I have the greatest book EVER

[Triple Zero]

Biases in Social Judgment

Design Flaws or Design Features?

Humans appear to fail miserably when it comes to rational decision making.
They ignore base rates when estimating probabilities, commit the sunk
cost fallacy, are biased toward confirming their theories, are naively optimistic,
take undue credit for lucky accomplishments, and fail to recognize
their self-inflicted failures. Moreover, they overestimate the number of others
who share their beliefs, demonstrate the hindsight bias, have a poor conception
of chance, perceive illusory relationships between noncontingent
events, and have an exaggerated sense of control. Failures at rationality
do not end there. Humans use external appearances as an erroneous
gauge of internal character, falsely believe that their own desirable qualities
are unique, can be induced to remember events that never occurred,
and systematically misperceive the intentions of the opposite sex (for reviews,
see Fiske & Taylor, 1991; Kahneman, Slovic, & Tversky, 1982; and
Nisbett and Ross, 1980; for cross-sex misperceptions of intentions, see
Haselton & Buss, 2000). These documented phenomena have led to the
widespread conclusion that our cognitive machinery contains deep defects
in design.

Design Flaws or Design Features?

Kahneman and Tversky.. that's the guys Nicolas Nasim Taleb misquoted.

Taleb's answer to the question seems to be "both". Design features cause simplifying the world was a tremendous evolutionary advantage when we were still cavemen and the world was simple. Design flaws because it's often horribly incorrect in today's fast-moving world.

Makes me wonder, just because it's a good idea to doubt everything. Was the world really that much more simple when we were cavemen? And when exactly, kind of, was this?

Can i explain it like this: the assumption is that our environment has shifted from being mostly dominated by bell-curves to being mostly dominated by exponential probability distributions and other unpredictabilities (apart from that, Taleb also points out some other failures in human  judgements that would also work against us in bell-curve dominated environments. it's probably important to keep that distinction in mind).
Now, the reason given for this shift, appears to be information. Discrete, combinatorial information, in fact. Where at first we just had DNA doing discrete combinatorics, mostly outside of our control (not that it matters), creating complexity, we developed spoken language, then written language and finally automatic language (computers). And a whole bunch of other things (like book-printing, recording sound and art, video etc) but the cause of the new, wild, complexity all seems to boil down to information and the increasing ease of reproduction of it. Taleb mentions this subject shortly (i'm at page 165 now), but i think it's worthwile to consider this for a moment.

Is there perhaps a connection between current issues about copyrights and intellectual property (stifling the ease of reproduction of information) and the increase in complexity of our environment if this wouldn't be the case?
Or is it more like a coincidence and we should be happy it is like it is, otherwise things would have gone really wild by now?

Another observation. So it seems like we've evolved our environment faster than our genes/bodies/minds can keep up with? Why is this so? Because, while humans haven't really physically evolved much lately, in the field of information-processing we have in fact evolved quite a bit. Language-use has definitely increased our brain-capacity, for instance. And it wouldn't surprise me if that was the whole issue that started off this rise/race to complexity in the first place.
Now, this reminds me of the "blind spot" in the eye. I assume you know the story, we somehow evolved our eyes backwards or something, with the nerve endings at the front of the retina, finally resulting in a blind spot where all the nerves come together (i admit this is not an entirely accurate picture, but you get the idea), but by the time our eyes were advanced enough for this to be a problem, things were too complicated to easily reverse it, for a more optimal eye (while some sort of squid or octopus has evolved its eyes in a kind of separate strain from ours, and by chance got it right the first time, so they dont have this blind spot).
Now, think "blind spot". Remember how Taleb keeps talking about "Black Swan blindness" ? Is this perhaps a similar phenomenon, where we evolved our information-processing abilities somehow backwards, not quite adapting to "Extremistan", and by now our brains are so advanced that we can't really reverse the process anymore? Is that why we are (seem to be) blind to these extreme unpredictable events, because we lack the information processing organs (brains) to deal with them?

