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153 Where One Can Show Mathematically the Misfitness of Mathematics To Most Problems Where It is Used
(To add to the introduction of my math version of the Incerto.) It is much more rigorous and safer to start with a disease then look at the classes of drugs that can help (if any, or perhaps consider that no drug can be a potent alternative), than to start with a drug, then find some ailment that matches it, with the serious risk of mismatch. Believe it or not, the latter was the norm at the turn of the century, before the FDA got involved. People took drugs for the sake of taking drugs. What I am saying here is now accepted logic but people don't get it when we change domains. In mathematics it is much better to start with a real problem, understand it well on its own terms, then go find a mathematical tool (if any, or use nothing as is often the best solution) than start with mathematical theorems then find some application to these. The difference (that between problem and inverse problem ) is monstrous as the degrees of freedom are much narrower in the foreward than the backward equation, sort of). The latter route, one can show mathematically, leads to a very high probability of misfitness. But people don't get that point there. The entire fields of mathematical economics and quantitative finance are based on that bullshit. Having a tool in your mind and looking for an application leads to the narrative fallacy. Now this analogy people don't get in social science. I've only seen one economist who got it, Ricardo Haussman (who was at some point the Venezulan finance minister). In his essay on whether economics is a science, Robert Shiller thought I was against math in general, rather than against the backward fitting of math. I love math, but only the right math. This also explains why schooling is dangerous as it gives the illusion of the arrow theory -> practice. Replace math with theory and you get an idea of what I call the green lumber problem in Antifragile.
accommodates skepticism, one-sided thinking: A is >x, A O(x ) [Big-O: "of order" x], rather than A=x . Working on integrating the rigor in risk bearing. We always know one-side, not the other.
This explains the mystery of the effortless Arab invasion of the Southern and Western Mediterranean, all the way to Spain (and, less advertised, the Portuguese Algarve). They had to be welcomed by the local population along the coast. Canaanite and Arabic are easily mutually comprehensible (the distance between Semitic languages is very short, a corrollary of the stability thanks to the triplet of consonnants). And it is wasy for a Punic speaker to progressively become an Arabic speaker, since he already knows 80-90% of the vocabulary. This also gives some credibility to the thesis that was popping up in the 19th century that the North African Jews had a Phoenician origin (or that the difference between Canaanite and Jew before the rabbinical period was not very pronounced for people to see an immediate difference). This is very plausible, since the Phoenician Canaanite diaspora had characteristics in trade networks that is similar to that of the Jews of later period. We find them in the same places as the Phoenicians. They had similar Gods (plus or minus monotheism & the beastly tophet , but we know of syncretisms as because religions were not very differentiated, as we saw evidence in Doura Europos and there were places of worship that would accommodate both Jews, early Christians, and pagans). They had a nearly identical language in the East (Canaanite) and a very similar one in the West (we only have one punic passage transcribed into Latin in a play by Plautus: in spite of the geographic distance it remained very close to classical Hebrew and Canaanite). My speculation is that many of the Jews are those locals who did not convert to Islam, and did not feel that had to. I voiced the idea to Jacques Attali (of North African Jewish ancestry) who boasted a historical relation to Phoenicians; he blurted out "tu me dis que les juifs sont des phniciens, je te dis que les phniciens sont des juifs" ). It is remarkable how people fall for the retrospective distortion, by imparting to ancient religions modern definitions and differentiations from rituals and theologies developed after, and to ancient "states" the definition of the modern state. "Identities" did not exist at the time, so "Canaanite" or "Arab" were not part of the discussion: one belonged to a certain network, a tribe, bottom up, using the Semitic patrilinear line of belonging. Ibn 3am means "cousin from the father's side" (Remarkably, in Hebrew 3am means people, or tribe). Finally, the Maltese, in spite of having been a bastion of Christianity, still speak a Semitic language easy to understand by Arabic speakers.
touching objects or pacing in his living room, given the multitude of such stressors and their total effect. The fragility that comes from linearity is immediately visible, so we rule it out because the object would be already broken and the person already dead. This leaves us with the following: what is fragile is something that is both unbroken and subjected to nonlinear effects and extreme, rare events since hits of large size (or high speed) are rarer than ones of small size (and slow speed). Let me rephrase it, in connection with Black Swans and extreme events. There are a lot more ordinary events than extreme events. In the financial markets, there are at least ten thousand time more events of .1% than events of 10%. There are close to eight thousand microearthquakes daily on planet earth, that is, those below 2 on the Richter scale about three million a year. These are totally harmless, and, with three million per year, you would need them to be so. But shocks of intensity 6 and higher on the scale make the newspapers. Take objects such as coffee cups get a lot of hits, a million more hits of (to take an arbitrary measure), say, one hundredth of a pound per square inch than hits of a hundred pounds per square inch. Accordingly, we are necessarily immune to the cumulative effect of small deviations, or shocks of very small magnitude, which implies that these affect us disproportionally less (that is, nonlinearly less) than larger ones. I simplify the theorem. Take x a shock to your system.The higher x, the more damage. Take H(x) the harm from x. The upper bound is H(x) = -1/F(x) where F(x) is the probabilityof harm as in the figure below. with H'(x)<0 at x0. Since P[x>K] the probability of having encountered intensity K in the past conditional on having survived is concave, then the form of H(x) needs to have a negative second derivative at the initial value x0. But there is an additiona complexity: H(x) F(x) need to be declining for the expectation to be integrable, unless harm is bounded by some amount (a maximum harm beyond which it makes no difference). The only probability distribution giving linear harm would have the shape p(x)=1/x, one that would not have any moment. The result of the convexity of probabilities is also seen in evolution, since probability of harm map into fitness and has to be conditioned by the statistical property of the size of exposures.
II- Take this medical application. The Second Principle of Iatrogenics: it is not linear. I do not believe that we should take risks with near-healthy people and treat them at all; I also believe that we should take a lot, a lot more risks with those deemed in danger. Why do we need to focus treatment on more serious cases, not marginal ones? Take this example showing nonlinearity. When hypertension is mild, say marginally higher than the zone accepted as normotensive, the chance of benefiting from the drug is close to 5.6% (only one person in eighteen benefit from the treatment). But when tension is considered to be in the high or severe categories, the chance of benefiting are now 26% and 72%, respectively (that is that one person in four and two persons out of 3 will benefit from the treatment). So the treatment benefits are convex to condition (the benefits rise disproportionally, in an accelerated manner). But consider that the iatrogenics should be constant for all categories! In the very ill condition, the benefits are large relative to iatrogenics, in the borderline one, they are small. This means that we need to focus on high symptom conditions and ignore, I mean really ignore, other situations in which the patient is not very ill.
Another way to view it is by considering that mother nature had to have tinkered through selection in inverse proportion to the rarity of the condition (in a convex manner according to the probabilities we saw above). Of the hundred of thousands of drugs today, I can hardly find a via positiva one that makes a healthy person unconditionally better. And the reason we have not been able to find drugs that make us feel unconditionally better when we are well (or unconditionally stronger, etc.) is for the same statistical reason: nature would have found this magic pill. But consider that illness is rare, and the more ill the person the less likely nature would have found the solution, in an accelerating way. A condition that is three mean deviations away from the norm is more than three hundred times rarer than normal; an illness that is five mean deviations from the norm is more than a million times rarer!
