Do not confuse your Black Swans. One is a swashbuckling 1932 novel about pirates – which, come to think of it, may not be without educational value to entrepreneurs. The other is a fashionable text on uncertainty by Professor Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

Professor Taleb must be a seriously clever chap, because he has managed to combine the hitherto diametrically opposed disciplines of epistemology and high finance.

Epistemology, the theory of knowledge, is hard core philosophy. As a rule, entrepreneurs are well advised to stay clear of it – especially the strong stuff like Rene Descartes. Speaking from personal experience, it is hard to focus on your business when you start doubting your own existence.

Yet the Prof uses this most esoteric branch of philosophy to make a practical point. With far more eloquence and learning than we can muster in a short blog post, he concludes that it is human nature to try to invest uncertain events with an artificial certainty, so it is not surprising that we are surprised when the unexpected happens – as it always does.

We could have told him that.

Blue chip shareholders rely on the artificial certainty of predictable rates of return, but entrepreneurs look to make a living where the big boys are afraid to go. We hope that it is the unorthodox, the unexpected, and the unpredictable that will make our fortunes.

Yet there is a difference between the unpredictable and the irrational.

Those who fail to predict something like to claim it was unpredictable – but in most cases that something was predictable because someone else predicted it. Indeed most of the examples of the unpredictable cited by Prof T himself were in fact widely predicted.

There is a mountain of pre-1914 literature predicting the Great War and there are numerous on-the-record warnings of a major terror attack on the USA predating 11 September, 2001. As for the current recession, most of the small business sector was talking not about “if” but about “when” – the proof can be found in our podcasts, among many other places.

Yet most of the major players were caught with their pants down by these predictable – and predicted – events. Their craving for artificial certainty made them dependent on highly paid “experts”, who themselves had a vested interest in feeding that artificial certainty. Between them they created a vicious circle of irrationality.

So the wise entrepreneur will react to the uncertainties of an uncertain world not by gambling recklessly on long shots, but by becoming more open minded, abandoning orthodoxies and artificial certainties, in order to become better at prediction than the close-minded “experts” who keep getting it wrong.