In February 2020, the COVID-19 case numbers refreshed every day. The first thing I did every morning was open the WHO statistics page to see how much the numbers had jumped.
At that point, global cases were somewhere in the tens of thousands. I looked at the curve, and a question automatically popped into my head: when would it break one hundred thousand? When would deaths break five thousand?
This wasn’t anxiety—okay, there was a bit of anxiety. But more than that, it was a kind of conditioned reflex. A way of thinking I’d developed during my years trading financial instruments.
Using Questions to Rehearse the Worst-Case Scenario
Back when I was trading, I did one thing every day before the market opened: I asked myself a series of questions.
What might today’s price movement look like? If it suddenly plunged 3%, what would I do? If it suddenly spiked, what would happen to my positions? What kind of movement would be “completely beyond expectation” for me? If that kind of movement occurred, how much would my current positions lose me?
The purpose of these questions wasn’t prediction—prediction is impossible. Their purpose was rehearsal.
The difference between prediction and rehearsal is enormous. Prediction says, “I think it’ll go up,” and then places a bet. Rehearsal says, “If it falls, rises, or stays flat, here’s what I’ll do in each case,” and then builds a corresponding plan.
Prediction requires you to be right in order to survive; rehearsal ensures you won’t die even when you’re wrong.
This habit later extended from trading into every aspect of my life. When I saw the pandemic numbers jumping, I didn’t think, “It probably won’t get too bad”—I thought, “If it gets worse than everyone expects, what will I do?”
The Thing-in-Itself Is Unknowable
Beneath this habit of thinking lies a philosophical foundation.
Kant proposed a concept: the “thing-in-itself” (Ding an sich) is unknowable. What we can know is always only the phenomenon, never the thing itself.
Karl Popper brought this concept into the philosophy of science and developed falsificationism. His central claim was this: a scientific theory can never be “verified,” only “falsified.” Observing ten thousand white swans cannot prove “all swans are white.” But you only need to see one black swan to falsify the proposition.
This logic had a profound impact on me.
Because it means: your past experience can never guarantee the future. Trading for ten years with consistently good performance doesn’t mean you truly understand the market. It only means you haven’t yet encountered that black swan.
The capital markets are vaster than we imagine. So is the world. The data we collect is only the tip of the iceberg, our eyes are full of bias, and the way we interpret information is full of blind spots.
Every day, we are blind men feeling an elephant. The only difference is this: some people know they’re feeling an elephant, while others believe they’ve seen the whole picture.
Certainty Is Poison
In the market, the most dangerous mindset is not fear, but certainty.
Fear makes you cautious, makes you leave yourself an escape route. But certainty makes you stake all your chips in one direction, and then, at the moment the black swan appears, you’re doomed beyond redemption.
I’ve seen too many cases like this. A trader wins for twelve straight months and begins to feel he’s grasped the market’s patterns. Then in the thirteenth month, the market makes a move he “never imagined possible,” and he loses a year’s worth of profits in a single month.
The problem isn’t the move itself—the move wasn’t especially extreme. The problem is the mindset: because of twelve months of success, he stopped asking, “What if I’m wrong?”
This is the same logic I discussed in “The Overlooked Civilizational Metric: The Risk Philosophy of Replacing ‘Goals’ with ‘Systems’”: you can’t look only at returns; you must also look at risk. A strategy with a 30% annualized return that could blow up your account is inferior to a system with a 10% annualized return that’s rock solid.
The core of falsificationist thinking is this: always assume you might be wrong, and then be prepared for “what to do when you are.”
What the Pandemic Taught Us
COVID-19 was a falsifying event on a global scale.
It falsified the assumption that “globalization brings only benefits.” It falsified the confidence that “the public health systems of developed nations can handle anything.” It falsified the expectation that “the economy will grow steadily and continuously.” The belief that large-scale lockdowns were impossible in modern society was overturned along with the rest.
In the early stages of the outbreak, the reaction of many people (including many experts) was: “It probably won’t get too bad.” This judgment wasn’t based on analysis but on comfort—admitting “it could get very bad” would bring too much uncertainty, and the human brain dislikes uncertainty.
But falsificationist thinking demands the opposite: when everyone is saying “it probably won’t get too bad,” you ask yourself, “If it really does get bad, am I prepared?”
In the early stages of the pandemic, I did a few things: I cut non-essential cash spending, confirmed my company’s remote-work capabilities, and assessed how long I could survive under the worst-case scenario. At the time, these actions looked like “overreaction.” Three months later, many companies and individuals who hadn’t made such preparations found themselves in an extremely passive position.
It wasn’t because I was smarter than others, but because falsificationist thinking had made me habitually ask, “What if the worst-case scenario comes true?”—rather than assuming it wouldn’t.
Coexisting with Uncertainty
Finally, I want to discuss a more fundamental question.
Our education, our culture, our society—all of them teach us to pursue “certainty.” Get into a good school, find a stable job, buy a house, save for retirement—every step is an attempt to eliminate future uncertainty.
But falsificationism tells you a cruel truth: uncertainty cannot be eliminated. What you can do is not eliminate it, but learn to coexist with it.
Coexisting with uncertainty means several things. Acknowledging that you don’t know more than you do. Maintaining humility about your own judgments, always ready to be falsified. Building redundancy—not putting all your eggs in one basket, not building all your plans on the assumption that “everything will go smoothly.” Continually questioning—not in order to find answers, but in order to stay alert.
So it is in the market. So it is in life. So it is in the pandemic. So it is wherever black swans roam.
Losing money is losing money. Diplomas, connections, family background—they’re useless before the market. They’re useless before the black swan too. The only thing that’s useful is having already asked yourself, before it appeared: “If it comes, can I hold on?”
What you can’t stop, learn to coexist with. And the starting point of coexistence is admitting: every day, we are blind men feeling an elephant. Knowing this is not weakness. It is the only rational posture.
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