Principia Discordia

Go out and buy "Black Swan" by Naseem Taleb.

Right now.

No excuses.

A book that explains how "black swans" (near-unpredictable events that forever alter the fields they are involved in) develop and unfold.  For example, 9/11 was a black swan.  It covers why unpredictability will always be the primary motivator of world events and how ineffectual the majority of social sciences are at coming to terms with this.  It includes a lot of psychology and philosophy, too.

Probably about the most Discordian book I have seen since the PD.  It encapsulates many of the ideas of creative disorder and the BIP perfectly.

Quote from: Cain on August 12, 2007, 05:14:15 PM
Go out and buy "Black Swan" by Naseem Taleb.

Right now.

No excuses.

A book that explains how "black swans" (near-unpredictable events that forever alter the fields they are involved in) develop and unfold.  For example, 9/11 was a black swan.  It covers why unpredictability will always be the primary motivator of world events and how ineffectual the majority of social sciences are at coming to terms with this.  It includes a lot of psychology and philosophy, too.

Probably about the most Discordian book I have seen since the PD.  It encapsulates many of the ideas of creative disorder and the BIP perfectly.

Thanks for the tip, Cain. I've seen this book and was kind of tempted by it. I'll shift it from the 'maybe' to 'purchase' category.

I looked for it via my local bookstore, but came up empty...
I may have to get it via when i make my next amazon order the begining of next month....
also his older book "Fooled By Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets" actually seems much more interesting then the title suggests, and got good reader reviews

Just starting in on it and Cain does not overstate.  First thing I've read in awhile that's intersting, and has started me thinking on a 6 AM train. 
I'm already having allot of fun with the contrasting to Plato's Forms (still in the prologue). 
I need to get out of work so I can read / discuss this more.

(http://i209.photobucket.com/albums/bb163/wompcabal/cainbookclub.jpg)

Alright Cain I'm ordering it.
But if you want me to continue doing your nefarious bidding I'm going to need some benefits. Like a dental plan or something.

Richter was raving about this book today.

I was reading the book in my break today.  The man is a natural born Discordian saint.

I'm going to email him, once I;ve finished it.

I'll have to gank it from Richter when he's done then.

Ordered. Looks like a fascinating book, and I can't wait to dive in.

I am now on part 2, about 150ish pages in, and this book is really amazing. It's incredibly densely packed with goodness, and really, really great. I've been taking it slowly to really absorb all the info he's working in to each part, chapter and section since it's so dense with quality. Well worth taking the time to really dig into.

I really have to echo Cain's statements in that it echoes a lot of what we've worked around and with in both the BIP and the creative disorder concepts.

Read it as soon as you can - you won't be sorry.

Looked it up on Amazon, and looks like another to add to my list of things to read. I'm going to have to see if I can find it at the library since, although it's relatively new, my library does get in some new works and I'm a bit strapped for cash at the time.

Soon as I can get my hands on it though, I'll be giving it a read.

I ordered this, Syn's hardcover Principia, and pre-ordered the Perry Bible Fellowship book.

In 3-5 days I will be illuminated.

PBF has a BOOK!?!?

Must ... get ... awesomeness ...

Funny, I just made a book order an hour ago for the first time in months... I sent them an email to add this book now, so with any luck it'll be in my hands later this week.

My copy just arrived last night. I've had time to devour the prologue and the first 17 pages. You're right Cain, this is prime Discordian material and thanks for the tip.

Is the prologue hosted online anywhere? If not, I'd be happy to scan it and post as PDF

Please do scan and present as pee dee eff.

I was just in the two bookstores that could have had it, in the first the offered me Pope's 100% instead and in the other they asked if I'd read silent spring. :? :?  :|

Hmm, thats going to be tricky, without a scanner.

Anyone else got the goods?

Damn, I want this book.

http://www.cwyohba.org/noexit/Black%20Swan%20Prologue.pdf

there ya go!

I kind of fucked up the scanning somehow
to read it, you'll have rotate it 90 degrees. Or print it and turn it 90 degrees manually.

I could probably figure this out but i had a lot of beer at lunch with the lunch cabal today.