148 The Central Idea: the conflation of event and exposure, or difference between f(x) and x
- f(x) is exposure to the variable x. f(x) can equivalently be called payoff from x, even utility of payoff from x where we introduce in f a utility function. x can be anything. This explains why innovation when in f(x)(trial and error) does not require understanding of x as much as being smart about f(x). The difference between theory and practice is in x vs f(x). Example : x is the intensity of an earthquake on some scale in some specific area, f(x) is the number of persons dying from it. We can easily see that f(x) can me made more predictable than x (if we force people to stay away from a specific area or build to some standards, etc.). Example: x is the rainfall in NY, f(x) is the health of my garden. Or x is arsenic, f(x) is my health (in low doses f(x) is actually OK). Example : x is the number of meter of my fall to the ground when someone pushes me from height x, f(x) is a measure of my physical condition from the effect of the fall. Clearly I can't predict x very easily (who will push me), rather f(x). Example : x is the number of cars in NYC at noon tomorrow, f(x) is travel time from point A to point B for a certain agent. f(x) is more predictable than x, particularly if he modifies his route. - Some people talk about f(x) thinking they are talking about x. This is the problem of the conflation of event and exposure . This errors present in Aristotle is virtually ubiquitous in the philosophy of probability (say, Hacking). - One can become antifragile to x without understanding x, through convexity of f(x). -The answer to the question what do you do in a world you dont understand? is, simply, work on the undesirable states of f(x). - It is often easier to modify f(x) than get better knowledge of x. (In other words, the robustification rather than forecasting Black Swans). Example : If I buy an insurance on the market, here x, dropping more than 20%, f(x) will be independent of the part of the probability distribution of x that is below 20%. (This is an example of a barbell). - If one is antifragile to x, then the variance (or volatility, or other measures of variation) of x benefit f(x), since distributions that are skewed have their mean depend on the variance (the lognormal for instance has for mean a term that includes + sig^2). [BARBELL THEOREM] - The probability distribution of f(x) is markedly different from that of x, particularly in the presence of nonlinearities. + When f(x) is convex (concave) monotonically), f(x) is right (left) skewed. + When f(x) is increasing and concave on the left then convex to the right, the probability distribution of f(x) is thinnertailed than that of x. For instance in Kathneman-Tverskys prospect theory, the so-called utility of changes in wealth is more robust than that of wealth. - Where p(x) is the density, F(X) p(x) is the true function, the integral p, and the more nonlinear f, the more it will depend on f rather than p. For instance, Jensens inequality, will depend increasingly on f rather than
"measurement" by "estimation" (say estimating the future value of an economic variable, the rainfall in Brazil, or the risk of a nuclear accident). What is called a regress argument by philosophers can be used to put some scrutiny on quantitative methods or risk and probability. The mere existence of such regress argument will lead to two different regimes, both leading to the necessity to raise the values of small probabilities, and one of them to the necessity to use power law distributions.
142 Time to understand a few facts about small probabilities [criminal stupidity of statistical science]
(I've received close to 600 requests for interviews on the "Black Swan" of Japan. Refused all (except for one). I think for a living & write books not interviews. This is what I have to say.) The Japanese Nuclear Commission had the following goals set in 2003: " The mean value of acute fatality risk by radiation exposure resultant from an accident of a nuclear installation to individuals of the public, who live in the vicinity of the site boundary of the nuclear installation, should not exceed the probability of about 1x10^6 per year (that is , at least 1 per million years)". That policy was designed only 8 years ago. Their one in a million-year accident almost occurred about 8 year later (I am not even sure if it is at best a near miss). We are clearly in the Fourth Quadrant there. I spent the last two decades explaining (mostly to finance imbeciles, but also to anyone who would listen to me) why we should not talk about small probabilities in any domain. Science cannot deal with them. It is irresponsible to talk about small probabilities and make people rely on them, except for natural systems that have been standing for 3 billion years (not manmade ones for which the probabilities are derived theoretically, such as the nuclear field for which the effective track record is only 60 years). 1) Small probabilities tend to be incomputable; the smaller the probability, the less computable. (Forget the junk about "Knightian" uncertainty, all small probabilities are incomputable). (See TBS, 2nd Ed., or Douady and Taleb, Statistical undecidability, 2011.) 2) Model error causes the underestimation of small probabilities & their contribution (on balance, because of convexity effects). Any model error, just as any undertainty about flying time causes the expected arrival to be delayed (you rarely land 4 hours early, more often 4 hours late on a transatlantic flight, so "unforeseen" disturbances tend to delay you). See my argument about second order effects with my paper. [INTUITION: uncertainty about the model used for calculation of random effects causes a second layer of randomness, causing small probabilities to rise on balance]. 3) The problem is more acute in Extremistan, particularly the manmade part. The probabilities are undestimated but the consequences are much, much more underestimated. 4) As I wrote, because of globalization, the costs of natural catastrophes are increasing in a nonlinear way. 5) Casanova problem (survivorship bias in probability): If you compute the frequency of a rare event and your survival depends on such event not taking place (such as nuclear events), then you underestimated that probability. See the revised note 93 on . 6) Semi-technical Examples : to illustrates the point (how models are Procrustean beds): Case 1: Binomial
Take for example the binomial distribution with B[N, p] probability of success (avoidance of failure), with N=50. When p moves from 96% to 99% the probability quadruples. So small imprecision around the probability of success (error in its computation, uncertainty about how we computed the probability) leads to enormous ranges in the total result. This shows that there is no such thing as "measurable risk" in the tails, no matter what model we use. Case 2: More scary. Take a Gaussian, with the probability of exceeding a certain number, that is, . 1Cumulative density function.. Assume mean = 0, STD= 1. Change the STD from 1 to 1.1 (underestimation of 10% of the variance). For the famed "six sigmas", the area in the tails explodes by 2400%. For the areas above 10 sigmas (common in economics), the area explodes by trillions. (More on the calculations in my paper).
141 Why does leverage in an economy generate (or exacerbate) fat tails?
There is no need to write a complicated model (precise but stupid, the kind of stuff complexity idiots write to get academic credit), simple rigorous arguments can prove with minimal words and no mathematics how fat tails emerge from some attributes of complex systems. This argument is a Dynamic Hedging-style (Taleb, 1997) argument. A- Why fat tails emerge from leverage and feedback loops, single agent simplified case. A1 [leverage]- If an agent with some leverage L buys securities in response to increase in his wealth (from the increase of the value of these securities held), and sells them in response to decrease in their value, in an attempt to maintain a certain level of leverage L, and A2 [feedback effects]- If securities rise in value in response to purchasers and decline in value in response to sales, then, by the violation of the independence between the variations of securities, CLT [the central limit theorem] no longer holds (no convergence to the Gaussian basin). So fat tails are an immediate result of feedback and leverage, exacerbated by the level of leverage L. A3 If feedback effects are convex to size (it costs more per unit to sell 10 than to sell 1), then negative skewness of the security and the wealth process will emerge. (Simply, like the negative gamma of portfolio insurance, the agent has an option in buying, but no option in selling, hence negative skewness. The forced selling is like a short option.) Note on Path dependence exacerbating skewness: More specifically, if wealth increases first, this causes more risk and skew. Squeezes and forced selling on the way down: the market drops more (but less frequently) than it rises on the way up. B- Multi-agents: if, furthermore, more than one agent are involved, then the effect is compounded by the dynamic adjustment (hedging) of one agent causing the adjustment of another. C- One can generalize to anything, such as home prices rising in response to home purchases from the Greenspan
liquidity, etc.
139-The Agency Problem & the Fragility of Market Capitalism: The Inverse of Das Kapital
It is my impression that, pace Marx, the market can act as some form of expropriation, all the way to destruction (what we are witnessing now). A transfer from the Kapital to the managers of companies (so Marx got it backwards, though he was right on fragility). Over the past decade, investors (mainly retirees) have lost several trillion dollars adjusted for financing/inflation (the market is where it was over 12 years ago; most people added above current levels). Meanwhile
company managers and investment managers generated for themselves more than a trillion in fees, bonuses, stock options, etc. The problem has been more acute in Japan and Europe. Banks are a special case of fraud: managers extort the states (banking loses periodically more than all past cumulative profits, with losses covered by governments) -and the game continues (to wit, bonuses for 2010). Venture capital is another form of Ponzi in which people create companies to sell them to suckers, with greater-fool games, a transfer from investors and entrepreneurs to financiers. The first problem is the absence of clawbacks (people make profits hiding risk then get an annual bonus off values at year end when risks explode every 8-15 years; the mismatch between bonuses and frequency of blowups). The second one is the free option granted to managers--upside not downside and transfer of fragility. My answer: alas, the only robust form is owner operated or matters that escape the agency problem. It becomes obvious... An artisanal world. Privately owned companies, etc. Probabilistic Growth: Some idiots keep countering me recently: "how can you get growth?", falling for the foolish separation growth-robustness. A car driven at 300 miles an hour on a country road will never get to destination, so speed needs to be discounted by the probability of crash; likewise you need to think in terms of probabilistic growth not nominal growth. Governments have not yet realized (too autitic bureaucrats) the notion of probabilistic growth in GDP. Note: the same idiotic argument is made about financing "growth" with debt.
