Black Swan, Power of Now and My Coffee

All thought is a feat of association; having what's in front of you bring up something in your mind that you almost didn't know you knew.Author: Robert Frost

Good books are always the source of good thoughts and i was fascinated by two thought provoking books in “Black Swan” by Nassim Nicholas Taleb and “Power of Now” by Eckhart Tolle (in no particular order as a disclaimer). The two authors analyze life from two very different perspectives , Nassim was a day-trader by profession ,he calls himself a empirical skepticist and Eckhardtt Tolle doesn't call him of anything , but is an inspiring spiritual master.

Black Swan is quite heavy to read and is not that book you would want to read on the beach after a couple of margaritas being distracted by the blondes. Black Swan , nassim explains, is a metaphor which can be realized only after its occurrence and people typically understand it only in retrospect (couple of quoted black swans are Google and Sep 11 and recent ones being global liquditity crisis) and we really dont understand when we are in middle of it. The awesome part is the way nassim takes a hit on the established beliefs starting from Plato(personally I hated his “Republic”) , Gaussian bell (HR's beware) curves and so on, he questions a lot of common beleifs that we take for granted as a god given rule. Fun to read.

Another good part is the reference to lots of philosophers and it could be a start of a whole new on thinking , contrary to the common thinking of philosophy as a heavy subject reserved for bored academics with a strong inclination towards debating on useless conundrums , nassim lets us realize it to be tool to strech the mind positively. Being a skeptical empiricist with lots of questions may not be all that easy in a practical life at all circumstances ,dont ever practise it with your wife, it may be injurious to health, but there are lot of things that you could learn and I have really started appreciating the empiricists in John Locke , David hume (though they are not too skeptical like nassim) and others philosophers like descartes ("I think, therefore I am" fame),nietzche , satre and even the Aristotle (Rhetoric is awesome).

If "Black Swan" is about complexity, “Power of Now” is all about Simplicity and it talks about self realization and focusing on the present moment rather then lamenting about the past and being anxious about the future. The essence of the book is to stick to "Now" rather than seeking ourselves and our identities in the past (dont we all often hear how one's grand parents were rich and powerful etc) and future (that Maserrati car , Havana Cigars , Rolex watches etc etc). Though the concept that he explains is not something that he invented (he doesn't claim so as well, luckily), the beauty lies in the way it is presented .



The good part of Tolle is the clarity (sample in above video) that he had brought in explaining such a heavy concept of realizing self, killing ego, living in now with simple anecdotes and an easy question and answer style and one couldnt stop from drawing easy parallels between Eckhart Tolle, Ramana, Bhavat Gita , Sufisim etc. Tolle seems to be very well living in the present and has been generating books at a notable speed, few good books worth mentioning are “Stillness Speaks” and “Practicing Power of Now”.

The good thing about these two books are the way they have been accepted into the mainstream community irrespective of the heavy subjects , thanks to the capable authors. Nassim believes in the randomness (Fooled by Randomness was his first ever book) and argues that world is more non linear than we tend to think and trying to fit linearities upon an complex non linear event would not get us anywhere. Tolle believes in the orderliness of a very simple world where people cling on to the present and live the current moment and has a magnanimous vision of a New World where every body is very happy practising power of now.

Hey its, time for me to have a coffee , wait a moment , I think nassim would call coffee as “an invigorating liquid which has been made tastier by the brownian motion of the coffee particles suspended in the milk when properly heated” and tolle may call you to "just ignore anything else and enjoy the moment of sipping the coffee and be within yourself". We need them both and morethan any thing I just need my coffee NOW.

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Market Meltdowns and Black Swans

It has been a real messy time that world economy is going through and with all those cries about the slowing US market pulling down bunch (may be more) of world economies with it.

Inciedentally i couldnt stop myself thinking about the book that i read recently Black Swan by Nicholas Nassim Taleb, It was a very good read and thought provoking. Taleb is one of the few original thinkers that i have come across who leaves a mark on your thoughts. His eloquent arguments that shakes the fundementals of your thinkings especially about those forecasts and rudimentary statistic will leave a strong impression on your thinking process.

He defines Black Swan as a "large-impact, hard-to-predict, and rare event beyond the realm of normal expectations", as the definition implies world is full of surprises that hit you hard in either good or bad way. In simple terms , blackswans are something which people have hardtime predicting and a simple example being wive's anger.

The real interesting part is that nobody would be able to predict (obviously) the occurance of black swans (unless you want to co-relate something that Nastradamus wrote -while he was too drunk), A recent black swan is the global economic meltdown -liquidity crisis , however you would want to call it - which has hit several economies badly, the US real estate boom has been on since from 1996-2006 and nobody warned about the associated sub priming which has been brewing up all those years, atleast those I-KNOW-ALL-ABOUT-ECONOMY types. I am very intrigued to know what happened to that hotshot investment banker who first made the nice presentation about projected incomes from Investments of those securities which were wrapped around sub-prime mortagages, may be he is on the look for the job or could be in caymans island in his own yacht.

Once it became very clear that the meltdown has happened , it became very easy for every body to formulate theories in hindsight and to explain whole anatomy of the subpriming crisis and the world is flooded with those strongly opinionated articles that explain what went wrong. Though we cannot say anything wrong about these post-mortems , after all every body needs to survice, but the fact that phenomenon of such a profoundly complex financial instruments which got wrapped with huge sub priming risks ( in a neatly decorated bouquet, with simple names) and offered at a premium didnt catch the eyes of economic guardians is very surprising.

But whatever may the reason, as Taleb rightly puts we have a strong tendency is formulate theories that explain calamities/catastrophes very clearly in retrospect but our powerful modeling techniques and economic gurus always fail to tell us that something is cooking up which could blow things apart(Any body out there doing Predictive Analytics?), one can argue that it may not be possible to do so given the complexities of the macro economies which are very well tied together after globalisation , but after all its not Tsunami or a Volcanic eruptions, it was those greedy guys who wanted to make good bucks on those who had strong desire to buy a home yet didnt do a math of whether they could repay consistently and those non US global economies around the world who just wanted to dump some money and forget about it.

May be these are the side effects of globalisation and the out comes of capitalistic aspirations which are the prime movers of today's economy.

In the back drop of all of these things, i dont know how may Jerome Kerviels are playing out with billions and how many black swan eggs would be hatched soon. The world is getting to be a more interesting place with lot of things going wrong ,after all - it is the unpredicability and a bit of chaos which adds flavour to our life (As long as we dont lose money on it).

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