My Job > Yuor Job
probably

Quote from: Professor Cramulus on September 28, 2007, 07:15:07 PM
to read it, you'll have rotate it 90 degrees. Or print it and turn it 90 degrees manually.

:lol: that weird phrase just made me smile

also, it reminds me of an idea for a summer project i long forgotten about, where i was going to layout a (amateur) magazine "manually". that is, without help of InDesign, armed with nothing except a printer, scissors, tape, glue and a photocopymachine.

and whiteout.

Thank you for the prologue Professor Cramulus. After reading it, i'm not really interested in reading the full book.  :p  I don't know how to put it without sounding like a snob - it doesn't seem to have anything to say that I haven't already read, learnt or talked about. I don't doubt that there is probably something new to learn about in there, but perhaps I didn't find the prologue very engaging.

Bought the book today, first hardcover book I've bought since I begun studying and if I wasn't headed home this weekend I couldn't have afforded it but it looks nice.

I saw an actual black swan a few weeks ago in Cambridge.
As in the creature, not the unfolding information of an event.

i just wanted to say i got this book from Sinterklaas last weekend, i just finished the introduction (no i didn't read Cram's scan, i generally rather read hardcopy), and it looks like it's going to be an awesome book so far!

apart from a few bits, where he kind of seems to state that actually, nobody can predict anything, ever. which is kind of taking it too far, IMO. but i presume he'll get back to that in the rest of his book.
and the semi-funny tone with phrases like "they also usually wear ties", i'm more interested in what he really has to say.. but i can live with that.

I went  ahead and ordered it...

Added to cart so as not to forget.

Considering parts of it actually validate my degree,  I'm quite fond of it.

your degree = what?

cause my degree will be in Machine Learning and Pattern Recognition, and prediction algorithms and such .. in other words, i have the sinking feeling this book will sorta invalidate my degree.. ;-)

otoh, it'll give me good ammo to tease my professor with.

it'll probably buy me more respect than contesting his example of astrology being an illustration of the dangers of dimensional reduction (star signs being a good example of arbitrary patterns found in a dataset that has been reduced from 3 to 2 dimensions).

Psychology.  I recall Taleb mentioning the analytic methods of psychology as one of few examples of statistics beign used properly (correlation =/= relation, and probability =/= actuality, for example).  An important point, and a I think lot of the folks who took the classes missed it, (Psych seen as an easy, soft field by some).  I was more into the neuroanatomy, pathology and biochemcial aspects, and there is definetly disciplined, traditional science invovled.
(Gets of soapbox)

I don't think this book would invalidate your own field much at all, depending on how it's gone about.  If anything, the book disects ways in which our own natural pattern recognition leads us to incorrect conclusions in larger scale opperations.  (Makes sense, as we didn't evolve with stock markets.)

Something I read in an English translation of a Japanese novel that summed it up well :
"The World is full of mistake"

It doesnt get very good reviews on www.bookdepository.co.uk .
I feel I should definately buy it now  :p

"This book is bad. You would have more fun trying to have a conversation with a bowl of corn flakes."
Does this appear in the Principia anywhere?

I know it helps validate some of the key arguments in my dissertation.  And make me a complete asshole (according to everyone else) in International Relations. 

Not that this is exceptionally hard.  For example, the main allegedly predictive theory in IR is Neorealism.  Yet it failed to predict the end of the Cold War, which some would say is a pretty big failure of the theory.  Neoliberalism is another one, which has failed to explain the anti-globalization movement and the shift in South America towards left wing populism.  In short, there are all sort of wannabe scientists running around in policy circles, taking their talking points from theories which only bear somewhat of a resemblance to reality.

This sorta vaguely ties into something I was reading while on the bus to work this morning--Murray Rothbard's Making Economic Sense. Not very Discordian, I know, but he had this essay in there that he wrote back in the early 1980s. In it he talked about how the entire statistics profession was undergoing a radical transformation at the time because there was finally a refutation of the "normal curve"---refuted by "artificial data sets" generated by computers. Now that struck me as Discordian.

reading further into this book, i already commented on Taleb's tendency for "funny" remarks, but it seems that this guy isn't really going to stop making it very very hard to take him serious, is he?