, greatness of soul , , , . [ the fact that, after the loss of the totality of my pharmaceutical remedies, the totality of my books, as well as these recipies of reputable remedies, as well as the various editions I wrote on them, in addition to so many other works, each one of which exhibits that love of work that was mine my entire life; the fact that I felt no pain shows firstthe nobility of my behavior and my GREATNESS OF SOUL.] Also pre-Christian thoughts on greatness of soul in the Hellenistic Levant :The Pagan Virtue of Megalopsychia in Pagan Syrian by Glanville Downey (Historian of Antioch on the Orontes). Note that humility in pre-Christian ethics was an insult.The Arabs translate it literally:
130-Stimulus
I just realized that what is called "Keynesian stimulus" works differently when the government is starting off a situation of deficit. The math would produce different results, which makes me wonder why economists cannot spot it (I inject more perturbations and see massive fragility). In one case, to make an analogy to an individual, you can invest money you have on the side(assuming you've had suspluses from the past). In the other, you fragilize yourself by borrowing, and transfer the liabilities cross-generations. Patris delictum nocere nunquam debet filio. [A father should not leave liabilities to his son.] But you can't expect economists to perturbate their models, or inject rigor in their arguments. They are the very same idiots after all who got us here.
Spent some time with Erwan Le Corre, whom many describe as the fittest man in the world, in a broad, naturalistic sense (along with John Durant the expert on Paleo nutrition & their friends) --we were filmed by French TV who picked up the links between their ideas and mine on the need for a certain class of randomness. Le Corre understands the value of moderate unpredictability, the importance of improvization, and unconstrained exercise --to avoid the "fossilization" of routines. My idea of naturalistic/Paleo fitness: the broadest domain bandwidth, freedom from the captivity & injurious gym machines (resembling Tayloristic methods in working out). So started walking/sprinting on "rough", fractal sufaces. I am lucky to have a place within walking distance from the best parc for that; along the coastline with close to a mile of rocks. Exhilarating, except for my broken nose. Just as chess skills only help you in chess (we know that those who can play chess games from memory don't have strong memory for other matters), classroom math only helps in classrooms, weight training in gyms almost only helps you in gyms, a specific sport almost only helps you in that specific sport, and walking on smooth Euclidian surfaces causes injuries somewhere deep inside your soul. When you run and jump on rocks, your entire brain and body are at work; you stretch your back better than with yoga; every muscle in your body is involved; no two movements will be identical (unlike running in gyms); you become yourself. Absence of effort: So I can get the benefits of a hunter-gatherer lifestyle with less than 20% changes in my day --as I can manage a 5-course dinner at Le Bernardin, drink good wine, dress with some elegance, yet have the benefits of the caveman... To me it is mostly about absence of effort in my life, outside of intense moments, freedom, work without constraints, unpredictability in my day, lounging whenever I feel like it, minimal contact with businessmen & other halfmen, etc. I spent 7 years in total as an employee. When I look back, it was half way between being dead & alive. Also I just realized that, in the same vein, broad erudition, when supported by a good mathematical culture, is vastly more robust than any specialization. The wisdom of the ancients was domain-independent.
126- Evidence that we human use thought largely for ornamental purpose
At the Harvard Symposium for Hard Problems in Social Science, Emily Oster presented a very simple, elementary problem: almost all people with type-2 diabetes can be cured by losing a little bit of weight. They are made aware of it, yet they usually gain weight after diagnosis (she mentioned "Atkins" among the options, so it was not just AMA low-fat.). It is so obvious that we know what to do yet do not carry the action because thinking can be largely ornamental. The proof of the sterility of (a significant class of) knowledge was right there (among the obvious evidence that the population has been gaining weight in spire of technological and educational progress). Yet the others social scientists kept exalting the value of "education" in spite of this simple devastating evidence. Someone even suggested teaching more
"critical thinking". This is the great sucker problem: people who teach truly think that teaching, or, worse, preaching, cures.
Negative advice : Nimium boni est, cui hinil est mali Ennius , via CiceroMadness of Crowds : Nietzche: Madness is rare in individuals, but in groups, parties, nations, it is the rule (this counts as ancient wisdom since Nietzsche was a classicist; I've seen many such references in Plato) Hormesis : Cicero (Disp Tusc,II, 22) When our souls are mollified, a bee can sting The Paradox of Progress/Choice (Lucretius): there is a familiar story of a NY banker vacationing in Greece, talking to a fisherman &, scrutinizing the fisherman's business, comes up for a scheme to help the fisherman make it a big business. The fisherman asked him what the benefits were; the banker answered that he could make a pile of money in NY and come back vacation in Greece; something that seemed ludicrous to the fisherman who was already there doing the kind of things bankers do when they go on vacation in Greece. The story was very well known in antiquity, under a more elegant form, as retold by Montaigne I, 42: (my transl.) when King Pyrrhus tried to cross into Italy, Cynas, his wise adviser, tried to make him feel the vanity of such action. "To what end are you going into such enterprise?", he asked. Pyrrhus answered:" to make myself the master of Italy". Cynas: " and so?". Pyrrhus: "to get to Gaul, then Spain". Cynas: "Then?" Pyrrhus: " To conquer Africa, then ... come rest at ease". Cynas:" but you are already there; why take more risks"? Montaigne then cites the well known Lucretius (V, 1431) on how human nature knows no upper bound, as if to punish itself. Loss Aversion: Nearly all the letters of Seneca -
The 20th C was the bankruptcy of the social utopia. The 21st will be that of the technological one. [From one Procrustean bed to another.] I trust those who earn their living lying on their back more than those who do so sitting on a chair (hint: I read in bed...) Don't trust a man on dependent income-except if it is minimum wage. Those on bondage & would do anything to "feed a family". Dubai borrowed to put vanity buildings on postcards; America and W. Europe need to borrow to just survive. We unwittingly amplify commonalities with friends, dissimilarities with strangers, & contrasts with enemies. The mark of a mediocre mind is the subdued and passive reaction in front of the truly exceptional Mental clarity is the child of courage, not the other way around. [ The biggest error since Socrates has been to believe that lack of clarity is the SOURCE of all our ills, not the result. ] What they call play (gym, travel) looks like work;what I call work (effortless daydreaming) looks like play.They lose freedom trying harder. I wish to say some day about someone "Voil un homme!" as Napoleon said upon meeting Goethe: mixture of passion & intellect (& elegance too) bermen tolerate others' small inconsistencies though not the large ones;losers tolerate others' large inconsistencies though not small ones Their sabbatical is to work six days and rest for one; my sabbatical is to work for (part of) a day and rest for six. City-states organize by tinkering; nation-states produce bureaucracies, empty suits, Bernankes, deficits, and the toobigtofail. Too obvious. Atheism/materialism means treating the dead as if they were unborn. I won't. By respecting the sacred you reinvent religion. answ:[ If you can't detect (w/out understanding) the difference betw sacred & profane you'll never know what religion means. Same with art ] What they call philosophy, I call literature;what they call literature I call journalism; what they call journalism I call gossip & what they call gossip I call voyeurism. How superb to become wise without being boring; how sad to be boring without being wise [like that Bernanke]. The role of the media is best seen in the journey from Cato the elder to Sarah Palin. Do some extrapolation if you want to be scared. Ethical man accords his profession to his beliefs, instead of according his beliefs to his profession. Rarer and rarer since middle ages. [Ethics, Cognitive Dissonnance & Diffusion of Responsibility, Chap, why we need to worry about econ, "risk experts", & other charlatans] Most people write so they can remember things; I write so I can forget. Corollary to Moore's laws: every ten years, collective wisdom degrades by half. I wonder whether a bitter enemy would be jealous if he discovered that I hated someone else. It is much harder to be a Stoic when wealthy, powerful, and respected than when destitute, miserable, and lonely. Academics are only useful when they try to be useless, and dangerous when they try to be useful.
