Daily Dispatch 26 - Black Swam

How do you predict the unpredictable?

Some of what I’ve found reading Black Swan (Still haven’t finished it):

• What Nassim Nicholas Taleb argues in his book Black Swan is that the first step is to realize which variables you can and can’t predict. Emphasis on the “can’t”.
• Most things are not easily predictable, and applying methods blindly can lead to a false sense of safety.
• He goes on and on about some examples and studies on how wrong most economists/sociologists/psychologist are. And how they hardly ever have enough reputable research showing their past prediction’s success and (more importantly) error rates.
• I’m excited particularly about his definitions on what is “Know-How and just Know something”.
  • You can trust a surgeon to do it’s job and accept his word as a specialist, but not every human science can have specialists. Who do you trust regarding projections for over 5 years of a country?
• And there’s something I want to read about the paper of Michael Berry analyzing collisions of billiard balls
  • In summary, he can predict about 9 collisions, but after that things like relativity and electron states are brought into the equations.
  • And Nassim uses this as basis for his argument on “why we can’t predict that much that we think we can”.

So I’m starting to learn a little bit more about Prisma IO, finished a whole new project on it. You can check it out on my GitHub. I’m still writing a proper read-me though.

It’s been interesting to take on more Backend projects, hopefully I’ll have something new to write about Devops by the end of the month.

On the mobile side, I’ve been gladly working at Nelogica on some exciting new technologies, both Kotlin Multiplatform and specific business logic features for traders.

And now I’m gonna continue learning more about devops, backend, and VIM (you didn’t think I stopped using it did you?).

It’s been a real pain using VIM to be honest, but what can I do, maybe when I finish the lessons from LearnVim I’ll like it more.

That is it for today, I’m so excited about reading Nassim’s book that I bought the whole collection today.