I am working my way through Nassim Nicholas Taleb's book Black Swan, and I am hearing my own half-formed thoughts and developing ideas already expressed! With statistics, examples, counter-narratives and an engaging style. I should have picked up this book sooner, and I will probably buy a copy so I can mark it up myself with notes. Taleb brings up a few ideas I have already been pondering: the human tendency to seek narrative explanations, the dismal way we evaluate risk, the difficulty people have of dropping out of their cultural, and indeed possibly biological, frames of thinking.
I disagree with him on the ability and utility of forecasting, but I am in complete concurrence with his requirement that professional predictors keep a record and go back and evaluate their records.
Since this is supposed to be an "outlook" of sorts, I will have to come up with a list of things that I think I am capable of predicting, and track them.
One of Taleb's arguments dovetails neatly into Goodhart's law and Campbell's law. As soon as a big investment player uses a strategy, it becomes apparent, and is no longer counter-systemic. This suggests two options: make moves so opaque as to be incomprehensible - which may be easier if you just make it hard to think about - or be so little as to be beneath notice.
I can't wait to get through <i>Antifragile</i>, which I have also been thinking about: the tradeoffs between robustness and efficency, the way interconnected networks respond to damage. How can we build robust, resilient systems? This, I think is the great question of the 21st century. We will answer it, or die.
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