Success is to be in middle adulthood what you dreamed to be in late childhood. The rest comes from loss of control. A good foe is far more loyal, far more predictable, and, to the clever, far more useful than any admirer. You will get the most attention from those who hate yrou. No friend, no admirer, and no partner will flatter you with equal curiosity. Mediterraneans scorn instructions but bow to authority; Anglo-Saxons bow to instructions but scorn authority. Most modern technologies are deferred punishment. " Evolution does not teach by convincing, but by destroying." [Fat Tony on why Robert Merton, univ tenures in econ, and bailouts are dangers] The Stoic sage should withdraw from public efforts when unheeded & state is corrupt beyond repair.[Seneca] Wiser to wait for selfdestruction. There is nothing deemed harmful (in general) that cannot be beneficial in some particular instances. Universals are weaker under complexity. "Don't cross a river because it is on average 4 f deep". The average of expectations is typically > than the expectation of averages. Medieval man was a cog in a wheel he did not understand; modern man is a cog in a more complicated system he thinks he understands. Giving businessreaders my book: like giving vintage Bordeaux to drinkers of Diet Coke and listening to their comments about it . They will envy you for your success, for your wealth, for your intelligence, for your looks, for your status --but rarely for your wisdom The idea is to NEVER answer critics, just aim to stay in print --make sure people will be reading me long after these critics are dead. Modernity: We created youth without heroism, age without wisdom, and life without grandeur. " It is much easier to scam people for billions than for just millions". [on Madoff & US gov-1st Lesson in the Epistemology of Fat Tony] Charm lies in the unsaid, the unwritten, and the undisplayed. It takes mastery to control silence. We are better at (involuntarily) DOING out of the box than (voluntarily) THINKING out of the box. Thinking is just ornamental; for show-off. I read nothing from the past 300 years; I drink nothing from the past 3000 years; but I talk to no ordinary (nonheroic) man over 40. Edmund Phelps got the "Nobel" for writings no one reads, theories no one uses, and lectures no one understands. [Panel in Moscow] Education makes the wise slightly wiser, but makes the fool vastly more dangerous. We ask "why is he rich (or poor)?" not "why isn't he richer (poorer)?";"why is the crisis so deep?" not "why isn't it deeper?". The tragedy of virtue is that the more boring, unoriginal, and sermonizing the proverb/tweet, the harder it is to
implement. To see if you like where you live: check if you are as happy returning as you were leaving. Also applies to work/relationships... My problem of knowledge is that there are many more books on birds written by ornithologists than books on birds written by birds. [OPACITY] Mathematics is to knowledge what an artificial hand is to the real one. Some amputate then replace. Pomponius Atticus, severely ill, tried, the Stoic way, to take his own life. Having chosen starvation, he was cured of his illness. Pure generosity is when you help the ingrate. Every other form is self-serving [Cont:genrosity/Kantian ethics] For the ancients, forecasting historical events was an insult to the God(s); for me it is an insult to science. A maxim/tweet allows me to have the last word without even starting a conversation. I'd rather be a janitor in a philosophy department than Chaired Prof at Harvard Business School; or flaneur in NY than a hotshot at Davos. I now take a hot bath after reading emails from businessmen or journalists; I then feel purified from the profane until the next email. We worry about "too big", but the biggest error-prone centralized top-down institution in the world is the US Gov. It is getting bigger. You cannot express the holy in terms made for the profane; but you can discuss the profane in terms made for the holy. CNBC journalists are imbeciles. "You need skills to get a BMW, skills + luck to become a Buffet" -> into "Buffet has no skills".
119- Huet & the Separation from the Vulgar, the Transactional, & the Common
Quiconque, dit Horace, sera regard en naissant par les muses dun oeil favorable, il mprisera les Couronnes des Jeux Olympiques des Grecs, & des triomphes des Romains, & leur prfrera les dlices dune retraite studieuse, & dune savante solitude. Il faut de plus un grand courage pour rsister aux accidents de la vie, capable dinterrompre les douceurs de son tude, aux ncessitez publiques, aux guerres (...), aux perscutions des envieux, (..) et leur vie retirez les expose plus que les autres. Quant un homme de cette terre sera consacrez aux Lettres, quil ne cherche la rcompense que dans les Lettres mmes, & (...) du haut de cette sainte montagne, o la vraie rudition a plac sa demeure, il regarde le reste du monde avec compassion, & avec un grand mpris des erreurs et des vaines occupations du vulgaire. Huet despised Montaigne --whom he called Montagne.
Tinkering]
This is the "lecturing birds how to fly " effect. Let us call it the error of rationalism. In Fat Tony s language, it would be what makes us the suckers of all suckers. Consider two ty pes of knowledge. The first ty pe is not ex actly knowledge; its ambiguous character prev ents us from calling it ex actly knowledge. It a way of doing thing that we cannot really ex press in clear language, but that we do nev ertheless, and do well. The second ty pe is more like what we call knowledge; it is what y ou acquire in school, can get grades for, can codify , what can be ex plainable, academizable, rationalizable, formalizable, theoretizable, codifiable, Sov ietizable, bureaucratizable, Harv ardifiable, prov able, etc. To make things simple, just look at the second ty pe of knowledge as something so stripped of ambiguity that an autistic person (a high functioning autistic person, that is) can easily understand it. The error of rationalism is, simply , ov erestimating the role and necessity of the second ty pe, the academic knowledge, in human affairs. It is a sev ere error because not only much of our knowledge is not ex plainable, academizable, rationalizable, formalizable, theoretizable, codifiable, Sov ietizable, bureaucratizable, Harv ardifiable, etc., but, further, that such knowledge play s such a minor life that it is not ev en funny . We are v ery likely to believ e that skills and ideas that we actually acquired by doing, or that came naturally to us (as we already knew by our innate biological instinct) came from books, ideas, and reasoning. We get blinded by it; there may ev en be something in our brains that makes us suckers for the point. Let us see how.
T Y PE 1 Know how Fat Tony wisdom, Aristotelian phronesis Implicit , Tacit Nondemonstrativ e knowledge Tchn Ex periential knowledge Heuristic Figurativ e Tinkering Bricolage Empiricism Practice Engineering Tinkering, stochastic tinkering Epilogism (Menodotus of Nicomedia and the school of empirical medicine) Historia a sensate cognitio Autopsia Know what
T Y PE 2
Aristotelian logic
Ex plicit Demonstrativ e knowledge Epistem Epistemic base Propositional knowledge Literal Directed research Targeted activ ity Rationalism Scholarship Mathematics Directed search Inductiv e knowledge
Austrian economics Bottom up libertarianism Spirit of the Law Customs Brookly n, Amioun Accident, trial and error Nonautistic Random Ecological uncertainty , tractable in tex tbook Embedded Parallel processing Off-model Side effect of a drug Nominalism not
Neoclassical economics Central Planner Letter of the Law Ideas Cambridge, MA, and UK Design Autistic Deterministic Ludic probability , statistics tex tbooks Abstract Serial processing On-model, model based National Institute of Health Realism
MEDICAL NOTES- Aggregation of notes on the history of medicine as I am writing my long chapter on
iatrogenics.
