Our Perception of the World

I started reading Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s The Black Swan today; The New York Times Bestseller dealing with everything we know about we don’t know. Taleb gives the impression of a talented and well-read author. A smart guy, basically. Reading just the first chapters gets you going. One basic point in Taleb’s reasoning is that anything can happen. History does not crawl, it makes jumps. The future cannot longer be predicted from past times experiences.

“I had been told in high school that the planets are in something called equilibrium, so we did not need to worry about the stars hitting us unexpectedly. To me, that eerily resembled the stories we were told about the “unique historical stability” of Lebanon. The very idea about assumed equilibrium bothered me. I looked at the constellation at the sky and did not know what to believe”. (Taleb, 2007).

It’s kind of a scary thought, indeed. If you really come to think about it, it seems more likely than ever that we’re all going to fall victim to some mass destruction weapon fired by some powerful lunatic in Extremistan. People have always had such dystopian fears, even in the most idyllic environments. And since we’re still all happy and alive, such fears and claims seem presently kind of stupid. I guess it will all be a big surprise for us when the bomb blows =)



Anyway, we talked, amongst other things, about visible and invisible trends on today’s lecture. It was said that invisible trends have greater impact than visible ones. When thinking about the future, people mainly think at gadgets and technology, rather than behavioral changes. Behavioral and taste-based changes seem harder to predict, but far more interesting, I think. If you look at paintings from Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, you’ll notice that most of his ideas about the future concerns technology, movement and machines; instead of human beings. The futurists are already a bit old-fashioned in that sense, I guess.

Finally, I came to think about how our perception of the world changes quite literary. Have a look at a couple of these old world maps and see what I mean.