Quote from: mr TalebLet's play the following thought experiment. Assume that you round up a thousand people randomly selected from the general population and have them stand next to one another in a stadium. You can even include Frenchmen (but please, not too many out of consideration for the others in the group), ...

c'mon is he for real? talking about such interesting subject matter, and at the same time pissing me off with such dumb "funny" remarks.

makes it harder for me not to instantly disagree with whatever else he has to say, bringing me to the following:

QuoteMatters that seem to belong to Mediocristan: height, weight, [ list of random variables and phenomena with--or based on--a Normal distribution].
Matters that seem to belong to Extremistan: wealth, income, [ list of random variables and phenomena with an exponential/power law distribution]. The Extremistan list is much longer than the prior one.

what, one is longer than the other? you can think up an infinite list of examples for both classes of random events, so what exactly does he mean when saying that one is longer than the other?

in his list of differences between class 1 (Normal) and class 2 (exponential/power law) events:

Quote[Class 1 / Mediocristan is] more likely to be found in our ancestral environment
[whereas class 2 / Extremistan is] more likely to be found in our modern environment

didn't he just explain that power law distributions have already been going on since evolution started storing information using DNA? and didn't he just say that America specializing in the creative aspect of things, exporting their culture according to class 2, heavily depends on outsourcing the (class 1) grunt work to other countries (and not only developing ones)? so how is either class more likely to be found in either era.

i find this very funny, because the guy seems to have fallen for his own traps:

QuoteThis framework, showing that Exremistan is where most of the Black Swan action is, is only a rough approximation--please do not Platonify [= categorize / polarize] it; don't simplify it beyond what's necessary.

and i'm looking forward to his justification of using the terms "fractal" and "mandelbrotian" (lolwhut), if any :)

another quote, still the same chapter and it's only getting worse:

QuoteExtremistan does not always imply Black Swans. Some events can be rare and consequential, but somewhat predictable, particularly to those who are prepared for them and have the tools to understand them (instead of listening to statisticians, economists, and charlatans of the bell-curve variety[1]). They are near-Black Swans. They are somewhat tractable scientifically [...] his category encompasses the randomness that produces phenomena commonly known by terms such as scalable, scale-invariant, power laws, Pareto-Zipf laws, Yule's law, Paretian-stable processes, Levy-stable and fractal laws[2]

[1] did he just really say that economists and statisticians do not know about power-laws??!! come on please, the buzz about "leveraging the long tail", "the 95/5 rule", etc * pre-dates this book by at least several years, and scientific research into these distributions by several decades. why else would these events be "commonly known" by big names such as Zipf and Levy? perhaps not as well-known as the Gauss distribution, but any statician not knowing these distributions would indeed be a charlatan, IMO.
(OTOH, who knows, maybe it *is* that bad, i just happen to know most of these terms from my general interest in the subject, i will ask a friend who majored in statistics, i bet he would love this book too, if mr Taleb could stop calling statisticians charlatans)

[2] i'm a littlebit familiar with about half of these terms, and afaik, they all mean kind of the same thing in this context. and just about every quantifiable example (that is, relating to numbers) Taleb has given for Black Swans falls into one of these categories (that he just called near-Black Swans!). with the specific example of "uses of words in a vocabulary" which is basically what Zipf's law is about. in fact, when he defined Black Swans a few chapters earlier, i immediately had to think of power laws. so if those are near-Black, or "gray" swans, then what is a real Black Swan? even more random, unpredictable? well, colour me intrigued.

it seems to me that mr Taleb has no problem at all making fun of statisticians, but doesn't really care get his facts straight or be a littlebit exact about the terms he's throwing around.
economists i don't really know about, but the ones that i know who concern themselves with matters of risk-analysis have majored in either math or physics/astronomy and know their shit--but maybe in America they're too busy being "far, far more creative than these nations of museumgoers and equation solvers". this may sound like i'm just being annoyed because he dissed Europeans (and i must admit, it did tick me off a littlebit), but this guy just defended being ignorant about math and equations, while on the other hand complaining about statisticians and economists being (apparently) ignorant about math and equations... so apparently a statistician or economist is either "uncreative" "equation-solving" "snotty (and frustrated)", or, indeed, a charlatan. can't really disagree with that, now can i?

i'm still of the opinion that mr Taleb has indeed something new to tell, with the idea that (near?) Black Swans have such an enormous impact on the history of things that Normal/Gaussian/predictable events pale in comparison. as far as i know, the consequences of power law and exponential distributions have not yet been approached from a historical angle, and indeed his findings in that respect are quite interesting. i just wish that he would keep his arrogance to himself, especially when it causes him to be wrong or contradictory.