The most complete compendium is in Wooton Bad Medicine: Doctors Doing Harm Since Hippocrates.
p 184 [...] why doctors for centuries imagined that their theories worked when they didn't; why there was a delay of more
than two hundred years between the first experiments designed to disprove spontaneous generation and the final triumph of the alternative, the theory that living creatures always come from other living creatures; why there was a delay of two hundred years between the discovery of germs and the triumph of the germ theory of disease; why there was a delay of thirty years between the germ theory of putrefaction and the development of antisepsis; why there was a delay of sixty years between antisepsis and drug therapy. [he explains elsewhere that there was no money in microscopy, which delayed implementation...] Elsewhere Wooton shows how surgeons resisted anesthesia (because it was considered cheating), how doctors in France were still bleeding patients at the end of the 19th century, yet: In 1851 [...] Dietl showed that bloodletting tripled the death rate in a pneumonia. p 240- Pasteur had a sensible distrust of doctors. p 14 I took it for granted that in an open argument, good ideas would always defeat bad ideas. [...] Peer group pressure often halt progress in its track.[...] Despite the brilliant work of philosophers and historians of science, no one has really worked out how to write a history that takes account of this. p 293 Shapin tells us that "The Harvard biochemist L.J. Henderson [1878-1942] was supposed to have remarked "that it was only sometime between 1910 and 1912 ...that a random patient, with a random disease, consulting a doctor chosen at random, had, for the first time in the history of mankind, a better than 50-50 chance of profiting from the encounter."'
James Le Fanu: The Rise and Fall of Modern Medicine (1999) talks of "collective deception". I call this the translational problem because of a great paper by Ioannides (my hero) et al. Life Cycle of Translational Research for Medical Interventions in Science (Sept 5, 2008) --they show how long it takes from initial scientific paper to implementation --and how the cycle is lengthening. But my problem is that the gap knowledge/practice is not curable -the arrow goes from practice to knowledge. New books on medical history: Gloria Origgi have me a book on Semmelweiss by ... Louis Ferdinand Celine! (merci mille fois). Also Francois Lebrun Se soigner autrefois Mdecins, saints et sorciers aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siecles, Georges Vigarello Histoire des pratiques de sant, Jackie Pigeaud La maladie de l'ame, Collectif (Centre Jean Palerne): Rational et irrationel dans la mdecine ancienne et mdivale. I also got a long paper by Gerd Gigerenzer on medical practice and conditional probability (I guess it is the misunderstanding of Type 2 error that is costing us so much). Also I consider the work of Gary Taubes (and soon the book by Art DeVany) as documents in the history of medical errors. *** Canguilhem wonders why it took so long to figure out iatrogenesis : "Quant a l'iatrogenese medicale, comment peut-on penser que les mdecins aient attendu la deuxieme moiti du XXe siecle pour observer les effets secondaires" [Etudes d'histoire et de philosophie des sciences, Vrin, 1968, 1994]. Scribonius Largus : who accompanied Claudius, was interested in pharmacology but not interested in hidden causes. Comme indices plaidant en faveur de cette orientation empirique chez Scribonius, on peut noter la place de choix acorde a la pharmacologie, le respect scrupuleux des auctores, de meme que l'absence d'interet pour la connaissance des choses caches. [Joelle Jouanna-Bouchet, Scribonius Largus et Marcellus: entre rationnel et irrationnel, in Collectif, Rationnel et Irrationnel dans la mdecine ancienne et mdivale, Publications de l'Universit de Saint-tienne, 2003].
and they wanted ANOTHER measure, the idiots, as if there was one. Yet I keep seeing from the history of religions that survival and stability of belief systems correlates with the amount of negative advice and interdicts -- the ten commandments are almost all negative; the same with Islam. Do we need religions for the stickiness of the interdicts? Telling people NOT to smoke seems to be the greatest medical contribution of the last 60 years. Druin Burch, in the recently published Taking the Medicine
The harmful effect of smoking are roughly equivalent to the combined good ones of EVERY medical intervention developed since the war. (...) Getting rid of smoking provides more benefit than being able to cure people of every possible type of cancer" [emph. mine]
Life expectancy: Another problem. I keep hearing the fiction that medical practitioners doubled our life expectancy. Life expectancy increased because of 1) sanitation, 2) penicillin, 3) drop in crime. From the papers I see that medical practice may have contributed to 2-3 years of the increase, but again, depends where (cancer doctors might provide a positive contribution, family doctors a negative one) . Another fooled-by-randomness style mistake is to think that because life expectancy at birth was 30, that people lived 30 years: the distribution was massively skewed: the bulk of the deaths came from birth & childhood mortality. Conditional life expectancy was high --I do not know of many measurements (it should not be too hard) --just consider that Paleo men had no cancer, no tooth decay, almost no epidemics, no economists, and died of trauma. Perhaps legal enforcement contributed more than doctors to the increase in life .
60 Religion Protects You From Bad Science --Medicine, Expert Problems, and the Rationality of Temples
I-Medicine
Nobody seems to notice that over the millennia religions (all religions) have saved people from death because it protected them from doctors and science. Because of the illusion of control , we feel like doing something when facing a problem seeing an expert, etc. If religion is at least neutral then it is a great way to stay out of harms way: science, faux-experts, quacks, etc. Martial in his epigrams gives us an idea of the perceived expert problem in medicine in his time (i.e., the doctor causing more harm than expected, but exploiting his expert status): Nuper erat medicus, nunc est uispillo Diaulus: quod uispillo facit, fecerat et medicus I thought that Diaulus was a doctor not a caretaker but for him it appears to be the same job. Non habui febrem, Symmache, nunc habeo. I did not feel ill, Symmache; now I do (after your ministrations). Montaigne goes deeper. He reports on the attribution problem seen by the ancients not too different from current stockbrokers & economists. Doctors claimed responsibility for success and blame failure on mother nature. On demandoit un Lacedemonien qui l'avoit fait vivre sain si long temps: L'ignorance de la medecine, respondit il. Et Adrian l'Empereur crioit sans cesse, en mourant, que la presse des medecins l'avoit tu. A Lacedaemonian was asked what had made him live so long; he answered ignoring medecine". The Emperor Adrian continually exclaimed as he was dying that it was his doctors that had killed him. Mais ils ont cet heur, selon Nicocles, que le soleil esclaire leur succez, et la terre cache leur faute; et, outre-cela, ils ont une faon bien avantageuse de se servir de toutes sortes d'evenemens, car ce que la fortune, ce que la nature, ou quelque autre cause estrangere (desquelles le nombre est infini) produit en nous de bon et de salutaire, c'est le privilege de la medecine de se l'attribuer. Tous les heureux succez qui arrivent au patient qui est soubs son regime, c'est d'elle qu'il les tient. Les occasions qui m'ont guery, moy, et qui guerissent mille autres qui n'appellent point les medecins leurs secours, ils les usurpent en leurs subjects; et, quant aux mauvais accidents, ou ils les desavouent tout fait, en attribuant la coulpe au patient par des raisons si vaines qu'ils n'ont garde de faillir d'en trouver tousjours assez bon nombre de telles...
[Attribution Problem] Effectively you hear accounts of people erecting fountains of even temples to their favorite gods after these succeeded where doctors fail (see Vivian Nuttons Ancient Medicine, an interesting book for a start, though near-silent about my heroes the empiricists, and not too detailed about ancient practices outside of a few standard treatises). I truly believe that it was rational to resort to prayers in place of doctors: consider the track record. The risk of death effectively increased after a visit to the doctor. Sadly, this continued well into our era: the break-even did not come until early in the 20th Century. Which effectively means that going to the priest, to Lourdes, Fatima, or (in Syria), Saydnaya, aside from the mental benefits, provided a protection against the risks of exposure to the expert problem. Religion was at least neutral and it could only be beneficial if it got you away from the doctor. Montaigne on why the last thing a doctor needs is for you to be healthy [Agency Problem]. Nul medecin ne prent plaisir la sant de ses amis mesmes, dit l'ancien Comique Grec, ny soldat la paix de sa ville: ainsi du reste. The easy part is to show that religion was superior to science. It is hard to accept it: religion protects you from bad science. Now my conjecture, which I am trying to substantiate, is that the empiricists (Agrippa, Philinus, Menodotus, etc.) and to some extent the medical methodists, did not have the expert problem. The empiricists insisted on the I did not know while facing situations not exactly seen in the past, for which an exact treatment did not repeatedly yield a cure. The methodists did not have the same strictures against analogy, but were still careful.
