freedom of action can cause the system to malfunction. Actions among the

parts of structurally complex systems follow a path of cause and effect, thus they lend themselves to the tools of systems analysis. To illustrate, an aerodynamic flaw in a newly designed airplane is likely to be a structurally complex problem. Aeronautical engineers may find it extremely difficult to solve, however, they know that the laws of Newtonian Physics, if properly applied, will allow them to determine the cause of the problem and to develop a solution. We find that individuals experienced in a particular field usually are able to move rapidly from efforts at problem definition to the steps

required for problem solving.

Too few American recognize a second class of problems, those whose

underlying logic or organizing system is dynamic or non-linear. Analytical approaches are usually inadequate for this class of problems. Authorities often call these systems “interactively complex.” These systems frequently have great freedom of action

among their elements or parts. Thus, rather than cause and effect, we frequently observe cascading effects where a single cause produces multiple outcomes that ripple through the system in all directions. In theory we should be able to trace the results or effects of each action. In reality we cannot follow them in any meaningful

sense because the interactions quickly progress to a point where no computer can handle the calculations needed to track them. To illustrate, even a bounded problem like that found in the game of chess allows for more potential interactions than there are atoms in the universe. The interactions in these sorts of systems can and often do produce unanticipated and disproportionate results. What leader could have imagined in June 1914 that two pistol shots fired at Archduke Franz Ferdinand as he visited Sarajevo would set In motion all the events leading up to the horrors of the First World War? Systems analysis is the wrong tool for attacking interactively

complex problems. And as John Gaddis, the “dean” of diplomatic historians notes, so are the “scientific” methods of political science.

International relations, economies, and social systems are all examples of interactively complex systems. War itself is interactively complex.

If we understand interactively complex problems we ought to grasp that taking action in societal or national security settings frequently creates multiple reactions that for any practical purpose are unknowable beforehand. Appreciating this, our nation’s leaders should be more humble when forecasting the results of specific

actions in the international arena…

In 1973 Urban designers Horst Rittel and Melvln Weber wrote a seminal article in which they coined the terms “wicked” and “tame” to classify problems. Though they did not use the nomenclature of interactively and structurally complex systems in association with wicked and tame problems there is a definite relationship…

In essence Rittel and Weber told us that while we might find a so-called tame problem very hard to solve, we would know where to begin. An example often used to illustrate this idea is working a crossword puzzle. I might not be able to complete a particularly difficult crossword puzzle, but it is not because I do not know how to

approach the problem. I realize what I am supposed to do, but in this case I am not smart enough to succeed. Others with more talent following the same rule-set would be successful. In contrast, each wicked problem is unique, thus, there are no standard methods or approaches for solving them. The uniqueness of each of these problems precludes ordered analysis. We must view them holistically with the first order of business being to “frame” or “formulate” the problem.

To secure the results sought, Warden and Deptula focused the effect they desired on a system rather than simply listing targets for pilots to destroy…This is a logical and productive way to develop targeting plans, an approach we should applaud. Warden and Deptula, however, could have just as easily used other words to express the same idea. As examples, they might have labeled it as outcome-based, result-based, impact-based, purpose-based, or intent-based operations without losing any of the value inherent in the approach. If the two officers had used either of the latter two terms, they would have acknowledged that they understood the essence of mission- oriented command [which, in a footnote, Van Riper traces back to the Elder Molke's Auftragstaktik].  Though any observer reviewing recent conceptual thought in the U.S. defense community would hardly know it, there is nothing magical or unique about the word effect. Fundamentally, Warden and Deptula were working to ensure that everyone involved in planning and executing an operation understood why they sought to achieve certain ends.

Despite its utility, this variety of effects-based operations is only effective with manmade systems that have an identifiable and tightly coupled structure, such as integrated air defenses, distribution networks, and transportation complexes. The method has little utility against dynamic systems such as economies and social groups whose elements are only loosely coupled and with relation- ships that are frequently unclear. Nonetheless, some proponents went on to claim that what began as an effects-based targeting method
should extend to operations as a whole and even to war.

In actuality, SoSA relies on the techniques of formal systems analysis. Vietnam War veterans quickly recognized SoSA as virtually identical to the analytical methods that Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara foisted upon the U.S. military in the 1960s with so many disastrous results.

Even more confusing is the use of the term effects…defined as “a physical and/or behavioral state of a system that results from an action, a set of actions, or another effect.” In plainer English, effects are the results, outcomes, products, consequences, or perhaps impacts of actions undertaken by the joint force. Seldom in recent years have careful listeners heard any of these synonyms used in professional discussions—the effects nomenclature has become a mantra. Sadly, as a result, defense leaders in their writing and speech have voluntarily given up the nuances possible with various other terms. All but forgotten is the fact that all these terms simply identify the ends desired.

Operational concepts existing prior to the EBO craze were founded on Clausewitzian thought, especially the master theorist’s recognition of the need to clearly identify desired ends and to tie them to available means. Clausewitz repeatedly called attention to the absolute necessity of connecting strategic and tactical ends to the higher aim or purpose. Over the past half-century or so, notable military thinkers such as B.H. Liddell Hart, J.C. Wylie, and Colin Gray have pointed repeatedly to the importance of the ends-means paradigm.

Ends are ends, plain and simple! What we title them may help or hinder their meaning and our understanding, but ultimately they remain ends. The longstanding naming convention for ends in the U.S. national security community has extended from goals to objectives to missions, with the latter’s inherent tasks and associated intents. At the national level, ends are expressed most often as goals. To accomplish these goals, national leaders assign objectives to various organizations. Subordinate objectives are nested under higher objectives as the expression of desired ends filters down through the chain of command. At some point, a leader assigns a military unit a mission designed to accomplish an objective. There appears to be no hard and fast rule as to when it is time to convert an objective to a mission, but most operational and tactical commanders expect to receive missions.