* not surprisingly, this buzz coincides with the buzz about "web2.0", which, contrary to the gut-reaction of most IT people, is not complete bullshit, but just a very ill-defined term, meaning a lot of different things ranging from marketing bullshit like shiny logos and websites named like Star Wars characters (meebo.com?) but also some interesting observations and developments on the subjects of social networks, hierarchical (directory) versus horizontal (tagging) clustering, online communities and the probability density distributions therein.

I'll agree he's a bit of an ass, but I think he's using it as a device, a way to keep the text "fresh" so it doesn't look like a textbook.  I don't think he's serious about his euro-bashing, considering he's from Lebabnon.

I'm still only about halfway through, so right now it only looks like he's tearing everything down.  I'm waiting for him to build it back up.  If he doesn't, I dunno.  Another case of pointing to problems without any solutions, I suppose.


Although, it's interesting that in the light of "Black Swan", all of a sudden Donald Rumsfeld's "known knowns/known unknowns/unknown unknowns" speech actually becomes quite astute.

I found it added some levity to the book.

And further confirms my suspicions that he is really a Discordian.

good critique, zilch. It does sound like you're mostly annoyed by his personality and his disgust with... well just about everybody, right? He doesn't like statisticians, he doesn't like economists, and IIRC he sort of tolerates other philosophers. I got a similar sort of vibe from Talib. I think I called him an arm-chair philosopher earlier in this thread, though Cain corrected me- he does have quite a bit of in-field experience in risk-analysis. I felt like the book was pushing at "No one really knows WTF is going to happen, and the more certain they are, the more shocked they're going to be. Idiots."

He doesn't try to make friends. He favors Americans over Europeans (because Americans are supposedly "more creative" than Europeans), and people from the Bronx over people from Manhattan (for their street-smarts). For a New York Intellectual, he spends quite a bit of time separating himself from them!

and jah I confess I only got about halfway through Black Swan before I was distracted by other IRL issues. When I lost track of it, I felt like Talib had been over-rehashing for about a hundred pages.  I found it fascinating, but it wasn't moving quick enough to keep my attention. Should I pick it back up and push through the end?

I like his iconoclastic attitudes towards intellectuals - mostly because I share them. 

He gets a little more mathematical and economical after chapter 15.

(LMNO just FYI, Lebanon is not in Europe, plus he moved to Pennsylvania not after '82)

if it was just the personality i could live with that. also, the jokes wouldn't have been annoying at all if they weren't wrong to begin with :)

in my post above, i pointed out some things where he was simply wrong, inaccurate or contradictory. now jokes and attempts to keep a text "fresh" i can deal with, but making statements that are false just piss me off when reading a book (especially when he's talking about a subject that, in principle, i'm inclined to agree with).
and really, i don't mind the euro-bashing, i frowned at it once, and silently replaced the word "Frenchmen" with "Mexicans", and assumed he was talking about South-America versus Asia :-P either way, my point about "equation-solvers" versus "charlatans" still stands.

the things he assumes statisticians do and do not know about, i find questionable.

now, i don't want to debunk this book, as i said, i love the subject, but please consider the next quote:

QuoteStatisticians, it has been shown, tend to leave their brains in the classroom and engage in the most trivial inferential errors one they are let out on the streets. In 1971, the psychologists Danny Kahneman and Amos Tversk plied professors in statistics with statistical questions not phrased as statistical questions. One was similar to the following (changing the example for clarity): Assume that you live in a town with to hospitals--one large, the other small. On a given day 60 percent of those born in one of the two hospitals are boys. Which hospital is it likely to be? Many statisticians made the equivalent of the mistake (during a casual conversation) of choosing the larger hospital, when in fact the ver basis of statistics is that large samples are more stable and should fluctuate less from the long-term average--here, 50 percent for each of the sexes--than smaller samples.

