First Blog

  Everyone seems to think this pandemic will make big changes, especially in education. Not so. In education, most students need in person teaching*, partly because they can't read, and can't think, and can't focus, and can't evaluate. In business, those dreaming of an at-home career will be passed over for advancement. In social life, those dreaming of chat rooms will be chatting with themselves. A life of hiding will distort humanity in no good way I can think of. People want to get back to their lives, the lives they liked. People are outrageously social. * I can speak with authority as I've taught 20 years online courses.

We all expect Black Swans in our lives; we just don't know what they will be. This is how we survive. We now even write about them, predict them, and warn about them. But they are unlimited in magnitude, and thus we cannot regress events to any mean. Tricky, at least that what the Coronavirus tells me. Consider. This virus exploded upon the earth, claiming many lives and economic disaster.   It now seems to linger, just hanging about like some serpent waiting to strike.   Staying alert, we can control it a bit, but by nature modern humans are not alert. They take chances; they expect good outcomes; they feel mostly invulnerable. Moreover, staying alert would cause changes in all our lives we don’t want. With no vaccine forthcoming and with the virus not mutating to a harmless relative, we may have trouble ahead. Hopefully, this problem will be solved, but the next Black Swan is on the way, the nature of which we know not, from where we know not, and delivered how we k

Nowadays we hear a lot about whether the COVID-19 is an actual BLACK SWAN event.   This means the Coronavirus is actually and totally unexpected, novel, and unpredictable. ( Taleb, Nassim Nicholas (2010) [2007].  The Black Swan: the impact of the highly improbable  (2nd ed.). London: Penguin.  ISBN   978-0-14103459-1 . ) In fact, every year we have a devastating virus attack, the flu.   It usually claims tens of thousands of lives. This year is no different. Yet, all we are told to get a flu shot.   That’s it! This year we have COVID-19, a rather contagious virus not well understood.   It seems to claim more lives of the aged than for younger citizens. It’s scary.   It became more scary when China basically shut down an entire province of multiple millions.   People were dying all over the place. But it is not too scary because we’ve had similar deadly viruses attack us in past years.   (SARS, MERS, etc) This makes our current virus as a surprise but not unexpected.   Another