The intellectual renaissance spurred by the failures in the Vietnam War and led by Admiral Stansfield Turner, USN, General Donn Starry, USA, and General Al Gray, USMC, during the mid-1970s into the late 1980s produced a solid body of doctrine and a powerful but concise professional lexicon. This renaissance was built on a deep appreciation of history and a thorough understanding of war’s fundamental nature. The operational concepts created during this period were founded on Clausewitzian thought, especially the master theorist’s recognition of the need to clearly identify desired ends and to tie them to available means. Central to these concepts was the notion that telling a commander the reason—or why he was to accomplish an assigned task—was imperative if he was to take the initiative when circumstances at the scene of action changed. Foremost, he was to understand that the purpose or intent of a task is always more important than the task itself. In essence, the achievements at the many points of contact with an enemy are the culmination of ends that have traveled from national goals through several echelons of command objectives to a hierarchy of unit missions with their integral tasks and intents.

[E]ffects-based operations is a “non-idea” that survived far too long. Not only did it undermine well-founded conceptual ideas based on mission-oriented command, but it also confused the U.S. military’s officer corps and diverted scarce resources and intellectual energies away from truly important issues, the most critical of which is studying insurgencies. The actual costs were significant; the opportunity costs were enormous.

The creators of this new and confusing naming convention never reveal its supposed advantage over the traditional one. Even more baffling, when these inventors provide examples of effects, they merely use the past tense of a verb that traditionally would be the task. For instance, an effect is “defeated Red’s attack,” which of course is completion of the task “to defeat Red’s attack.” Justifiably, any American taxpayer would cringe knowing that the U.S. military spent tens of millions of dollars between 2000 and 2007 to conclude that using the past tense of a verb in some mysterious way improves U.S. military planning and operations.

I would like to introduce readers of  Riskczar.com to the De-risk blog. Have a read at this post about Nassim Talib’s The Black Swan and poke around his blog for some other great posts.

In 2008, Nassim Nicholas Talib published a book called “The Black Swan”. A Black Swan is defined as being an event which has three characteristics; it is highly improbable, has massive impact and, in a strange way, appears almost inevitable after the event! Due no doubt to the timing of the book’s publication relative to world events, the term Black Swan has crept into business language. So how do we protect our businesses from Black Swans?

Click here to read the rest.

NATALIE PORTMAN

Read more HERE.

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I’ve recently been listening to a lot of audiobooks. I really enjoyed Freakonomics and so I thought I’d catch up on some modern classics on economics.

The black swan by Nassim Taleb is all-but unlistenable. Perhaps the author is being misread, but his rambling comes across as incredibly self-important and therefore vastly tedious.

In the first few pages we discover he dislikes the photos of ugly swans fans have sent to him, is ungrateful for the case of Black Swan wine, and he identifies himself with a nationality which simply no longer exists, because they were such cool people. This is how he introduces himself, which is a funny sort of step. At the start of The wealth of nations did Adam Smith tell you about his home life and which brand of beer he liked?  Not so much…

Taleb’s basic argument is

• events which are wildly unlikely happen frequently
• people pretend they don’t and are thus blindsided by them
• people retell their stories so that the event makes sense. 

This doesn’t  seem to be nearly as amazing as the author seems to think it is. I presume I’m meant to find the author’s belligerence charming, but I don’t, and so as he sets out to prove his thesis, I was left hoping that things would  improve as the book continued. They didn’t.

Also, perhaps as an artefact of listening to the book rather than reading it, his continual use of the term “black swan” eventually begins to grate. It’s like his book has an advert for itself in it, that gets played every couple of pages.

PJ O’Rourke on The wealth of nations was a surprisingly good book. A curmudgeonly right-wing humorist reads a classic economics text, and riffs off it for the amusement of the listener. I have not read The wealth of nations: like most people who studied economics at university I was given condensed and reworked versions of his ideas to study instead. I was surprised by how left of centre his work, when quoted, actually is. O’Rourke’s humor is, in places, topical but a little dated, but most of it works well, even though I don’t share his political views. Again, surprisingly good.

The world is flat shares the style of Black swan, in that the author is talking about himself a great deal, and has the same grating habit of repeating the title of his book every few minutes.  That aside, it’s an interesting view of the processes of globalisation. It’s all very rosy, strangely enough. That would be my main criticism of the book: it doesn’t deal with the downside of globalisation, as seen from the view of the person on the street, as well as it deals with the upside seen on an abstract and global level. I still enjoyed it a great deal, and in the context of this little experiment in globally published librarianship that we are doing here, it had some very apt messages.

WrapMail today launched Royal Pacific as its first client in Bangkok. Royal Pacific will initially use WrapMail to brand and market “The Penthouse” which is its latest apartment development in downtown Bangkok.

Fredrich August von Hayek wrote in The Fatal Conceit that:

If we were to apply the unmodified, uncurbed, rules of the micro-cosmos (i.e., of the small band or troop, or of say, our families) to the macro-cosmos (our wider civilization), as our instincts and sentimental yearnings often makes us wish to do, we would destroy it. Yet if we were always to apply the rules of the extended order to our more intimate groupings, we would crush them. So we must learn to live in two sorts of a world at once.

As a professional libertarian, Hayek saw attempts at central planning as the extension of the familial or tribal order of command and control onto the more creative and vibrant emergent order of the market. The logic of central planning that worked in the small tribal group, he argued, doesn’t scale to the realm of his macro-cosmos. On the other hand, the impersonal bartering of the price mechanism, Hayek asserts, cheapens the intimate tribal linkages that provide the emotional reinforcement that the human mind requires.

