Chasing the Black Swan

While reading The Art of Acting Smart I encountered another interesting column that I found quite relevant.

In this column, Rolf Dobelli (the author of the book) showcases a philosophical notion from Donald Rumsfield: that there are things we know, (known facts), things we don't know (known unknowns) and things we don't know that we don't know (unknown unknowns).

Might sound complicated, especially with the last one, but a known unknown is basically just a thing that we haven't researched enough to know the answer for. How big is the Universe? What is the ideal diet for every individual? So, they are things, a known framework that we, in theory, could have an answer for.

However, with unknown unknowns it gets trickier because we cannot answer to the question, because we don't know what we are asking for. I think the easiest way to think of them is that they are things we don't even know exist. And such things are usually things that occur in the future, because future is hard to predict, one reason being that our brain is still equipped for stone era where things, majority of the time, went according to known rules and limits. But that is not the case in today's era in the midst of technological revolutions.

Before Facebook existed, nobody could've asked "how is Facebook going to affect self-esteem?" or "how does Facebook (or social media) affect social behavior in real life?" because nobody saw Facebook coming to its fruition the way it did. And now, thanks to social media as a whole, we are pondering with the questions considering the selling of our data and behavior patterns – things that still are a big question mark because who knows what the implications of them are in the future.

It was a black swan that nobody saw coming, until it did.

Now, blockchain could be our next black swan, or rather some thing that is going to become thanks to it – remember, we can't know of it yet. Though the last point is somewhat arguable, because while we can't know the specifics, some people could hold information with whom one can at least speculate, if not a specific outcome, at least some general trend taking place; the cypherpunks – advocating cryptography and privacy enhancing technologies since 1990s – among which Satoshi, creator of Bitcoin, might've also belonged, already experimented with digital currencies and they might've had a vision of one that would work along the lines of Bitcoin even if not knowing the specific turn of events.

It's hard to think of these things, especially for people who don't have the information; remember that before cars we're invented, when people were asked for what they wished, the answer was "faster horses". People don't know what they wish for, until they know of it. The same happened with the Internet: who wished to make funny pictures with two lines of text to be viewed by other people through a screen? Not many, until Internet came. I believe the same is going to happen with blockchain/cryptocurrency. Some people don't even know what they'd want cryptocurrency for, until the day comes that they do.

We all on Steem hope that Steem is going to be our black swan, the good kind. And even if not, we hold a lot of information that not a lot of people don't even grasp yet, that should not be underestimated. Whatever emerges in this new industry, we have a much bigger chance to know and understand it before the mainstream.

But what is great with Steem is that unlike Facebook, a lot more people can financially benefit from it, because everyone has the ability to make a Steem account, albeit being bit hard at the moment.

In any case, to catch a black swan, you have to expose yourself to situations where there's a possibility of it appearing, but even if you decide not to try catch one like J.K.Rowling did, here you can actually be an active participant on the process of potentially creating one.