Pandemics are Never Random, Thanks to Benoit Mandelbrot
How do we make sense of the uncertainty around us?
A pandemic on this scale is never an accident. It is meant to happen, we just don’t know when.
The pain of death for the fallen victims of the coronavirus is excruciating. Not to mention the hole it left in the hearts of their bereaved families and friends. From a daughter who lost a medical frontliner mom, to a parent who was never allowed to visit his son in the COVID-19 ward, only to come back as ashes inside the urn. This black swan of an event is utterly devastating. No matter how hard I carefully try to rephrase my words and write a lighter statement, it won’t be enough. But a pandemic on this scale is never an accident. It is meant to happen. We just don’t know when.
One night, while I was reading The Black Swan by Nassim Taleb, I stumbled upon a radical concept I couldn’t get out of my head. It’s about the geometry of irregular shapes, which is used to understand the world’s unpredictable events. In my mind, I asked, “how on earth could someone create a formula that can produce infinite geometrical shapes in a finite space?” In layman’s term, imagine zooming in an Instagram image infinitely many times, and yet that image never runs out of shapes…
