Tag Archives: Black Swan

Spiral Swan Theory

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An earlier version of this work appeared in January and February 2022 on Medium. Below is the link to the fully developed concept of Spiral Swan Theory with endnotes.

Here’s the Abstract from the paper. Please feel free to download and give proper citation to my work should you decide to use it.

ABSTRACT

In today’s global complexity the intelligence that classifies risk into different categories comes from a very thin layer of human values that leaves out much of the psychosocial structures that have defined the evolution of the mind. This paper focuses on the most popular classifications of risk as described by the popular Black Swan theory and offers a wider view on the values the incase today’s risk models and their limitations. It takes statistical modeling out of its sterile and often reductionist nature and places it into the totality of value systems that define our human journey. Using the Spiral Dynamics and MEMEnomics models, this paper demonstrates how systemic risk becomes less systemic and a lot more predictable when there is a functional balance between all the known stages of human development. Using the totality of value systems from both models this paper reclassifies the rare Black Swan into the knowable Orange Swan once the Black Swan is observed from a higher level of psychosocial development. It also sets forth the narrative on how the appearance of Orange Swans in perpetuity contributes to the Dead Swan phenomenon, a rare event that rewards systemic risk that has historically ended in catastrophe. This paper puts forth the hypothesis that we’ve been on the road to a Dead Swan for over a decade. Click here to view or download the full paper.

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Financial Democratization and The New Black Swan

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There will come a time when all the contrarians in the financial sector stop warning about any impending economic disasters. They don’t understand that no markets of any kind will ever crash again. How stupid you stupid Boomer. Can’t you see that my App is worth more than the entire industry you worked your whole life in. You have no way of understanding how we geniuses work. Nothing will ever crash. Not housing, not crypto, not green energy stocks. We can even resurrect the dead like Game Stop and AMC stocks. We are the new Gods, Okay Boomer?

When all you’ve known in life, are bubble economies that haven’t popped when they were supposed to, you begin to think you’re a genius. Forget the fact that governments and central banks have been propping up your naivetĂ© by throwing money into the economy at 7-10 times the normal money supply that make you think you’re infallible. The Bitcoin cult will gouge your eyes out if you speak of its highly speculative nature. After you’re blinded, they’ll send their digital henchmen to tell their investment community not to pay attention to the Boomer behind the curtain and to double down on their investment because it will be going up by at least another 30,000% in just a few short months.

That’s right. Keep thinking that none of it will crash, at least not in the traditional ways they continue to warm us about. We have been in this uncharted territory for years and the gaslighting by the new e-bulls of this non-economy is now global, systemic and complete. The wolf of Wall Street is now the hyena of Main Street. It hides behind benevolent names like Robin Hood while it seeks a multi-Billion-dollar IPO only to throw the naive millennial investor back to the wolves after it squeezes its last breath.

Welcome to the Digital economy driven by a very shallow expression of democratization of knowledge and resources. The sleazy salesmen, is now replaced by the coder and a hapless generation of speculators who have no basic understanding of economics, business cycles and stock valuations. They have liberated themselves from that stupidity and accountability that is often summed up in two words: Okay Boomer!

Well, this boomer is calling it! We are approaching a Black Swan event the likes of which we haven’t seen since the 1930’s. It won’t be one sector that crashes. It will be systemic reset of global monetary and financial systems triggered by the need to restore sanity. Yes, that! Sanity that ties the value of things to a measure, any measure that pierces the veil of unbridled speculation that has gaslighted the entire world

 

 

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The Tragedy of the West: Our Obsession with Quantification

