This chart from Taleb’s Black Swan is a perfect Thanksgiving story for security and risk management professionals. It is a graph of a 1000 days of the life of a Turkey.
Taleb writes: The history of a process over a thousand days tells you nothing about what is to happen next. This naïve projection of the future from the past can be applied to anything.
#infosec #security #OODA #thanksgiving
@BobGourley Counterpoint: "Think you understand Black Swans? Think again"
https://exploringpossibilityspace.blogspot.com/2013/07/think-you-understand-black-swans-think.html
@MrMeritology Thanks for that. Very well done. My views:
I define Black Swans like Taleb, since it is useful in decision making. These are events categorized by rarity, extreme impact, and retrospective (though not prospective) predictability. Stuxnet is not a Black Swan, cyberwar vs infrastructure has been predicted for years. Pandemic not a Black Swan either, was an example in Taleb’s books.
@BobGourley I understand.
And I have chosen not to make a big public stink about misuse of "Black Swan" concept.
There are bigger, more important fish to fry.
On the plus side, there are a meaningful number of people (risk folks) who have benefited from my refined/nuanced/differentiated taxonomy of Swans.
@BobGourley No, I haven't. I shall look it up!
TBH, there are domains where rigor and attention to detail payoff, and others not so much.
Luckily, I'm in a job, team, and company where it pays off.
@BobGourley Have you read about "Dragon Kings"?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_king_theory
Much more solid, analytically and theoretically, than Black Swan mish-mash.
BobGourley
Russell Cameron Thomas