However, Hayek erred in only providing a human mental universe populated by two worlds, the Tribe and the Market. A much more expansive framework is David Ronfeldt’s TIMN framework which provides four worlds for the human mind to inhabit: the two worlds mentioned by Hayek, the Tribe and the Market, plus two others, the Institution and the Network (hence TIMN, from Tribe-Institution-Market-Network). Ronfeldt provided this helpful table for telling which is which:

TIMN: The Table

Hayek postulates a two-way conflict between Tribe and Market. In this Manichean struggle between Darkness and Light, the Institution is merely a super Tribe which is ever plotting, plotting against the Market. TIMN offers a far more accurate four-way tug-of-war between Tribe, Institution, Market, and Network. Within Hayek’s dichotomy, the primary failure of neoclassical economics is overlooking the inconvenient fact that Markets have Institutional side-effects. Shifts in Market power warp Institutions. Institutional power, when concentrated, gives quicker and seductively easy results than Markets. This often leads Market actors to seek to turn Institutional power against rival Market competitors. A Market actor may also develop Institutional ambitions and use power derived from Market activities in the pursuit of purely Institutional power. The primary problem caused by Market distortions of Institutions are their potential to unleash and amplify systemic uncertainty to the point of generating black swans.

On the other side of this particular two-way shouting match, Institutionally focused actors will often neglect the small problem that Institutional power warps Markets in unpredictable and potentially harmful ways. Market evolution (in the aggregate unfolds) over extended periods of time and their power. As a result, their impact is more diffuse. Market power is more like boiling the frog than knifing it. Institutional power can distort markets with all sorts of side effects and the ultimate results may not immediately manifest themselves for some time.

Tribes add a third pole to Hayek’s two-way tug-of-war. Jared Diamond hypothesized that Institutions are created when human groups attempt to scale beyond the Tribe. In smaller numbers, key tribal mediators know everyone personally and can intervene in squabbles before they accelerate to the point of violence. Dunbar’s number may play a role here:

Dunbar’s number is a theoretical cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships. These are relationships in which an individual knows who each person is, and how each person relates to every other person. Proponents assert that numbers larger than this generally require more restricted rules, laws, and enforced norms to maintain a stable, cohesive group. No precise value has been proposed for Dunbar’s number, but a commonly cited approximation is 150.

Diamond further argues that once interpersonal relationships cease to be able to regulate group dynamics, a natural consequence of group growth, the only thing that can replace it is an Institution that can apply coercion to keep order and prevent free riding. An Institution reflects some aspects of the Tribe through its basis in social hierarchy but it’s much more impersonal.

As a hierarchy with tribal trappings, the Tribal group that lies at the heart of any Institution is jealous of other Tribes under its jurisdiction and often resorts to a wide variety of methods for reducing their scope. Killing the Tribes is bread and butter for Institutions. Many modern Institutions have a strong cohesion that’s based in creating a kind of supra-Tribal dynamic where people feel they have a strong personal connection with abstract and often remote authority.

Subduing the Tribes

It may be that humans see any social group as a continuation of the Tribe with the addition of Other People. Even the wan Tribes of modern Western society are necessary to the normal functioning of human beings. Western Tribes were reduced through the sword and the miter to a flattened mass ripe for the operations of the atomizing Market. Many Westerners who had found meaning in attachment to the Institutions that replaced the Tribes of their forbears were lost in the world of the Market. The Market, like all TIMN forms, had existed since prehistory in some form. Tribes frequently traded for distant goods in the nascent Markets of the hunter-gatherer phase. Institutions also had recourse to the market as they became predominant after the ascent of agriculture. But Markets never became prominent until early modern Europe. This marked a watershed in human history. The Adaptive Market Hypothesis (AMH) comes into play here:

[T]he AMH can be viewed as a new version of the EMH, derived from evolutionary principles. The primary components of the AMH consist of the following ideas:

• (A1) Individuals act in their own self-interest.
• (A2) Individuals make mistakes.
• (A3) Individuals learn and adapt.
• (A4) Competition drives adaptation and innovation.
• (A5) Natural selection shapes market ecology.
• (A6) Evolution determines market dynamics.

EMH and AMH have a common starting point in A1, but the two paradigms part company in A2 and A3. In efficient markets, investors do not make mistakes, nor is there any learning and adaptation because the market environment is stationary and always in equilibrium. In the AMH framework, mistakes occur frequently, but individuals are capable of learning from mistakes and adapting their behavior accordingly. However, A4 states that adaptation does not occur independently of market forces but is driven by competition, that is, the push for survival. The interactions among various market participants are governed by natural selection—the survival of the richest, in our context—and A5 implies that the current market environment is a product of this selection process. A6 states that the sum total of these components—selfish individuals, competition, adaptation, natural selection, and environmental conditions— is what we observe as market dynamics.

Much of the problem that many people face in understanding Markets is that Market reality, especially when dealing with a large macro-cosmos, defies the built-in assumptions behind the deepest human mental hardware:

The proper response to the question of how individuals determine the point at which their optimizing behavior is satisfactory is this: Such points are determined not analytically, but through trial and error and, of course, natural selection. Individuals make choices based on experience and their best guesses as to what might be optimal, and they learn by receiving positive or negative reinforcement from the outcomes. If they receive no such reinforcement, they do not learn. In this fashion, individuals develop heuristics to solve various economic challenges, and as long as those challenges remain stable, the heuristics eventually will adapt to yield approximately optimal solutions.

If, on the other hand, the environment changes, then it should come as no surprise that the heuristics of the old environment are not necessarily suited to the new. In such cases, we observe behavioral biases—actions that are apparently ill-advised in the context in which we observe them. But rather than labeling such behavior irrational, we should recognize that suboptimal behavior is likely when we take heuristics out of their evolutionary context. A more accurate term for such behavior might be “maladaptive.” The flopping of a fish on dry land may seem strange and unproductive, but under water, the same motions propel the fish away from its predators. And the antagonistic effect of human emotional reactions on logical reasoning described earlier is maladaptive for many financial contexts.