personally i found this just a littlebit hard to believe, given that IMO, at least anybody with a college-level highschool diploma and math/statistics in their final year would answer this question correctly. also i really wondered in what way you'd have to phrase the question in order to confuse statisticians about it.

so, i looked up the original article (http://pirate.shu.edu/~hovancjo/exp_read/tversky.htm). and apparently:

- they weren't "professors in statistics", but they were people attending two symposia for psychologists.
- they weren't "questions not phrased as statistical questions", they were questions about scientific experiments, regarding confidence intervals, sample variation, Student's t-test and other technical statistical things.
- "changing the example for clarity" seems to mean, completely making something up. there is nothing even remotely like the "quoted" example in the original article.

now, at least over here, psychologists aren't exactly known for their mathematical knowledge and insight. of course they should, because statistics are very important to their area of research. but in general they aren't(even though i know a few examples to the contrary). indeed, if Taleb would have said that psychologists are charlatans because they (generally) don't know shit about statistics, i wouldn't have disagreed as vehemently with his statement as i did when he spoke about statisticians.

btw, i don't want to insult any psychologists that happen to read this board. a friend of mine, graduated psychology a few years ago and kicks ass at statistics. on the other hand, my father is a respected neuropsychologist, he's pretty good at his job, visits the sort of symposia this questionnaire was taken at, and would definitely, totally flunk it.

the article itself isn't completely free of errors, wrong assumptions and false implications either. apart from my own doubts i found at least one review that debunked the conclusions drawn in the article.

(and, i'm not really sure what to make of the fact that Taleb refers to Daniel Kahneman as "Danny")

now, i just found this out because i happen to like checking sources once in a while. it took me about an hour to find and read the article. can you now understand why this pisses me off severely? i don't have the time to check for every reference, every example Taleb gives whether it is true, or if it's completely made up bullshit irrelevant yet vaguely related to the topic at hand, as in this case.
sure, i'm gonna finish the book, i enjoy it too much, but i'm a littlebit scared, at least with one story--i won't tell which one, avoiding spoilers--he admitted it was a joke (a good one at that, i enjoyed it, although it also didn't help my nervous skepticism).

he does sound discordian enough to me (also the story about the pranks), and what are discordians to do to eachother, if not disagree with one another? ;-)

Actually, historically, the Levant was considered part of Europe.  You see, you had the Byzantium Empire and Crusader Kingdoms all the way down to the modern Egyptian border, and even after they were eventually pushed out by the Ottomans and Saladin, they were still considered Christian, and thus, European, territory.  Its only been with the ascendancy of the Shi'ite 'minority' and the Civil War the Levant has been considered Middle Eastern.

either way, deliberately misquoting scientific articles in order to support an argument is a capital sin in my book.

000, what I think he was getting at was that humans who are "experts" in something often turn the "expert" way of thinking on and off.

So, a professional statistician won't always think like a statistician when not it statistician mode.

As a musician, I can appreciate a good pop song, and can find interesting melodies and lyrical turns of phrase in the most trite of Top 40.

But that doesn't mean when I hear the new Brittany Spears single I don't say, "turn that shit off!"

yeah, except that is not entirely true. i know a professional statistician, and he definitely has a clearer grasp on seemingly obscure risks and probabilities even outside of the classroom.

also, the article he "quoted" to make his point was about psychologists, not statisticians. as i said, if he would have ranted against the statistical knowledge of the average psychologist, i wouldn't have had a problem with it at all.

BTW Big Kudos, tripzip, for checking his references. That's some sterling academic professionalism right there.

It feels "truthy" though, no?  :p

"One was similar to the following:"


He's making a parallel comparison.




And isn't your anecdotal evidence of "a statistician you know" just as suspect?

Quote from: LMNO on December 11, 2007, 05:04:40 PM
000, what I think he was getting at was that humans who are "experts" in something often turn the "expert" way of thinking on and off.

So, a professional statistician won't always think like a statistician when not it statistician mode.

As a musician, I can appreciate a good pop song, and can find interesting melodies and lyrical turns of phrase in the most trite of Top 40.

But that doesn't mean when I hear the new Brittany Spears single I don't say, "turn that shit off!"

