the black swan problem

just finished this book "the black swan" by nassim nicholas taleb. he previously wrote "fooled by randomness".

simply put - if you see a thousand white swans, or even a million white swans, you still cannot definitively say all swans are white. it only takes one black swan to negate all these observations.

the book is a pretty dense 300 pages so there's no way to summarize, but there were some interesting observations about film.

• the movie biz is a winner-takes-all business. in any of these winner-takes-all biz, one needs only to be marginally better (or even not), but supremely lucky, to hit the homerun. the fact that there are so many small movies out there, statistically there must be some that become blockbusters.

• one can analyze all we can about why a small movie hit whereas another gem, better directed/shot/acted/written, failed to gain any traction. but essentially it is an ice-cube problem. imagine an ice-cube on your desk. one can easily deduce what happens an hour later (in room temp). the problem is, when you only see a small puddle on your desk (the result). so, the cause - what was the shape of the ice? cube? triangular? or, did someone just accidentally spill water? the problem is there are a million reasons and it is simply impossible to reverse engineer.

i know it sounds a bit defeatist that everything is up to luck (what about skill? hard work? talent?), but it's still food for thought... and the case for it is actually pretty strong, especially above some reasonable baseline of skill/hardwork/talent.

anyway, although this sounds a bit academic, i found this a fascinating read. i'm a nerd at heart!!