Agrippa might be the only Pyrrhonian skeptic who was imprisoned for his writings (I guess if you do not take my brief jail episode in Lebanon into account).
Agrippa's Dilemma: Hermetic" Rebirth" and the Ambivalences of De vanitate and De occulta philosophia Renaissance quarterly [0034-4338] Keefer yr:1988 vol:41 iss:4 pg:61
probare , mais le sens actif du grec pithanon (qui persuade) est occult dans l'emploi de l'adjectif probabile dont tous les emplois attestes sont passifs ("qui peut etre prouv/approuv). [...] le sujet ne recoit plus passivement ce qui le persuade, c'est lui qui juge si une chose mrite son approbation. [Cicero translated Plato's Timaeus [believable rationalization/explanation] & [believable story] by probabilia, something we can give approval to.]
OLDER SEQUENCE
112- Prophets
The world is in three or more dimension. 1) In Two-Dimensions : Most people see it in two dimensions, but with some clarity --imagine what you miss living in a 3D world mistaking it for a 2D one. You get a lot of things right, but you do not understand the world. 2) In One-Dimension: Many see it with extreme precision, but in one single dimension (and don't know it). These are usually academics or commoditized practitioners --imagine what they miss. But what they lose in dimensions, they gain in accuracy. Almost all the time, they destroy knowledge. On the occasion, their precision allows them to hit on something real --but it is a rare Black Swan. 3) In Three or More Dimensions: Finally, a few, very few, see it in blurred three dimensions. They see things blurred, but they see them as they are. These are sometimes called prophets.
nothing about large deviations, for which the errors would be monstrous.
under certain classes of ignorance. I continue. Nouriel Roubini. Two days earlier, and five feet away, at Balthazar, I had lunch with my new friend and party-friend, Nouriel Roubini, who ( I am certain, alone among economists) predicted the current crisis --by predicting I mean seing the full extent of the damage. Nouriel, on top of his prescience, is a massively impressive and confident fellow, who uses his own brain to think. I asked him out of the hundreds of thousands of persons on the planet who deal in economics, whether academics , practitioners, journalists, or traders, how many saw this coming. He, modestly, said: a few. I only see him as the ONLY one among professional economists who saw it coming --I do not call myself an economist but a philosopher. 1) Some might have worried about housing, but I do not think that predicting a housing crisis meant predicting the crisis --you need to envision the consequences on the entire structure, the house of cards. I am certain that the crisis would have taken place even without a housing catalyst. 2) Many economists, like the empty suit Kenneth Rogoff claim, after the fact, to have seen something like it --but I wonder if this is not something in hindsight as he did not bark enough at the time; I need to see private investment portfolios and check the EVIDENCE that he and people like him were not exposed to bank stocks, general stocks, if they were even short the market (if they "knew" it would happen, did they take action?). So we live on a planet in which out of hundreds of millions of of people fed with trillions of pieces of information, hundreds of thousands of research papers and books, thousands of textbooks, etc., only a handful of citizens warned against the dangers we were facing. Do you feel comfortable being in such an environment? And the irony is that Nouriel and I didn't discuss crises more than the bare minimum; we are mostly interested in parties.
Thierry de la Villehuchet --an acquaintance of mine -- just killed himself in the aftereffects of the Madoff case. He had dragged his clients into investing with Madoff . "Killing himself over money?" I kept hearing. No, it is not about the money --it was other people's money. It is about dignity. I could not help comparing it to Madoff, pictured walking around Manhattan with a faint smirk --totally insensitive to the harm he caused. This is an aristocratic act coming from an aristocratic character: you take your own life when you believe that you failed somewhere -- and the solution is to inflict the ultimate penalty on yourself. It is not the money; but the embarrassment, the shame, the guilt that are hard to bear. Someone callous, indifferent to the harm done to others would have lived comfortably ("it is all about money"). A life of shame is not worth living. Christianity never allowed suicide; the stoics did --it allows a man to get the last word with fate. Thierry, veuillez recevoir l'expression de mon respect le plus profond.
Other Discovery: An original Arabic language medieval commentary on Galen's discussion of the empiricists: by anonymous reviewer of the differences between the three schools :analogists ( ) , empiricists ( ) and methodists ()
Bubbles are n a problem --we move by fads (cycles of fads-squeezes) and there is no reason to rectify human nature. However, equity bubbles are benign (particularly when they are not fueled by debt). Consider that the internet craze left us so much better off (and consider that companies incapable of borrowing 5 million from the bank could manage to raise a billion at an IPO) . Debt bubbles are not benign --leverage induces nonlinearities. There is an asymmetry: the equity owner gets almost all the positive uncertainty, the debt holder gets the negative. In my Fourth Quadrant problem (f. International Journal of Forecasting) I show that we need to "decomplexify" financial exposures and linearize them to face the switch into Extremistan. Apparently, Mediterranean cultures did not like debt but slowly relaxed the interdicts on lending and borrowing (except for Islamic Banking). Stocks have Ponzi characteristics. People discuss "value" in stocks as if it were something tangible --beyond a mere opinion, and a public opinion at that. Listed stocks are not "self-liquidating" --at least not in any realistic investment horizon; an investment in the market is largely a bet on what some other idiot will think of the investment in a few years, assign "value" to it, or invent a convincing and contagious narrative. It is simply psychology of the other idiot. This makes anyone investing for "hard" value extremely vulnerable. Most people who act conservative in their regular business become suckers from listening to the news.
three meals a day is for morons --we need episodes of hunger punctuated brief by periods of replenishing. Hunger improves insulin sensitivity, brain function, etc. So it is a good idea to, counterintuitively, fast on days when we need the energy, rather than the opposite. Our Platonic "make sense" indicates that you need to "eat well" during a period of physical stress --the opposite holds true empirically: fasting chemo patients do much much better. Without actual testing, every cancer patient has been told to "eat well but not excessively". The same applies to thirst. Stochastic sleep: I have not seen anything on the subject in the literature, but I am also realizing that stochastic sleeping periods might be good for us. I have been traveling on red eye flights and went through such memorable experiences as a whole night standing at Mumbai airport (there were no seats available and I needed to stay near the gate). After a sleepless night. I always manage to catch up, as I design my own schedule. I am now discovering that sleep if vastly more enjoyable after periods of deprivation --much like the taste of water under extreme thirst. So, by tinkering, I figured out that I fare best under the following conditions: no breakfast, working out randomly (but in a lumpy way: long walks & intense weight lifting without a scheduled time limit), "working" randomly, fasting when working out, avoiding modern carbs (and modernized fruits), avoiding contact with economists and finance idiots, taking red eye flights & fasting during episodes of jet lag and similar physical stressors.
