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Posted by info on 08:23
How do you investigate hypotheses? Do you seek to confirm your theory -
looking for white swans? Or do you try to find black swans? I was
startled at how hard it was for people to investigate number sets that
didn't follow their hypotheses, even when their method wasn't getting
them anywhere.
In the video I say "when people came to
Australia..." by which I meant, "when Europeans who believed all swans
were white came to Australia..." I did not mean any offence to
Indigenous Australians who were already in Australia at that time.
Please accept my apologies for the poor phrasing if you were offended by
it.
This video was inspired by The Black Swan by Nassim Taleb and filmed by my mum. Thanks mum!
Partly
my motivation came from responses to my Facebook videos - social media
marketers saying 'Facebook ads have worked for me so there can't be fake
likes.' Just because you have only seen white swans, doesn't mean there
are no black ones. And in fact marketers are only looking for white
swans. They think it was invalid of me to make the fake Virtual Cat
page: 'well of course if it's a low quality page you're going to get low
quality likes.' But my point is this is black swan bait, something they
would never make because their theory is confident in the exclusive
existence of white swans.