But there's a big difference between "what he's getting at" and the example he's using to prove his point. What he seems to be aiming at is "a limitation of the human to apply knowledge of models in the real world"... but the example appears to be more about how most people don't really grasp the models related to statistics correctly. The former would seem important in the concept of Black Swans (the models can't really reflect reality), the latter would seem to counter the argument, in that with education about the models, the participants could perhaps have answered the question correctly. That seems like a pretty big misdirection to me....

Not really, because the example he presented was an example of Mediocristan, and his thesis takes place in Extremistan.

Quote from: LMNO on December 11, 2007, 06:31:30 PM
"One was similar to the following:"

did you read, or even scan the original article he referenced?

there is not one example that is even remotely similar to the one he gives.

QuoteAnd isn't your anecdotal evidence of "a statistician you know" just as suspect?

exactly, you are making my point here :) this guy is writing a scientifically supported book here and HAS to prove his point. he hasn't just failed to prove his point, his "proof" turned out to be fake. that i am making a similar statement, whether i'm able to prove this is besides the point.

what i would really like is that you guys, coming from different areas of expertise, take a critical look at his statements; in particular the ones not about mathematics and statistics, but about history etc.

indulge me

I would, but essay, dissertation etc means I refuse to take part in any more research than strictly necessary to get a High Merit.

From what I could tell, he usually calls himself a philosopher, not a scientist.



I think where we diverge is that I'm reading the book as a general assesment of the way our Monkey Minds seem to work when we're not really paying attention (or just pretending to pay attention) to things, and you seem to be reading it as a scientific dissertation.

His broad claims seem to hold up.  We are horribly bad at predicting things, but amazingly good at finding "reasons" after the fact.

He's still not offering any solutions yet, though (I'm on page 170 (hardcover)).

Wait 120 pages.

Not that I'm saying there will be a revelation or anything (the final chapter is only 3 pages long), but when you consider the nature of the problem is he describing, could there ever be an acceptable solution?

I'm guessing it's something like, "stay flexible"?


I was thinking about this the other day.  From my current vantage point (page 170), he seems to be advocating a very conservative* approach to life.  "You literally don't know what's going to happen, so WATCH OUT!"  You can't use the past to predict the future, and the unknown event that will change everything is COMPLETELY UNKNOWN, and there's nothing you can do about it!












*in its non-political usage.

About exposures to negative black swans, yes.

Not so much positive ones.

But even then, we won't know what kind of Black Swan is headed for us, do we?

I mean, if you do your best to minimize your exposure to risk in general, doesn't that apply to positive risk as well as negative risk?

Quote from: LMNO on December 12, 2007, 02:37:47 PM
I think where we diverge is that I'm reading the book as a general assesment of the way our Monkey Minds seem to work when we're not really paying attention (or just pretending to pay attention) to things, and you seem to be reading it as a scientific dissertation.

true, and i agree that's probably the wrong way to look at the book.

but still, why even bother putting up the references list (looooong list in the back of the back) if you're not supposed to check them?

but even then. be it scientific, philosophical or general assessment. is it so strange to be dissapointed that the very first example i decide to look up his proof for, turns out to be totally fake?
i hope it's a coincidence, i'm willing to be generous and assume he was thinking of a different paper, or perhaps he discussed this particular example with Kahneman and assumed it was in that paper (seeing as he called him "Danny", they might have talked or met IRL).

(but if i'm not so generous, i call it purposefully misrepresenting a paper in order to make yet another stab at statisticians (i bet he got dumped by one, or something :-P))

either way, i guess i'm gonna be checking some more of those references as i progress in the book.

QuoteHis broad claims seem to hold up.  We are horribly bad at predicting things, but amazingly good at finding "reasons" after the fact.

He's still not offering any solutions yet, though (I'm on page 170 (hardcover)).

yeah i agree with the broad claims (as i said before), they seem to hold up, which is all the more reason why he really shouldn't need to make up evidence for his claims, as there is enough actual true evidence out there as well.

i'm at page 53, but i'm a slow reader (especially in english, even though i must have read more english than any other language in my life, even dutch) and it is, how do you say, "advanced english", big words, complicated sentences etc, impeding my progress even more :)

about the "solution", so far as i've read he said he is in fact not advocating a conservative approach, he said something about people asking "so should i avoid any and all risks?", explaining, no, he likes to use a "very agressive" form of risk-taking, that, indeed he promises to explain later on in the book.
something about not "not crossing the road at all", but preventing yourself from "crossing the road blindfolded".

