Outliers

I just started reading The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb and I’m enjoying it far more than any book filed under economics should be enjoyed:

What we call here a Black Swan (and capitalize it) is an event with the following three attributes.

First it is an outlier, it lies outside the realm of regular expectations, because nothing in the past can convincingly point to its possibility. Second, it carries an extreme impact. Third, in spite of its outlier status, human nature makes us concoct explanations for its occurrence after the fact, making it explainable and predictable.

My immediate reaction to this was to scribble two words in the margin:

stone egg

For me a stone egg being made magically fertile and giving birth to a stone monkey who would one day declare himself Great Sage Equal of Heaven is a perfect Black Swan. That it’s a fictional Black Swan is perfect.

I’ve been spending a lot of time this year thinking about Wu Cheng’en’s Journey to the West in preparation for one of two projects that I’ve been working towards for even longer. One is pure fiction, a retelling of the Monkey King myth called West. The other for now is simply entitled Black, but is a lot more involved as it requires a fair bit of research.

I’ve been waiting for this financial year to end so I can kick April off with a little space to work on these more personal projects. I’ll be using this blog a lot more for research material regarding both works while still trying to make it as readable as possible.

Also looking forward to a few unexpected turns in the road.

Follow that Swan.