Virtual and physical: extreme world and mediocre world
The so-called “black swan” refers to an event that is extremely unlikely to occur but actually occurs.
It mainly has three major characteristics:
- This event is an outlier because it occurs outside the general expected range, and past experience makes people disbelief in its possibility. Second, it will have a huge impact.
- Although the event is an outlier, once it occurs, people will naturally make some explanation to make the event explainable or predictable. (This non-requirement is just a part of explaining human phenomena. As long as the first two are met, it can be called a black swan event)
The difference between the physical world and the virtual world
When the number is large enough, the impossible will inevitably happen. In the physical world, when the observation time is long enough, the probability of a black swan occurring can be evaluated. For example, taking the successful listing of a business, we can also predict based on statistics that one out of every thousand new businesses will successfully go public for IPO. We will not know which one it is, but we know that there will always be one.
In an era before the advent of the Internet, it might take a year to create a thousand new companies in the physical world, but in the Internet age, it may only take a month to create a thousand new companies. In the past, it might take a year for your company to have a thousand customers in the physical world, but it might only take one hour on the Internet in the virtual world. Therefore, you can understand that the time required for a large number of events to occur on the Internet has been greatly compressed, which has resulted in a significant increase in the probability of seemingly impossible black swan events.
Every black swan event will cause mutations in social genes, thus creating a more progressive social environment. (Natural selection: Because genetic mutants are better able to adapt to the new environment than other non-mutated people, the non-mutated ones are gradually eliminated, and eventually only the new mutants remain, resulting in comprehensive replacement)
The explosive growth of “events” has condensed the frequency of black swan events. In the foreseeable future, events that originally occurred only once every hundred or millennium will be condensed to every year or every month in the Internet world (extreme world)… It is conceivable that the frequency of black swan events in the Internet world will increase due to the rapid increase in the mother number.
Therefore, we must not think about the future from the perspective of the physical world in the past. The development of the virtual world of action, information, and the Internet. When you are ready to blurt out “This can’t happen”, please think about it again. If it happens a thousand times, The probability is 0.09%, but if there are 1 million events, the probability of it happening will become 90%. In the past, it might have taken 1,000 years to generate 1 million events, but on the Internet, it might only take 10 years. This is what we must understand.
Make good use of the black swan effect
So we can take advantage of scale variability: harness the black swan effect to increase our chances of success.
You must identify positive black swan events and negative black swan events. When your losses are extremely limited, you must try as much as possible. Don’t look for something clear and narrow. Bet on preparation, not prediction (because you can’t predict anything). Take advantage of any opportunity and be as exposed as possible to it.
Make a list of all the things you think are impossible in the physical world. Maybe this is the key to your success in the virtual world.
References The Black Swan Effect, written by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, translated by Lin Maochang, published by Chuchuan Culture, April 2008
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