The Tribal mind is what the human mind is optimized for. Institutions are one step removed from Tribes and, while they have their own dynamic, are still comprehensible within a Tribal worldview. However, in markets humans behavior is often “maladaptive”. In a Tribal sea, their flapping moves them efficiently through an ocean of personal relationships. However, in the Market, they merely flop in a rather pitiable manner. The problem is one of scope. In one quadrant, the Tribal mind is comfortable and well-adjusted to reality. In the other, it is wildly confused. And that’s not even including Networks.

Many of the contortions produced in modern life in the West is caused when one TIMN form is imposed upon another. Marxism produced a massive imposition of the Institution on Market and Tribe (and nascent Networks). Neo-liberalism compounded this imposition by extending the reach of the Market back into the Institution and Tribe. The result has been a compounded weakening of both Institutions and Markets, leading to the rise of a revaunchist Tribalism of the most negative sort. The rise of the Network, Rondfeldt observes, has also been enabled by modern developments. In this new wicked problem of the wickedest kind, the scope for discord has been raised to new heights. In this battle of forms of organization, the Tribe, like the graviton, has the weakest immediate pull but cumulatively has the most pull over a wide area. Opening the lid of chaos forces most people back to the default configuration of the human mind which in turn unleashes the Tribe on the other forms, producing another cycle of internecine conflict. The distortions produce instability so potent that small waves can produce system wide disasters.

It may be that stricter demarcations should be drawn between the different TIMN forms. An example of these sharp lines are Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s 10 principles for a black swan proof world:

1. What is fragile should break early while it is still small. Nothing should ever become too big to fail. Evolution in economic life helps those with the maximum amount of hidden risks – and hence the most fragile – become the biggest.

2. No socialization of losses and privatisation of gains. Whatever may need to be bailed out should be nationalised; whatever does not need a bail-out should be free, small and risk-bearing. We have managed to combine the worst of capitalism and socialism. In France in the 1980s, the socialists took over the banks. In the US in the 2000s, the banks took over the government. This is surreal.

3. People who were driving a school bus blindfolded (and crashed it) should never be given a new bus. The economics establishment (universities, regulators, central bankers, government officials, various organisations staffed with economists) lost its legitimacy with the failure of the system. It is irresponsible and foolish to put our trust in the ability of such experts to get us out of this mess. Instead, find the smart people whose hands are clean.

4. Do not let someone making an “incentive” bonus manage a nuclear plant – or your financial risks. Odds are he would cut every corner on safety to show “profits” while claiming to be “conservative”. Bonuses do not accommodate the hidden risks of blow-ups. It is the asymmetry of the bonus system that got us here. No incentives without disincentives: capitalism is about rewards and punishments, not just rewards.

5. Counter-balance complexity with simplicity. Complexity from globalisation and highly networked economic life needs to be countered by simplicity in financial products. The complex economy is already a form of leverage: the leverage of efficiency. Such systems survive thanks to slack and redundancy; adding debt produces wild and dangerous gyrations and leaves no room for error. Capitalism cannot avoid fads and bubbles: equity bubbles (as in 2000) have proved to be mild; debt bubbles are vicious.

6. Do not give children sticks of dynamite, even if they come with a warning . Complex derivatives need to be banned because nobody understands them and few are rational enough to know it. Citizens must be protected from themselves, from bankers selling them “hedging” products, and from gullible regulators who listen to economic theorists.

7. Only Ponzi schemes should depend on confidence. Governments should never need to “restore confidence”. Cascading rumours are a product of complex systems. Governments cannot stop the rumours. Simply, we need to be in a position to shrug off rumours, be robust in the face of them.

8. Do not give an addict more drugs if he has withdrawal pains. Using leverage to cure the problems of too much leverage is not homeopathy, it is denial. The debt crisis is not a temporary problem, it is a structural one. We need rehab.

9. Citizens should not depend on financial assets or fallible “expert” advice for their retirement. Economic life should be definancialized. We should learn not to use markets as storehouses of value: they do not harbour the certainties that normal citizens require. Citizens should experience anxiety about their own businesses (which they control), not their investments (which they do not control).

10. Make an omelette with the broken eggs. Finally, this crisis cannot be fixed with makeshift repairs, no more than a boat with a rotten hull can be fixed with ad-hoc patches. We need to rebuild the hull with new (stronger) materials; we will have to remake the system before it does so itself. Let us move voluntarily into Capitalism 2.0 by helping what needs to be broken break on its own, converting debt into equity, marginalizing the economics and business school establishments, shutting down the “Nobel” in economics, banning leveraged buyouts, putting bankers where they belong, clawing back the bonuses of those who got us here, and teaching people to navigate a world with fewer certainties.

Starting in the early 1900s, various Institutional remedies were put in place to tame the Market excesses of the second half of the nineteenth century. Banning child labor and “breadwinner” wages for husbands, for example, removed women and children from the workforce and created space for a separate Tribal sphere. The outcome of these remedies that peaked in the 1920s is hard to say. A global depression and an unprecedented boom caused by the fact that North America is an island off the self-destructive continent of Eurasia obscured their impact. Now, in the face of the re-rise of Eurasian economic capacity and a second globalization of trade, the demands of the Market seem to be overrunning Tribal space with an unprecedented ferocity. This risks further Institutional and Tribal encroachment on the Market and more distortions. Defining the proper scope of each TIMN form is becoming ever more necessary.

Continuing my thoughts stimulated by Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s The Black Swan  on the validity of human-acquired wisdom, information, predictions, etc. 

