Jul
03
There are two categories that events/actions fall in: scalable and nonscalable. Whether it is the small town musician before the advent of the sound recording, or the local storyteller before the advent of the printing press – scalability destroys the notion of an equal share. A small number of people have a disproportionate amount of power and influence.
The nonscalable economy can only produce “more” with more time, while the scalable economy can produce “more” with the click of a button. The author does not have to rewrite his or her novel every time a copy is sold – the investment up front is on hopes of a larger payoff in the end. The scalable economy is therefore quite succeptible to the Black Swan – it is based on the notion that the future is predictable. This is true until an event occurs outside the bell curve – disturbing the normative condition.
Jul
02
“History is opaque. You see what comes out, not the script tat produces the events, the generator of history… The human mind suffers from three ailments as it comes in contact with history, what I call the triplet of opacity… They are [1] the illusion of understanding… the retrospective distortion… the overvaluation of factual information and the handicap of authoritative and learned people…”
After a catastrophic event occurs we tend to compartmentalize a select group of “facts” – looking to the simple solution. Many scholars have looked back on the events leading up to World War II to demonstrate how “we” knew it was coming. However, the journal of William Shirer proved the opposite – “the diary purported to describe the events as they were taking place, not after.” the question must be asked: What is more respectful of the “truth”, the diary of events or reflections on those events?
“Categorizing is necessary for humans, but it becomes pathological when the category is seen as definitive, preventing people from considering the fuzziness of boundaries, let alone revising their categories.”
Jul
01
The concept of a Black Swan was something that was deemed impossible until one was discovered. It’s what we don’t know that is worth studying – events that deviate from the norm. To learn we have to look at the information that exists outside the bell curve.
“The central idea of this book concerns our blindness with respect to randomness… Why does reading the newspaper actually decrease your knowledge of the world? What you know cannot really hurt you.”
Learning from the past is not the solution – the Maginot Line shows how the failure to look outside the norm can prove disastrous. Society tends to reward the status quo – forward thinking is only supported if there are instant financial rewards. Think about a legislator that wanted to make all cockpit doors locked and bullet-proof on September 10th, 2001 – he;d be laughed out of office. How do we create a system that applauds the long view?
“Platonicity… is our tendency to mistake the map for the territory, to focus on the pure and well-defined ‘forms,’ whether objects, like triangles, or social motions, like utopias, even nationalities.”
Once abstraction has become our primary, and sometimes only, method of thinking the messier [and more telling] parts of relationships often remain unnoticed.
“The platonic fold is the explosive boundary where the Platonic mind-set enters in contact with messy reality, where the gap between what you know and what you think you know becomes dangerously wide. It is here that the Black Swan is produced.”
In disciplines that deal primarily in the abstract [read academia], checks and balances tend to come form those that share the same beliefs – turning scholarly pursuits into ego-boosting conversations. External checks from the opposite end of the table can be the most fruitful and enlightening. The quest for knowledge is not the problem, it’s the belief we’ve attained it that’s the danger.