Depends if the risk is scalable or not, doesn't it?  He uses market metaphors frequently, and there is a difference between spreading your investments and making them small, or investing large but in concentrated amounts.  The former maximises your chances of a positive Black Swan, precisely because the risk is minimized, whereas the larger invites a devestating black swan.

Quote from: LMNO on December 12, 2007, 02:59:00 PM
But even then, we won't know what kind of Black Swan is headed for us, do we?

I mean, if you do your best to minimize your exposure to risk in general, doesn't that apply to positive risk as well as negative risk?

well the point is, you can't really minimize your exposure to risks of black swans.

remember that turkey example, getting killed on day 1001. the turkey had all the reason to believe it was living in Mediocristan, while on day 1001 a black swan hit, and apparently he had been living in Extremistan all along.

the point is, you can't know. you can't avoid all risks, because you can only avoid risks based on historical evidence, and some risks, black swans, cannot be predicted from history, at all.

so, maybe he is saying, take the risks and go with them, AAAAAAAIIIIIIIIIEEEEEEEEEEEE!!

Oh yeah, I forgot that bit.


I'm reading Black Swan like I read RAW:  His large concepts are useful, his examples, not so much (I can hardly bear to re-read his stuff on quantum mechanics, for example, and his Futurism just doesn't stand up anymore).

Hah, zilch you quoted the exact line I was going to. (paraphrasing) I'm not advocating that people don't cross the street. I'm just saying don't cross the street blindfolded." I think that sums it up, right?

No you can't know what black swans you might encounter, but when you're aware that they might be coming, you can keep yourself guarded.

Example - I was trying to persuade a friend of mine to come to a LARP one weekend. He said he couldn't because his wife (who is in the process of divorcing him) was going to be in the country. Also, she was intent on fucking up his life.

"Is she going to interact with you in some way this weekend?"

"Probably not," he said, "but she's connected into a lot of the same systems as I am. I need to be at an at-ready posture just in case."

To me, that sounds like someone who's ready for Black Swans.

It also may be a case of letting the POSSIBILITY of a Black Swan hinder life.  Just sayin'.

I thought a big part of the book wasn't just the message (expounded on by many in the thread) but the messenger. It's one thing for someone like RAW or any of us to talk about this stuff and try to get other people to understand and work with this kind of Black Swan mindframe. As we've probably all experienced at one time or another, the "straights" tend to humor us (at best) or just ignore us.

With this book - and a lot of the approach - it's as much the messenger (a former trader on Wall Street IIRC) that's important. As someone that's been in that economic prediction racket, his voice regarding this stuff (even if his message isn't perfect in every detail) has a LOT more weight in the "establishment" than if it was anyone like RAW or any of us trying to convince anyone in the racket of making the kinds of predictions the book says are pretty much a waste. Hell, the man was getting asked to speak at conferences about this stuff before he put it all down in the book.

Admittedly, we're not really the target audience of this book because we've already predisposed ourselves to acknowlege and anticipate the Black Swans, and yes, he could have done a bit more fact checking (didn't he refer to people that were helping him with that in a few places as well in the book? can't remember exactly where, but I thought he did). However, if the messenger helps people get the general message (which we're also trying to get across to people, althogh we tend to aim for a different or at least broader audience than it seems this book is shooting for) then that should count for something.

I'm not defending any incorrect facts or misstatements, but at least he put all those footnotes and sources in - hopefully people will check them for themselves. The more information people can get about this thing is good, yes?

Quote from: Netaungrot on December 19, 2007, 06:59:55 AM

QuoteBiases 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? (http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/comm/haselton/webdocs/designflaws.pdf)

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?

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.

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?

A focus on the exceptions that prove the rule (http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/5372968a-ba82-11da-980d-0000779e2340,dwp_uuid=77a9a0e8-b442-11da-bd61-0000779e2340.html) 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.

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.

Quote from: Cain on April 21, 2008, 05:34:25 AM
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

Quote from: Cain on April 21, 2008, 05:34:25 AMSpeaking 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