In Chapter 5, entitled “Confirmation Shmonfirmation” Taleb observes, “…a series of corroborative facts is not necessarily evidence [of something]. Seeing white swans does not confirm the nonexistence of black swans…” However, seeing a single black swan will  prove that not all swans are white. In the same way finding a malignant tumor proves you have cancer, whereas not finding one doesn’t prove you don’t. [As the doctor said recently to my mother, the cancer cells migrated from the first location to the second and logic says they took up residence elsewhere besides in her leg bone. Hence they opt for another round of chemotherapy. How can we know that the chemo is needed, that it will kill the cells we are hoping it will? We can't.]

Taleb calls this “negative empiricism” and contends that negative instances (like cancer, like a black swan) can bring us closer to the truth than verifying instances. ”It is misleading,” says he, “to build a general rule from observed facts. Contrary to conventional wisdom, our body of knowledge does not increase from a series of confirmatory observations.”

That’s one of those sentences that makes you stop and ponder. It seems that the more we see of something, the more certain we can be of the truth, but the reality is, we just don’t have a large enough sample size. Or, put another way, we simply don’t know the big picture.

This recalls to mind God’s command that His children live by faith in His word and character and not by what they see. Sight would involve confirmatory observations, and we crave confirmation of the things that we believe. Yet as we grow God increasingly asks us to put that desire for confirmation aside.  Noah had never seen rain, had not one convert in his 120 years of preaching to the antedeluvian world, yet he kept on.

Abraham spent his entire life waiting for a city without foundations and is still waiting. Moses spent his adult life traveling toward the promised land and never got to enter it. The church has waited 2000 years for the return of our Lord with no confirmatory evidence for the most part. (Though lately that’s been less true than in the past!)

And then there was Job, who was actually being shown off by God to Satan and the world. “Have you noticed my servant Job?” he asked of Satan. “There is none like him in all the world.’

Job was a mature believer with whom God was well pleased. And what did He do with His mature believer, one who had been faithful for many long years? He drew Satan’s attention to him and allowed him to take all that he had without cause. And after Job lost all his children, all his livestock and houses and servants, and even his health, there wasn’t a lot of confirmatory evidence to bolster the notion that God loved him, and that He was a just God who had all under control.

Nevertheless, Job’s initial response was to affirm that very viewpoint: “The Lord gives, the Lord takes away, blessed be the name of the Lord.”

Even after his wife came advising him to curse God and die, he said, “Shall we indeed accept good from God and not accept adversity?” and did not sin with his lips. It was only when those three so-called friends arrived to sit with him silently for seven days before urging him to confess his sins because it had to be his fault that all this had befallen him — which was not at all the situation! — only then did he start to fail the test. Why? Because he had only the word of God to rest in and the lack of confirmatory evidence had gotten to him, especially when the “friends” used that very lack against him.

Our Lord also did not seem to be in the Father’s plan when He was tried, convicted and marched up to the hill of Golgotha to be crucified. There His enemies mocked Him, demanding, once again, confirmatory evidence: “Why don’t you come down from there if you’re the son of God? Where is He? Why doesn’t He deliver you if you’re really who you say you are??”

Of course the evidence did arrive eventually, but it’s in those dark hours that we most want it and don’t have it and the fact that we don’t is by God’s design.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb is a philosopher, concerned with human viewpoint, and the limitations of man’s perceptions. He doesn’t touch at all on divine viewpoint — at least not directly, but what I like is how he highlights many of the tendencies we have as humans that make having faith in someone we’ve never seen, having faith in the words of men long dead, as all the while the exact opposite is apparently staring us in the face and “everyone” is telling us how things “really” are, and they aren’t like how the Bible says.

 It also shows the myriad ways in which the cosmic system deceives. With such tendencies in us, it’s not all that hard. Especially when you combine it with our lack of brainpower to process all the details that surround us and our resulting need to summarize. And then there is our almost hard-wired inclination to make stories out of everything, regardless of the amount of actual facts we have. But those are subjects for future posts.

Wow, another December 7th has passed. Life’s kaleidoscope twists and presses the view upon us with new colors and old thoughts. I read the Wikipedia description, HERE. I’m not even close to being a military strategist, historian, or personal observer, but think Wiki has a pretty good handle on the description of events. Their discussion on how this successful Japanese tactical event eventually cost them the war is interesting.

Wiki also has an interesting list and critique of books and movies on the subject.

As I said, I wasn’t around, but I was born in the SF Bay Area, a hub of military activity before, during, and after the war, and my father worked in the shipyards, with US Steel, during the war.  As a result, the war I missed was still an integral part of my upbringing.The idea that we on the West Coast were only an ocean away, that submarines were off our shores, Ft Stevens was shelled, and that there was even a small but deadly balloon attack, left all of us with the deep understanding that an ocean and the people on the other side of it weren’t so far away and imaginary. Perhaps in an odd way, because we were so aware, it fostered eventually the growth of the Pacific Rim concept, trading partners, commonalities.

The article in the CS Monitor yesterday made me think of another commonality-a relationship with 9-11. The Monitor says:

“A better explanation for the enormity of the US defeat might be that the attack was a so-called black swan event: something so far outside the realm of expectations that Americans could not conceive of it occurring.”

Sure enough, Wiki had already linked the two together. Nassim Nicholas Taleb described the theory in his 2007 book entitled: “The Black Swan”. There will always be Black Swan Events. No matter how hard we try to prepare, some things will just be outside our frame of reference.

It is difficult to imagine the desperation and freneticism of the few souls who found themselves on the advancing edge event of World War II or 9-11, and tried to warn their compatriots. It is difficult to plum the later misery for those who saw those Black Swan Events coming but didn’t understand them.

High impact Black Swan Events happen more then we realize. I personally have had one event in my life, which might fall into this category, where I found myself on the leading edge. I know I suffered.

