The Black Swan Reality

Today, there is a growing concern about the overreliance on seemingly objective information and logic as the sole determinants of truth.

We follow the data, we look at credentials, we weigh options on seemingly logical foundations.

And yet, the great tragedy of modern civilization is that we self-impose boundaries on ourselves based on this seemingly scientific evidence.

Don’t get me wrong, past information is very important to predicting and making assumptions about future outcomes. In fact, this is a major biological input/output behavioral mechanism that we use on a daily basis.

The problem is though, that as a collective we have taken it too far.

Modern society, consumed by data obsession, has trapped itself in a self-imposed cage of the past.

While logic and evidence have their place 99% of the time, what we’re ignoring is that 1% - the unforeseen, the improbable, the potential for catastrophic change.

Things like pregnancies even with the use of contraception, a suddenly fatal aneurysm of a perfectly healthy family member, or a pipeline explosion that sends the economy into ruin, do the most damage because we choose to believe that high probabilities mean guarantees.

A lot of the fragile systems in place that make the world go round are, in fact, entirely built on assumptions.

We assume there will always be food at the store, we assume that the power will always be on, we assume that we will always be paid on time, and we assume that professionals are always correct in their field just because they have credentials and experience.

So while it’s important to base decisions on evidence and data, we shouldn’t enslave ourselves to a purely scientific existence.

We live in a subjective world where people come together and collectively accept objective rules to live by so that our societies don’t descend into anarchy. Yet interestingly we limit ourselves to only looking at the world through the objective lenses that were created by subjective people!

Here’s the bottom line:

The world is dynamic, not a carefully executed experiment in a vacuum. So let’s stop looking at it through a static lens.