[LMNO]

I'm not sure I can address everything, but:

Perhaps not just information, but the notion of the abstract.  The ability to separate ideas about the environment from the environment itself seems to be a root cause.  In this way, we create extremistan in our heads, which then translates into the environment.

[Triple Zero]

well, it's just terminology, but one property of information is that it can be pretty much replicated indefinitely at no or nearly any extra cost. while "the abstract" doesn't necessarily have this property (although you could argue that, in some way it does, in which case it's just terminology and definitions).

because, to me it seems that the ability for meaningful things to be replicated indefinitely at no extra cost, is what turned the whole system upside-down.

i have made pretty much the same observation in one of our discussions about copyright issues, if you'll recall. not that i wanna go there again but it is an example of how this is a "problem" that will not go away and needs to be addressed in some way, even though, apparently people like to build structures/rules that allow them to ignore this property. In that case, intellectual property laws. But in Taleb's case it's Black Swan blindness. maybe the latter is a generalized view of the former?

[Triple Zero]

A focus on the exceptions that prove the rule By Benoit Mandelbrot and Nassim Taleb

found this article linked on the wikipedia page of mr Mandelbrot. it pretty much explains the basic ideas of the Black Swan and/or Fooled by Randomness, so if you have already read one of those it may be a bit of a rehash, on the other hand, if you haven't, it serves as a nice short explanation.

btw, Cain, you mentioned you have read Fooled by Randomness recently? what did you think of it, especially compared to the Black Swan?
As I said before, i'm of the opinion that they talk about pretty much the same subject, except that I think Fooled by Randomness is a bit more clear and practical about it.

[Cain]

I haven't finished it yet, but I would have to agree.  I'm on Chapter 4, so take that as you will.  I still enjoy the philosophical digressions of Black Swan, but I believe it would be best considered supplementary/advanced detail for Fooled by Randomness.

Speaking of which, I had an idea.  I was going to mention this in Think for Yourself, but this this topic is here... On the BIP Wiki, I've set aside a page called The Black Swan Foundation.  The idea is to take certain fallacies and themes from the books (such as the Ludic Fallacy, Survivor Bias etc) and document examples of this from the media.  It could be YouTube videos, news reports, opinion articles, scientific papers...even fictional examples, should you come across one.

The idea being to train our minds to look for such things, to a degree, and see how useful and helpful it actually is.

[Cainad (dec.)]

Speaking of which, I had an idea.  I was going to mention this in Think for Yourself, but this this topic is here... On the BIP Wiki, I've set aside a page called The Black Swan Foundation.  The idea is to take certain fallacies and themes from the books (such as the Ludic Fallacy, Survivor Bias etc) and document examples of this from the media.  It could be YouTube videos, news reports, opinion articles, scientific papers...even fictional examples, should you come across one.

The idea being to train our minds to look for such things, to a degree, and see how useful and helpful it actually is.

Is there a term for believing in anything that can be explained or demonstrated by analogy or metaphor?

Cainad,
Has a fucking vendetta against C.S. Lewis's Mere Christianity

[Triple Zero]

Speaking of which, I had an idea.  I was going to mention this in Think for Yourself, but this this topic is here... On the BIP Wiki, I've set aside a page called The Black Swan Foundation.  The idea is to take certain fallacies and themes from the books (such as the Ludic Fallacy, Survivor Bias etc) and document examples of this from the media.  It could be YouTube videos, news reports, opinion articles, scientific papers...even fictional examples, should you come across one.

The idea being to train our minds to look for such things, to a degree, and see how useful and helpful it actually is.

i like this idea! i put some stuff there, to get it started a bit:
http://www.poee.co.uk/bip/index.php?title=Black_Swan_Foundation

btw it would be nice if we could get Syn to meddle a bit with the wiki/domain settings so that the links will be http://www.blackironprison.com/Black_Swan_Foundation