Always, some of us will find ourselves in the leading edge of these events. Maybe it helps to understand that we are part of a continuum. I wanted, after my event, to analyze and avoid future incidences. Others in involved in my event did not. It a human condition. Besides, Counterfactual History does not necessarily prepare us for the next Black Swan Event.

In keeping with the Black Swan Model, my life certainly went in a new direction.  Likewise, for those who were involved in Pearl Harbor Day, the whole world changed. Yet, their experiences did not prepare us for 9-11. Can we say that 9-11 has prepared us for the next event? Ultimately, though we try, we just can’t prepare for everything. Except, perhaps, the commonality of suffering.

Confirmation bias is when you search for confirmation of something you believe. Finding it then bolsters your belief. In The Black Swan, author Nassim Nicholas Taleb recounts a psychological experiment in which subjects were given the number seqence 2, 4, 6, and asked to guess the rule generating them by producing other three-number sequences that followed the same rule. The experimenter would answer “yes” or “no” in response to each sequence and from that the subjects would formulate their rule.

In this case the rule was “numbers in ascending order,” a simple rule which few of the subjects discovered.  To do so, they would have had to offer a number series in descending order (to which the experimenter would have said “no”). Being focused on trying to confirm whatever rule they had come up with, the subjects never thought to try to disprove it and thus never asked the right questions…

This practice of seeking evidence that disproves one’s theory is called skeptical empiricism, and is one Taleb advocates as a means of increasing one’s objectivity in perceiving reality.  However, it is so much against our nature that it requires a fair degree of concentrative energy. Our habit, our nature is to go for confirmation rather than falsification. Given man’s fallen state I can readily attribute this to the pride of the flesh, delighting in the cleverness of its own ideas and not at all pleased at the idea of being wrong

“The way of a fool is right in his own eyes…”  Pro 12:15

“He who corrects a scoffer gets insult for himself.” Pro 9:7

“Do you see a man wise in his own eyes? There is more hope for a fool than for him.”  Pro 26:12

Taleb says you can find confirmation for just about anything you want to believe. Confirmation in circumstances, confirmation in “references,” confirmation in events. Confirmation from other people.

The day before I read this section of the book, I was talking with someone who was advocating a health product whose method of operation and results I found difficult to believe. When I expressed my skepticism the person offered several incidents of the personal testimony sort as “proof” the product was legitimate and worked as advertised. As soon as I read about confirmation bias, I realized I’d just seen it in action.

In Frank Peretti’s semi-autobiographical novel, The Visitation, there is an incident where the protagonist was certain that God wanted him to go to the Billy Graham headquarters in Minnesota and offer his services. He was totally unqualified and really had no “services” to offer (except perhaps janitorial), nevertheless he was convinced it was God’s will and direction that he do this. He found confirmation on the side of a boxcar in a train he happened to pass as he started out on his bus trip to Minnesota. There on the side of the car was a number that just happened to be the same as the street number of the Billy Graham offices. Proof, he exulted, that he was indeed following God’s lead.

 Unfortunately when he arrived at the headquarters he was turned away without appeal… Which left him confused. Had God not been leading him after all? I’d say no. It was merely confirmation bias at work.

Complicating this tendency to want to confirm one’s theory or belief rather than to disprove it is the tendency to focus on the incidents that do confirm, while blotting out those that do not. Taleb calls this the silent evidence. You hear of the 10 people who were cured of cancer using this innovative technique, not the 1100 who died using it. You hear of the 100 writers who succeeded using such and so marketing technique, not the thousands who did not.

Sometimes, scientists just throw out the experiments that don’t confirm their theories while trying to force the ones with promise to do so… The recent CRU emails give some examples of this, and I distinctly recall an article I read a few years ago by Richard Lewontin, maybe, about exactly this. We are aghast at the practice, yet if we’re honest I think most of us will find we do the same thing, if on a lesser scale perhaps.

I’ll use an example that I’m familiar with. Let’s say I fear that deep down I believe that I’m not really a very good writer (my theory). I can get twenty very positive comments on my writing, from people I know and respect and yet, it’s the one negative comment, often from a total stranger, that I recall most vividly. Why? Because it’s corroborating my “I can’t write” theory. That’s also why the negative comments are the ones that tend to surface when I’m struggling to write the next book, corroborating my resurrected fear that I really can’t write after all. “See? Not only am I having trouble with the work in progress but some reviewer on Amazon confirmed that I really am just an imposter.”

Thankfully God’s growing me out of this ridiculous scenario, and this whole idea of confirmation bias is a very helpful concept in doing so. It also answers questions I’ve had about doctrinal or faith-based differences between believers. But more on that tomorrow.

Listen here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3WCFTKI5lu4

Athlete is a band I’ve been following for a while now. They’ve had some amazing songs in th last few years. Among them: Wires (the first song I heard by them on One Tree Hill), Tourist, Twenty-four Hours, Westside, Tokyo and my favourite Hurricaine. This English band has an amazing sound and they consistently deliver. Check out all the songs. You will not be disappointed.

Lyrics here, more below:
I waded through the darkest fields you’d imagine
Your pretty face sketched on the barrel of my gun
And I know you’ll be the first to welcome me
When I climb into eternity
Oh, oh

The forest kept us warm
Bur it doesnt feel like home anymore
And I know there’s bigger mountains where you are
And a better climate for my heart
Oh,oh

I’ve been racing the clock
And I’ve run out of steem
I am ready for my final symphony
Oh my body is weak
But my soul is still strong
I am ready to rest in your arms

Though many battles I have won
I lost too many friends I could count on
And I know they’ll be the first to welcome me
When I parachute into eternity
Oh, oh

I’ve been racing the clock
And I’ve run out of steam
I am ready for my final symphony
Oh my body is weak
But my soul is still strong
I am ready to rest in your arms

And the rain beat down on the rooftops
But there was no sound,
There was no sound
And all my friends and familly carried me
They carried me home
Carried me home

I’ve been racing the clock
And I’ve run out of steam
I am ready for my final symphony
Oh my body is weak
But my soul is still strong
I am ready to rest in your arms
I’ve been racing the clock
And I’ve run out of steam
I am ready for my final symphony
Oh my body is weak
But my soul is still strong
I am ready to rest in your arms
Oh, oh

This is a beautifully dark song. Almost feels like a song about AIDS but could be any disease or even conflict depending on your view. The ‘lost too many friends’ is a touching bit of pain. The gun symbolizes the end of his own suffering. And I love that he knows they’ll all be there to greet him. And it is easy to imagine he wants to rest in God’s arms. Everything about the words and music are brilliant.

