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Comment by bherms | Hacker News Reader

Black Swan - Nassim Taleb

http://www.amazon.com/The-Black-Swan-Improbable-Robustness/d...

Anyone who played the web version (as I did) knew it was special. Now not all special games become hits on mobile, but it's not actually all that surprising.

Wow, because random apps have never shot to the top of the listings! Gee whillikers, that sure was an unpredictable black swan, totally outside previous reference classes!

I see what he's saying. Maybe not "black swan", but it's pretty crazy. A Dark Room reminds me of a BBS door game from the late 80's. It blows my mind that this became the #1 app.

Now, if it was Cookie Clicker (basically the same formula) I wouldn't be surprised - that actually has nice graphics, a broad appeal, lots of dark humor.

This is a great game (the web version, at least) but not at all something I'd expect to go mainstream.

Taleb talks about books/movies/etc becoming successes with little to no predictability. Games fall into this category. Hard to tell which games will become runaway successes, especially from small studios. But you know, it's cool, you can just be a dick about it instead.

> Taleb talks about books/movies/etc becoming successes with little to no predictability

No, Taleb loves to sophistically equivocate between meanings of 'black swan' to neutralize any criticism. Did a perfectly ordinary phenomenon in network dynamics and winner-take-all scenarios happen? Taleb takes this as an example. Does someone point out that this is consistent with all past experience and non-power-law distributions like log-normals? Oh, suddenly, he means black swans are totally unpredictable things like 9/11!

Well, he actually calls things relating to those areas mentioned (arts, etc) as grey swans because they do happen, but you can't really predict which of the multitude of things coming out will become the next runaway success. Either way, seems to be a sore spot for you. Chill out.

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