Black Swans and white tablets

Black Swans and white tablets

The Black Swan, a metaphor for highly improbable, high impact events, warns us to understand the limits of our predictions and expect the “unknown unknowns” everywhere, from war to science and industry. From the earliest stages of discovery to post-marketing events, we argue that fundamentally the structure of pharmaceutical industry is driven by and impacted by both positive and negative Black...

Beware of black swans and do not ignore white ones?

Uncertainty pervades most aspects of life. From selecting a new technology to choosing a career, decision makers often ignore the outcomes of their decisions. In the last decade a new paradigm has emerged in behavioral decision research in which decisions are " experienced " rather than " described " , as in standard decision theory. The dominant finding from studies using the experience-based ...

Yield of Black Swans

h EXCEPT FOR GETTING your chip to market on time, optimizing yield is perhaps the most important thing we can do to improve IC profitability. We address this problem in several ways: design for manufacturability (DFM) through layout rules, process control, and increasingly clean cleanrooms. In an ideal world, this would solve our yield problems. We know it doesn’t, so we build a diagnostic capa...

Waiting for medicine's black swans.

Free Will, Black Swans and Addiction

The current dominant perspective on addiction as a brain disease has been challenged recently by Marc Lewis, who argued that the brain-changes related to addiction are similar to everyday changes of the brain. From this alternative perspective, addictions are bad habits that can be broken, provided that people are motivated to change. In that case, autonomous choice or "free will" can overcome ...