HAPPY FEATHER OOAK Felted Scarf with Peacock Feather

This little treasure created from salvaged marabou feather boa, crocheted pure cotton linen and Dark yellow satin ribbon. It could be absolutely amazing adornment for you neck!

Available at my Etsy shop:
Magical Laboratory of Fashion
© COPYRIGHT NOTE: All of my designs, photos and descriptions are protected by copyright. They may not be duplicated, copied, reproduced and/or republished without permission or notice. All rights are reserved.

“There is absolutely no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening”

Marshal McLuhan (in “The Medium is the Massage”)

Oh my:

“Nassim Taleb has decided to go into exile courtesy of the imminent reappointment of the man who not only caused the near destruction of the financial system, but with his actions has sealed the fate of America’s middle class. In a post titled “Good Bye! The reappointment of Bernanke is too much to bear” Taleb bids farewell and shares his disgust with the bullshit that the Wall Street – D.C. cabal has become, and the certain destruction that it is leading this once great country to.”

Zero Hedge (via adamcrowe.com)

“The world has never, never been as fragile. Economics make homeopath and alternative healers look empirical and scientific.”

Nassim Taleb

If there is ever a footnote written about Schwerpunkt, Beat Films, or the Indie Programs, this film would be the road trip that started it all, or ended it all, depending on which side of the fence  you live.  As in many other Schwerpunkt films, the best elements, the northern lights, eating shellfish from a polluted beach and wondering if we were going to die (except for Trevor, he asked if he could have the Jeep when we were dead), the lady who almost drove us off the road to ask, “why the battle flag?”  “Well, it was 5 bucks, the Canadian one was 40….” the story of the smile in the closet that seemed so funny as the fire was bright but, deep in the cold darkness of the night crept into the thoughts of campers sleeping on an abandoned section of the highway, did not make it into the film.  As in the past summers, the days were often rainy and the nights cold.  For the 1981 CJ7, dubbed Nelly Bell, the 55 MPH was enough to pull our crew through hundreds of miles of dirt road, off roading in dumps and mine craters rather than splashing through pristine wilderness.  In a way the torn landscape, burned forests, clear-cut wilderness, and at the end of this road a trash heap infested with bears…. is our current Americas.  This is our motorcycle diaries… Except that we did not write a book… and have not participated in a revolution.  And with any luck no one of us will hunt down and have the hands cut off the others…..  We did learn that a Jeep comfortably sleeps none.  I still have part of the stick shift inside me somewhere…..

Black Swan is as it sounds.  An unexpected event.  An answer to 9/11, an event I watched personally.  I asked a simple question of this trip to the wilds.  What if all the famous people in the United States were killed?  What if we lost our entertainment not just for a day, but forever – supposing that some kind of strike obliterated the Oscar ™ night and rid… ahem… robbed us of the rich and famous. This film also was perhaps my way of working though that event in my mind, as well as a relationship that was born days after that event.  The final cut presented is rough since it had to be compressed for the youtube file size which reduced time and quality of an image already created with sub-par cameras.  This is that same MP4. The music is drawn from a few free share sources (the “internationale” being Soviet and without copyright since it belongs to all of us… common ownership, some idea, sounds “communist”) and the cameras were junk from the Indie Programs.   The major theme music is Swan Lake, a reference to the Prague Spring when the radio station was captured by the Soviets and the station played Swan Lake for perhaps four days straight (I cannot find an online citation to this but believe I heard it years ago in a documentary – anyway, the idea stuck in my head).

Whatever it may mean psychologically, for Sovietologists, to Japanese, as dumb road trip film, for the History of the Indie Programs,  Black Swan is a rare work and seldom viewed except by our closest fans.  The Schwerpunkt team is talking about a remake.  Getting the old team together.  It’s been three years.  Thats twenty-one years, in dog years.  We want to return to those hills aboard Nelly Bell who is at this moment with a damaged gas tank and needs her body attached to the frame, reuniting the crew who for have traveled so far, each in their own ways and may not have changed the world but the world has changed them.  Actually, no it hasn’t.

To forecast the future, marketing leaders often look to the past. But the past isn’t always a very reliable gauge of future conditions. For proof, we need to look back to a day-in-the-life of a turkey, and implications of not preparing for possible “extreme” events around the corner.

First, let’s start with a fun exercise courtesy of Wilmott Magazine. Let’s look at damage estimates of earthquakes in California from 1970 to 1993 in the table below. Can you make an educated calculation of losses due to earthquakes in 1994?

Taking a look at the distribution of data, notice the low end is “0” and at high end, the most damage caused was “129”. So what’s your guess?

If you’re like me, you probably guessed wrong. Using the above numbers as an “anchor”, most people would reasonably assume that 1994’s earthquake was either an average of the above numbers or perhaps a bit higher than 129. Maybe you even threw out “129” as an outlier in the dataset. To be honest, I guessed around “200”.

The correct answer is “2217.2”! FEMA estimates that every year earthquake losses in the United States add up to $4.4 billion a year. But then, some extreme outliers can really skew that number, especially years like 1994 where just the Northridge Earthquake in California alone tallied $20B in damage!

