The concept of a Black Swan was something that was deemed impossible until one was discovered.  It’s what we don’t know that is worth studying – events that deviate from the norm.  To learn we have to look at the information that exists outside the bell curve.

“The central idea of this book concerns our blindness with respect to randomness… Why does reading the newspaper actually decrease your knowledge of the world?  What you know cannot really hurt you.”

Learning from the past is not the solution – the Maginot Line shows how the failure to look outside the norm can prove disastrous.  Society tends to reward the status quo – forward thinking is only supported if there are instant financial rewards.  Think about a legislator that wanted to make all cockpit doors locked and bullet-proof on September 10th, 2001 – he;d be laughed out of office.  How do we create a system that applauds the long view?

“Platonicity… is our tendency to mistake the map for the territory, to focus on the pure and well-defined ‘forms,’ whether objects, like triangles, or social motions, like utopias, even nationalities.”

Once abstraction has become our primary, and sometimes only, method of thinking the messier [and more telling] parts of relationships often remain unnoticed.

“The platonic fold is the explosive boundary where the Platonic mind-set enters in contact with messy reality, where the gap between what you know and what you think you know becomes dangerously wide.  It is here that the Black Swan is produced.”

In disciplines that deal primarily in the abstract [read academia], checks and balances tend to come form those that share the same beliefs – turning scholarly pursuits into ego-boosting conversations.  External checks from the opposite end of the table can be the most fruitful and enlightening.  The quest for knowledge is not the problem, it’s the belief we’ve attained it that’s the danger.