Preparing and Proftting from the Unknown - Unknowns

Noel 

        I am rereading this fascinating book called The Art of Thinking Clearly by Ralf Dobelli. In it are 99 short ideas which help people like myself develop independent thought.  This short story is called the Black Swan episode, and the jist of the story is this. People learn by attending both school which is a cumulative compilation of people's past experiences and lessons conjugated into basic building blocks of alphabets, logic, math, science, humanities, history and literature. The other is the huge and no holds barred life experiences. Every person is shaped primarily by genes, values transmitted by our parents, caregivers, teachers, relatives, friends, schoolmates and when you start working, colleagues.

       Our responses will be in line with what we have been taught either in a logical, musical, spiritual and religious sense as we take references to firstly our earliest and secondly our most cognizant responses to what we see and experience. Every one's interpretation of an event is moulded and each person's account will be tainted by what he or she is most familiar with.

       The term Black Swan is an event which up to the current time has never occurred in the concious realm of the ordinary. Things like the the explosion of Mount Pompeii in Italy, the Ice Age taking place, the creation of fire, the invention of the Atomic Bomb, Nuclear bomb, the findings of Copernicus which postulated that the Earth is not the Centre of the Universe, the creation of the Internet, handphones and the like.

     In 2004, the then Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said, that there are the Known Knowns (those are facts), there are the Known Unknowns (we know what we dont know

but we know that it exists) and the Unknown Unknowns (we do not even know that it ever is possible to exist).  

    So what happens when the Unthinkable happens ?  Ralf Dobelli suggests the following in the meantime, get out of debt, save conservatively, invest moderately - this is to stay afloat during a negative Black Swan event ; The election of the populist Donald Trump, could possibly be the negative Black Swan event. 

     In the positive Black Swan event, Dr. Dobelli suggests in the meantime that we should   work at either being an artist, an inventor or an entrepreneur with a scalable product.

     Bring it On !!