No slack. Only idiots (such as Banks) optimize, not realizing that a simple model error can blow through their capital (it just did). Goldman Sachs experienced 24 x the daily transaction volume in August 2007 would 29 times have blown up the system? The only weak point I know of financial markets is their ability to drive people & companies to efficiency against risks of extreme events. I was in a hotel room in Istanbul when the internet cable connection died. I called the operator who connected me to a gentleman who had a strong Indian accent I see, sir, that rrrrooooom 223 should now have a connection, sir, now, go, sir, connect again, sir. I asked him out of curiosity if there were many Indian techies in Istanbul (I was also impressed with his non-Mediterranean politeness). No, sir, I am not in Istanbul, sir, he replied. He was in India and could tell that room 223 was now connected. So efficiency is driving us to use Bangalore (etc.) as our IT because it is very optimal. But what happens to the world if there is a problem there? Are we equipped? Option-theoretic analysis : redundancy is like long an option. You certainly pay for it, but it may be worth it. Biology: Complex systems, like the human body, and mother nature, are NOT optimized. They harbor plenty of duplicate pathways, plenty of redundancies.
scholars and economic historians did not notice that the traits that we think CAUSED the industrial revolution have existed in many places, including 14th Century England, without leading to anything. Also many of the IMF/World bank dogmas & recommendations seem to just correspond to a misunderstanding of a trivial causal mechanism: incentives, low taxation, even institutions etc. may be just necessary, not sufficient (and certainly not CAUSAL) in generating economic growth. It is easy for scholars to confuse necessary and causal. I also reread a few of Joel Mokyr's papers & his two main books. He seems to impart a role to an "epistemic base", propositional knowledge, falling into the conventional FBR trap: just as we impart skills to businessmen without considering that they could have been lucky --we are prone to make the mistake of skills attribution more readily than the reverse. Common understanding in history of science is that engineering leads to mathematics which in turn leads to better engineering. Wrong or not that true. I showed with my investigation of the history of the Black-Scholes formula that mathematics is often there to lecture birds how to fly, fit backwards to justify the use of a technology, often in a lame way. Indeed, last spring, when I gave a lecture in the sociology department of LSE on the Black-Scholes-Merton scam, the academics in the audience told me that the previous lecturer, Phil Scranton of Rutgers, made similar points about the jet engine. We had been building and using jet engines, without anyone truly understanding the theory. Builders needed the original engineers to make things work. Theory came later, in a lame way, to satisfy the intellectual bureaucrats. But thats not what you tend to read in standard histories of technology I am convinced that, when writing history, we project our mental biases in a way to produce agency and increase the role of theory. Mokyrs other problem is that he focuses on applications that are linear in nature, those that have tractable mathematics, thin-tailed statistics: conventional engineering [Mediocristan] assuming theories work there. His ideas of knowledge base do not apply to medicine or technology in the information age where an epistemic base causes mental tunneling. Indeed medicine is an area in which theories and ideas have been bad for our health. Or take economics: we still dont understand the subject. So it is easy for motivated researchers to focus on some applications in which propositional knowledge can lead to consequences and generalize to everything. This reminds me of a hotshot mathematician who gave a lecture about the uses of mathematics in society (producing examples of traffic lights, cryptography, etc.). He did not consider the non-mathematicized non-mathematicizable applications, etc.
which we cannot predict & one we cannot control): the stoics & the Pyrrhonian skeptics. The stoics advocated focusing on behavior, rather than result. The Pyrrhonian skeptics advocated the need to remain skeptical about the consequence of any action, as we are not able to gauge whether it should have beneficial or adverse effects. is that state of lucid indifference that results from the suspension of belief, the absence of anxiety about the future. While the two schools traded insults & were quite divided, particularly about Cosmology (the stoics were quite dogmatic) many moderns, say Charron or Montaigne (or this lesser author) have had sympathies for both schools. Recall that the Levantine origin of both ideas is striking:. Both ataraxia & the stoic separation between labor & the fruits of the labor were present in the culture of the Orient that strip of eastern cultures East of the Fertile Crescent. I enjoy doing some occasional cultural archeology to dispel myths about the arrow of influence& I can see compelling traces of the in the Arabic-language wisdom in which I grew up [& I am convinced that it did not travel from the Athenian Academy to the Arabs, but in reverse]: Do not give too much certainty to consequences of some events. You do not know what is going to be bad for you.
I finally found a fable illustrating the dictum about a King & his wise minister who is conscious of counterfactuals [to translate later, during a severe episode of boredom, or if I find it necessary to include the segment in my next book]. : .. ..! : .. : .. . : ! .. . .. . .. : .. . : : .. ..! : .
A reader (Jean-Francois Leon) sent me this excerpt from a short story by Herman Hesse (cannot be found in English). Parabole Chinoise Un vieil homme du nom de Chunglang, qui signifie Matre des rochers , possdait un petit lopin de terre dans les montagnes. Un jour, il perdit lun de ses chevaux. Des voisins vinrent alors lui exprimer leurs condolances pour ce malheur. Mais le vieil homme leur demanda : Pourquoi pensez-vous que cela soit un malheur ? Et voil que quelques jours plus tard lanimal revint, suivi dune horde de chevaux sauvages. nouveau les voisins apparurent, pour le fliciter cette fois-ci de cette aubaine. Mais le vieil homme leur rtorqua : Pourquoi pensez-vous que cela soit un aubaine ?
Les chevaux tant devenus trs nombreux, le fils du vieil homme se prit de passion pour lquitation, mais un beau jour il se cassa la jambe. Alors, encore une fois, les voisins vinrent prsenter leurs condolances et nouveau le vieil homme leur rtorqua : Pourquoi pensez-vous que cela soit un accident malheureux ? Lanne suivante, la commission des Grands Flandrins arriva dans la montagne. Elle recrutait des hommes forts pour devenir valets de pied de lempereur et porter la chaise de celui-ci. Le fils du vieil homme, toujours bless la jambe, ne fut pas choisi. Chunglang ne put rprimer un sourire. Hermann Hesse , loge de la vieillesse, p. 146, trad. A. Cade, Livre de poche, n 3376.
I had been trying to catch journalists red-handed committing a blatant narrative fallacy. [People have asked me to show instances in which reading the newspapers reduce our understanding of the world. Overcausation is just one of them. Framing is another severe problem.] I have been on a lookout for evidence of overcausation by finding cases of liquidation driven market moves in which you are quite certain that economic interpretations are bogus. People only announce the liquidation after it is completed.
Soc Gen sold $70 billion worth of stock on Monday Jan 22, 2008, to liquidate the rogue traders positions. They did it the French way (clumsily, one single stressed out trader; they did not realize or did not take into account that NY was closed for the Martin Luther King holiday). They kept selling at lower and lower prices. The NYT journalists (they were not alone) attributed the move in markets to "fears of a recession". They cant just provide facts and avoid narrating.
Aritobulos : Un Aristobule voulut etre lhistorien des conquetes dAlexandre le Grand, quil avait suivi jusque dans lInde, & lon peut croire, quil possedait du talent pour cela, puisque ce Monarque prenait la peine de livre les ecrits en voyageant sur le fleuve Hydaspes. Il ne put sempecher pourtant de jetter son livre dans leau, voiant, que contre toute vrit, & contre toute apparence, lui faisait tuer dun coup de flcche des Elephans dans un combat contre le roi Porus; ajoutant, quun tel historien meritait, quon le precipitat dans une riviere, pour avoir debit des choses si notoirement fausss. [in the original 17th C. erratic spelling]
stoic doctrines]. Ierodiakonou & Vanderbroucke [1993]. More fundamentally, the Greeks wondered what gave rise to the stochastic nature of medicine. Here, their ways split. In the second century AD Alexander of Aphrodisias held it to be an inherent property of medicine. Medicine does not proceed by syllogisms to the effect that something necessarily and invariably is the case. Rather, medical propositions are concluded in terms such as "for the most part", or "in only a rare case". These expressions hold true generally, but not necessarily for the individual. Others such as Galen in the same century, believed that medical science in itself was as impeccable as any other but that its practical application was fallible because of variation in the individual patient. [Medicine as a stochastic art. Ierodiakonou, Katerine,Vandenbroucke, Jan P., Lancet; 2/27/93, Vol. 341 Issue 8844, p542, 2]. I looked for Ierodiakonous research (she is a classicist, V. is a medical researcher) on the vanishing Aenasidemians.