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The recent rise of protectionism and nationalism in the Western World has presented progressive thought leaders with one of the greatest challenges in almost a century. We continue to struggle to make sense out of the current reversal in our journey towards human progress. And, sadly (or arrogantly), we continue to shape our views and our emotional well being  through the same lenses and by the same metrics that never saw this coming. What has been left out of the debate, and in my opinion, is the main  contributing factor to our continued anguish, is that we’ve forgotten how fragile our western construct of thought has been. Or, how vulnerable it is to a Black Swan event that can shake our faith in the very foundation of what we believe.
In the value systems framework, the current Western center of gravity for cultural values is associated directly with 4th and 5th levels of psycho-social development. This modern expression began after the Spanish Inquisition. The values of this era continue to shape Western culture today and are about the macro-memetics of the 4th level value system.  They’re about building the right institutions and excluding the wrong ones and other random un-quantifiable cultural expressions that fall into the dark side of this black-or-white dichotomy.  It is that dark side that in our subconscious that could no longer be repressed that is now coming to the surface.
With the Industrial Revolution and the Age of Enlightenment came the macro-memetics of the 5th level system. This stage of psycho-social development  seeks to uncover the secrets of the universe through quantification, research and mathematical analysis. It excludes what is not rationally quantifiable and measurable, and everything that fell outside the processing capacities of the grey matter between our ears. This also became repressed in our subconscious giving us further confidence that the dark side of conscious actions mattered not.  This too is now coming to the surface.
Together these two levels of development gave us the wonders of Western Civilization. They gave us Measurement: Time, Space and Mathematics. They gave us the visual arts, music, and painting. They gave us business and bureaucracy, science, modern medicine  and technologies that have  become indispensable to our modern, efficient and  hectic lives.   But all this came at a cost. We seem to have forgotten what it is to be human outside the quantifiable world.
Jung-fate
The perfect description of this world comes from one of my favorite writers in the piece below. Ironically it’s called the “Perfect World”. Kahlil Gibran supposedly wrote this after he was invited to recite some of his poetry at Harvard University, the most refined institution  that upholds the virtues of the 4th and 5th level systems.  After his recital he was humiliated and ridiculed for using a style called “free verse”, something that fell outside the quantifiable measure of Harvard at the time.
As you read this and consider the evolution of poetry over the last 100 years,  do what I did. Look within you to see if it’s not those same measures that have arrested our evolution and closed us off in our own safe world. A world that makes darkness out of the immeasurable, the un-quantifiable and the non-scientific. Maybe you’d add the spiritual and the metaphysical to all that defies measurement.
Gibran-Western Measure

“The Perfect World”

By Kahlil Gibran 

God of lost souls, thou who are lost amongst the gods, hear me:
Gentle Destiny that watchest over us, mad, wandering spirits, hear me: I dwell in the midst of a perfect race, I the most imperfect.
I, a human chaos, a nebula of confused elements, I move amongst finished worlds—peoples of complete laws and pure order, whose thoughts are assorted, whose dreams are arranged, and whose visions are enrolled and registered.
Their virtues, O God, are measured, their sins are weighed, and even the countless things that pass in the dim twilight of neither sin nor virtue are recorded and catalogued.
Here days and night are divided into seasons of conduct and governed by rules of blameless accuracy.

To eat, to drink, to sleep, to cover one’s nudity, and then to be weary in due time.

To work, to play, to sing, to dance, and then to lie still when the clock strikes the hour.

To think thus, to feel thus much, and then to cease thinking and feeling when a certain star rises above yonder horizon.

To rob a neighbour with a smile, to bestow gifts with a graceful wave of the hand, to praise prudently, to blame cautiously, to destroy a sound with a word, to burn a body with a breath, and then to wash the hands when the day’s work is done.

To love according to an established order, to entertain one’s best self in a preconceived manner, to worship the gods becomingly, to intrigue the devils artfully—and then to forget all as though memory were dead.

To fancy with a motive, to contemplate with consideration, to be happy sweetly, to suffer nobly—and then to empty the cup so that tomorrow may fill it again.

All these things, O God, are conceived with forethought, born with determination, nursed with exactness, governed by rules, directed by reason, and then slain and buried after a prescribed method. And even their silent graves that lie within the human soul are marked and numbered.

It is a perfect world, a world of consummate excellence, a world of supreme wonders, the ripest fruit in God’s garden, the master-thought of the universe.

But why should I be here, O God, I a green seed of unfulfilled passion, a mad tempest that seeketh neither east nor west, a bewildered fragment from a burnt planet?

Why am I here, O God of lost souls, thou who art lost amongst the gods?

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