Let’s get back to talking turkeys via a parable from Nassim Taleb, author of the “Black Swan”. Dr. Taleb reminds us that fat, dumb and happy is probably the best way to describe the life of a turkey. They’re fed and nurtured for three years straight. Day after day, they expect the same thing. But then, one fateful day arrives and the “life” of a turkey ends quite abruptly.

Can we accurately predict the future based on reviewing and analyzing historical data? Sometimes, but we have to make assumptions of similar conditions, a normal distribution, and event independence. Complex systems will have none of these characteristics. Dr. Taleb says as much; “Real life isn’t a casino.”

Indeed, the parable of the turkey and the earthquake loss estimation exercise show us that predicting the future in complex systems can be a futile exercise because there are so many unknowns, changing conditions, and inter-connecting relationships. Extreme events that carry a huge impact happen, and some would argue they’re happening a whole lot more often as interlocking financial markets and globalization become commonplace.

Should prediction exercises be avoided? Nassim Taleb would argue otherwise; “We need to start thinking of the inconceivable,” he says. And while we cannot determine the exact probability of tomorrow’s events, we can “get a general idea about the possibility of their occurrence.”

And that’s where scenario planning comes into play. Bill Ziemba, author of the aforementioned Wilmott Magazine article says, “Getting all the scenarios and their probabilities right is impossible and doesn’t matter much anyway. What is important is to cover the board of possible occurrences. Then you will make sound decisions with risk under control.”

The fact is, like the turkey, we just don’t know what tomorrow will bring. So, plan for the five to seven most likely occurrences and then develop contingencies based on those scenarios. French microbiologist Louis Pasteur says it best, “In the fields of observation chance favors only the prepared mind.”

For a turkey, today may appear like any other “normal” day. However, tomorrow could be the chopping block.

Questions:

• Nassim Taleb says, “It is only in very rare circumstances that probability (by itself) is a guide to decision making.” Does this mean that historical data analysis isn’t worth the effort?
• If chance favors the prepared mind, what’s the “next unexpected twist” that marketers should be looking for?

One of Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s earliest points in The Black Swan regarding the difficulties of prediction resides with the Thanksgiving turkey. Though Taleb is specifically addressing the inadequacy of using the present and even the past to predict the future, his discourse stimulated lots of branching thoughts for me that had little to do with his original point…

First though, Taleb’s point: For the first 1000 days of a hypothetical Thanksgiving turkey’s life, he is protected, cared for, fed, and treated kindly. Looking at days 1 – 1000 of his life, neither the turkey nor an uninformed observer would have reason to think his life would not continue as it has. But then on day one thousand and one (which this year would be November 26) something utterly unexpected and disastrous befalls the turkey. He experiences a very negative Black Swan event.

Thus Taleb illustrates the fallacy of relying on past observed data to make accurate future predictions, a practice that people seem to do all the time, particularly, says he, in economics, where they add insult to injury by making their faulty predictions with great authority and conviction. Just one among many flaws of the cosmic or worldly what of thinking, and a valid point… but not where the turkey illustration led me.

Let’s go back to the farmer who, of course, knows what he has planned. It’s the turkey who’s out of the loop. The comparison of the turkey’s relationship with the farmer and ours with God is unavoidable. You might argue that God would never do such a nasty thing as the farmer did to the turkey — raising us up and caring for us just to eat us! Well, of course He’s not going to eat us, but there are similarities nevertheless.

The farmer has plans and purposes that go far beyond the turkey’s simple life and understanding. He is raising the turkey to feed his family, to provide for their sustenance, nourishment, pleasure and blessing. The Thanksgiving turkey has become an icon of God’s blessing Americans in the warmth and closeness of family, and in celebration of the struggles, faith, needs and provisions for the people that began this great nation. And the freedom we still enjoy.

The turkey has to die, has to be consumed for the farmer’s (father’s?) purpose to be fulfulled. So it is with our Lord, the Father’s beloved Son, and so it will be for us as believers, followers who walk after the pattern established by the Son. There must be death for life to follow.

He who seeks to save his life will lose it; the one who loses his life will find it.

The farmer allows the turkey to continue in ignorance of his plans, first because the bird would be unable to understand his attempts to communicate them (even if the farmer came into the pen everyday and chased the turkey around with an axe, he’d only scare the creature not convey any sense of purpose), and second, even if he could, such plans would only frighten and distress the creature, producing a skinny bird and an unsatisfactory Thanksgiving meal.

Most of God’s people are in an uncannily parallel situation to the turkey. If they knew all the trials that were going to come their way, they would only live in fear and distress and probably go insane from the pressure, not fulfilling His plan at all. Therefore, most are left in the pen, relying on the notion that since yesterday passed without disaster, tomorrow will as well.

But it is not God’s desire for us to be out of the loop like a Thanksgiving turkey, pecking and scratching and gobbling about our pens in ignorance until the big Black Swan blindsides us. No, He may not want us to know specifically what’s ahead, but  His word undeniably warns us there will be suffering, undeserved and deserved, in our futures . “Momentary light affliction is part of His plan for us. And if we learn His Word, make it part of our thinking, it will enable us to handle whatever suffering we have to face. The Black Swan event may be surprising, but not unexpected, and it will be something through which we can be assured we will see God’s hand and wisdom and grace.

His thoughts are not our thoughts; His ways are not our ways. We can’t know them apart from knowing His word, and I don’t mean a casual superficial knowledge, I mean really knowing it, digging deep, learning constantly from a prepared pastor. Such knowledge produces the capacity to receive greater knowledge, deeper knowledge, until we reach a point where it’s impossible for us to perceive the Black Swan’s that God places in our lives (has placed in eternity past, actually) as anything but positive and right.

Turkey image by freeimageslive.co.uk – valuestockphoto