Shared by JohnH
Again, just seeing NNT’s ideas filter into the culture. Hugh Macleod is an artist and an entrepreneur and a frequent speaker at internet conferences. He blogs at http://gapingvoid.com/
To get some very lucid, hardcore perspective on this, I recommend that you read Nassim’s Taleb’s excellent and highly readable “Fooled By Randomness” (W. W. Norton & Co., 2001). Nassim’s thesis is childishly simple: That the bigger the historical event, the more random and unpredictable the event was to begin with. Nobody saw 9/11, Pearl Harbor, the assassinations of JFK, Lincoln or Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the Atomic Bombs being dropped on Japan, the 1923 collapse of the German Deutchmark, the Barbarians sacking Rome in 410 A.D., The Bubonic Plague of the 1300’s, or Hitler’s 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union coming down the pike. Ditto with Detroit not seeing the threat of Japanese cars coming after 1945, or IBM not seeing the threat posed in the 1970s by Microsoft and Apple. Everything just happened when it did, everybody was shocked completely, and everybody just had to deal with the MASSIVE consequences afterward. Not too much fun at the time, but there was no other choice. Nassim makes a damn good case.