I do not think Black Swan is a book on How Life Works, nor is it intended to be. It deals with the subject of uncertainty and as such, Life is inevitably a part of it. But it is not as grand as trying to encompass the whole of Life.
Haven't heard of Gödel, Escher, Bach before, but after a bit of Googling, it does sound interesting.
I also don't think the credit crunch or 9/11 were black swans.
Hmm... I'm not 100% sure on that. It is true that everybody knew USA couldn't keep lending so much money at such low interest rates forever. People did expect a correction to occur at some point. However, the trigger of the crisis was unexpected as well as the extent of the crisis. Dollar losing some of its value? Sure, expected. Banks not lending each other money at all? Not expected at all.
So I guess it depends on how you look at it. It was expected that the USA economy would run into trouble, so then that wouldn't be a Black Swan. However, it was not expected that it would happen in this way... so then maybe a Black Swan after all? Like I said, I'm not 100% sure myself.
Haven't heard of Gödel, Escher, Bach before, but after a bit of Googling, it does sound interesting.
I also don't think the credit crunch or 9/11 were black swans.
Hmm... I'm not 100% sure on that. It is true that everybody knew USA couldn't keep lending so much money at such low interest rates forever. People did expect a correction to occur at some point. However, the trigger of the crisis was unexpected as well as the extent of the crisis.
Dollar losing some of its value? Sure, expected. Banks not lending each other money at all? Not expected at all.
So I guess it depends on how you look at it. It was expected that the USA economy would run into trouble, so then that wouldn't be a Black Swan. However, it was not expected that it would happen in this way... so then maybe a Black Swan after all?
Like I said, I'm not 100% sure myself.
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