Assessing Black Swans for Divergent Options
[ by Charles Cameron — my latest, written for a mil scenario-planning audience ]
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Think of the cognitive humility I propose in this piece as prepping your attitude to the future. My black swans themselves aren’t the point — it’s your attitude that counts.
My opening paras, from Assessing Black Swans and their Pre-Incident Indicators at Divergent Options:
Watching a black swan take off is instructive. It starts, invisibly, on the lake of time, skeeting with wing-flaps to gain speed, achieves lift-off, after quite a while, and whang, whang, whang, ups itself to optimal speed and altitude – at which point we, in our hide in the marshes, recognize “Hey, there’s a black swan here,” and note where on the lake of time the occurrence occurred. National security analysts often opine on Black Swan Events, which are events that comes as a surprise, has a major effect, and are often inappropriately rationalized after the fact with the benefit of hindsight. Equally if not more important than the Black Swan Event are the pre-incident indicators of the event, the flaps of the swan’s wings if you will, that enabled the Black Swan to take flight.
A first flap might have been Ramon Llull’s devices for calculating all possible knowledge by means of wheels and tables. As History-Computer.com suggests, “One can ask ‘What exactly is Ramon Llull’s place in the history of computers and computing?’ The answer is Llull is one of the first people who tried to make logical deductions in a mechanical, rather than a mental way.” On the lake of time, that preliminary wing-flap occurs around 1275 CE. Llull, a Franciscan, was called Doctor Illuminatus, and beatified by the Church in 1514 CE.
Skipping a few possible Renaissance wing-flaps…
Read the rest here>
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FYI, a black swan in flight!
By JJ Harrison (https://www.jjharrison.com.au/) – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4763688
