All Life Is Problem Solving

Joe Firestone’s Blog on Knowledge and Knowledge Management

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Black Swan Ideas: The Black Swan and Knowledge Management

June 4th, 2009 · Comments Off on Black Swan Ideas: The Black Swan and Knowledge Management

In past blogs, I’ve discussed Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s The Black Swan as a metaphor for systematic doubt and fallibilism as well the ideas of scalability, non-scalability, Extremistan, Mediocristan, the fallacy of silent evidence, confirmation error or platonic confirmation, epistemic arrogance, future blindness, the lottery-ticket fallacy, the ludic fallacy, Mandelbrodtian randomess and Gray Swans, the narrative […]

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Tags: Epistemology/Ontology/Value Theory · Knowledge Making · Knowledge Management

Black Swan Ideas: Platonic Folds, Platonicity, Randomness, Retrospective Distortion, and the Round-trip Fallacy

June 3rd, 2009 · 1 Comment

Here’s more on ideas from Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s (NNT) The Black Swan, including discussions of Platonic folds, Platonicity, randomness as incomplete information, retrospective distortion, and the round-trip fallacy. Platonic Folds and Platonicity. NNT focuses a lot of attention on our tendency to view our concepts, models and representations as pure, sharp, crisp, abstract forms. A […]

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Tags: Epistemology/Ontology/Value Theory · Knowledge Making · Knowledge Management

Black Swan Ideas: Lottery Ticket and Ludic Fallacies, Mandelbrodtian Randomness, Gray Swans, and the Narrative Fallacy

June 2nd, 2009 · Comments Off on Black Swan Ideas: Lottery Ticket and Ludic Fallacies, Mandelbrodtian Randomness, Gray Swans, and the Narrative Fallacy

More on ideas from Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s (NNT) The Black Swan today, including discussions of the Lottery Ticket and Ludic fallacies, Mandelbrodtian Randomness, and Gray Swans, and the Narrative Fallacy. The Lottery Ticket Fallacy. One of the things NNT calls attention to is the possibility and advisability of living one’s life in such a way […]

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Tags: Complexity · Epistemology/Ontology/Value Theory · Knowledge Making · Knowledge Management

Black Swan Ideas: Silent Evidence, Confirmation Error, Epistemic Arrogance, and Future Blindness

June 1st, 2009 · Comments Off on Black Swan Ideas: Silent Evidence, Confirmation Error, Epistemic Arrogance, and Future Blindness

In this post, I’ll continue my discussion of key ideas from Taleb’s The Black Swan, with an examination of: the fallacy of silent evidence, confirmation error (or platonic confirmation), epistemic arrogance, and future blindness.

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Tags: Complexity · Epistemology/Ontology/Value Theory · Knowledge Making · Knowledge Management

Black Swan Ideas: Mediocristan, Extremistan, and Randomness

May 31st, 2009 · Comments Off on Black Swan Ideas: Mediocristan, Extremistan, and Randomness

There’s a good reason why The Black Swan is a best seller. It’s written in a very lively style with great narratives, literary images, and vivid terms and phrases. Nassim Nicholas Taleb (NNT) talks about scalability, non-scalability, Extremistan, Mediocristan, the fallacy of silent evidence, confirmation error or platonic confirmation, epistemic arrogance, future blindness, the lottery-ticket […]

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Tags: Complexity · Epistemology/Ontology/Value Theory · Knowledge Making · Knowledge Management

The Black Swan Metaphor

May 23rd, 2009 · Comments Off on The Black Swan Metaphor

Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s (NNT) The Black Swan is a “best seller,” and therefore may be having a certain influence on our thinking in many fields including Knowledge Management. From the viewpoint of KM, The Black Swan isn’t about what we know, or about what we know we don’t know, but rather is a book that […]

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Tags: Epistemology/Ontology/Value Theory · Knowledge Making · Knowledge Management · Politics

Black Swans and Prediction

April 23rd, 2009 · 2 Comments

Recently, I’ve been having a good bit of fun with Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s The Black Swan, a book I’ve been meaning to read for awhile but only recently have gotten to. Taleb’s book is mainly about the difficulty of predicting the future due to the weakness (partially based in evolution) in human abilities to predict […]

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Tags: Complexity · Epistemology/Ontology/Value Theory · Knowledge Making · Knowledge Management

A Black Swan?

April 17th, 2009 · 1 Comment

From The Huffington Post and YouTube Nassim Nicholas Taleb says (pp. xvii – xviii) that a “Black Swan” is an event with three attributes. “It is an outlier . . .” in the sense that it is “outside the realm of regular expectations, because nothing in the past can convincingly point to its possibility. . […]

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Tags: Complexity · Knowledge Making