86- Xenophons Socrates, a no-nonsense fellow despises Episteme for its own sake
Wow! The Socrates of the Memorabilia is no-nonsense down to earth; he despises sterile knowledge, and the experts who study matters without practical consequence when so many useful and important things are neglected (instead of looking at stars to understand causes, figure out how you can use them to navigate; use geometry to measure land, but no more. Note his definition of usefulness is not just about matters material; it has largely to do with conduct). In Book I, he talks about the (useless) knowledge of heavenly matters in which specialists disagree. [I struggle with the Greek, a page a day, but so much worth it just on account of the .] Book IV, vii, [4] , , , ' , : .] [5] , , , , . ' : : . He uses techne and episteme interchangeably. I will move next to Oeconomicus but his idea about economics is also practical estate management [so far from the theorizing academic imbeciles , Samuelson-style, who get the Nobel]. [On that score, the effect of the success of The Black Swan is that the new head of the IMF, Dominique Strauss-Kahn decided to get rid of many of his economists, in a first such cost cutting move, because he found that they lack practical sense. ]
Huets source. Every time I find a original thinker who figured out the skeptical solution to the Black Swan problem, it turns out that he may just be cribbing a predecessor not maliciously, but we forget to dig to the roots. Humes
problem is certainly not Humes. I thought it was Huets but now I see another predecessor.
attributed by our textbooks to the Averroes-Ghazali polemic. If it had been explained to them they would have been amazed, as their successors today are amazed. I am a little ashamed, because Arabic is one of my native languages, and I am reporting from sources developed by scholars illiterate in Arabic (and sufficiently overconfident & lacking in erudition to not realize it). It is remarkable how few texts have been translated, how many discussions of Arabic philosophy are based on minimal evidence. In addition, Gutas sees a confirmation bias: It seems that one always starts with a preconception of what Arabic philosophy should be saying, and then concentrating only on those passages which seem to be supporting such a bias, thereby appearing to corroborate the preconception on the basis of the texts themselves.
76- The Holy and the Profane: Script is Holy, Speech is Profane
Athens- There is something holy about the written. People speak in the profane. But they write the vernacular in the holy script of their religion. This is counterintuitive because I thought that they would express the holy language in their local script rather than the vernacular in the holy script. This leads to the aberration of people speaking the same language while writing it in different ways, according to their rite. Serbians and Croats speak what can still be considered identical languages, but write it in Cyrillic (the Orthodox Serbs) or Latin (the Catholic Croats); Maronites in Lebanon did not speak Syriac, but Arabic, which they wrote in Syriac script; Jews spoke Arabic but wrote it with Hebrew letters (Maimonides wrote Guide to the Perplexed in Arabic); Hindi and Urdu are almost the same language (with now different accents) but are written differently. Of course languages start to diverge once they are spoken by separate populations. I noticed it when I was in a Romanian Orthodox church in Bucharest. There was something strange about their script. They are Orthodox but write their Romance language in the Latin alphabet. Somehow you can figure out a rule from the exception.
Religion 1 Orthodox (Serbia) Orthodox (Russia, Bulgaria) Moslem (Pakistan) Maronite Christians GreekOrthodox Pagan
Script 1 Cyrillic
Script 2 Latin
Cyrillic
Latin
Arabic Karshuni (Syriac), Estranghelo GraecoArabic Aramaic Script (Decapolis, Hawran, Roman Arabia)
Hindi Arabic
Western Arabic
Catholic (Malta)
Latin Hebrew
Arabic Arabic
Medieval Jewish Arabic (e.g. Maimonides) (Sephardic) German dialect (Yiddish)Modern times Farsi Turkic Jewish (Ashkenazi)
Hebrew
German
Latin (~)
Arabic Arabic
Coptic
lgre dans l'eau que hors de l'eau. Et la plupart des choses sont des mlanges dont nous ne pourrions pas reconnatre les lments constitutifs. 7. Quantits ou compositions: Que la quantit et la qualit ont des proprits qui peuvent tre connues. Mais le vin, bu avec modration, fortifie, consomm avec excs, affaiblit. La rapidit est relative d'autres vitesses. La chaleur et le froid ne sont connus que par comparaison. 8. Relation: Que les relations entre les choses peuvent tre nonces. Mais la droite et la gauche, l'avant et l'arrire, le haut et le bas, dpendent d'une infinit de variables, et la nature du monde est que tout est toujours changeant. La relation d'un frre une sur n'est pas la mme que d'un frre un frre. Qu'est-ce qu'une journe ? Tant d'heures ? Tant de lumire solaire ? Le temps entre deux minuits ? 9. Frquence et raret: Qu'il y a des choses tranges et rares. Mais les tremblements de terre sont frquents dans certaines parties du monde, la pluie est rare dans d'autres. 10. Coutumes, lois, opinions. I am asking around: the Arabic and Syriac speakers certainly knew of Aenesidemus but where are the texts?
was the ideal Christmas gift. And not just in Victorian England: In France, too, it was a delicacy. In modern Greek, they bear the name , portokali as the Portuguese marketed them. So were tomatoes imported from Central America (a tomato is technically a fruit). So were carrots roots were bitter in the ancient world. Berries (tut ) were the main fruit. But strawberries they were not: they were small, wild and tart. There is no biblical name for strawberries. I am about to go to Brazil papaya, (modern) bananas, mangoes. All these are newly prevalent in our diet. What is sweet is not so natural.
69 Because
Amioun- I like to play the narrative fallacy & always answer questions with a because, especially when it is absurd but people are always impressed by the because and nod as if I said something intelligent. My usual answer when I run out of something silly & confusing is to tell people because I am from Amioun, or because I am originally from Amioun. The problem is that I am now vacationing in Amioun & I offered a few people the answer because I am from Amioun, causing complications in the conversation. I did not realize that people in Amioun would not buy the argument with the same gullibility as the nonAmioun set. The next time I will say: because I live in New York.
I keep saying that accepting randomness & chance does not imply atheism. Just one instance:
Here is a more explicit reference to the epistemic opacity of things (to humans):
As I said, it is a faux-problem. Accepting the existence of mysteries, the impenetrable... and having respect for them.
67 Huetiana
I found a volume of posthumous essays by Huet called Huetiana put together by his admirers c. 1722. It is so depressing to realize that, being born close to 4 centuries after him, and having done most of my reading with material written after his death, I am not much more advanced in wisdom than he was moderns at the upper end are no wiser than their equivalent among the ancients (just consider the modern war mongers, the road-rage prone machos, the then not existing but newly created categories of finance idiots and economists, etc.). True, for a Fideist -Pyrrhonian skeptic he offers many more causes than I could expect; but no nitpicking with such a man. Quiconque, dit Horace, sera regard en naissant par les muses dun oeil favorable, il mprisera les Couronnes des Jeux Olympiques des Grecs, & des triomphes des Romains, & leur prfrera les dlices dune retraite studieuse, & dune savante solitude. Il faut de plus un grand courage pour rsister aux accidents de la vie, capable dinterrompre les douceurs de son tude, aux ncessitez publiques, aux guerres (...), aux perscutions des envieux, (..) et leur vie retirez les expose plus que les autres. Quant un homme de cette terre sera consacrez aux Lettres, quil ne cherche la rcompense que dans les Lettres mmes, & (...) du haut de cette sainte montagne, o la vraie rudition a plac sa demeure, il regarde le reste du monde avec compassion, & avec un grand mpris des erreurs et des vaines occupations du vulgaire. [I translate liberally: Horace saw that he who is well treated by the muses (...) will despise the honors, the Olympic Medals, the rewards of a common life. He will have to resist the persecutions of the envious (...) to which his retirement & solitude will expose him more than others. From this Holy Mountain where true erudition placed his residence, he observes the rest of the world with compassion and with a profound disdain of the transactions & trite activities of the vulgar.] Another gem. He was an octogenarian, perhaps a nonagenerian when he wrote: Ni le feu de la jeunesse, ni lembarras des affaires,ni la diversit des emplois, ni la socit de mes gaux, la plupart dinclinations fort diffrentes, ni le tracas du monde, non pu modrer cet amour indomptable de lrudition, qui ma toujours possd : & dans l age avanc o je suis, je la sens aussi vive quau plus fort de mes tudes. [Neither the fire of youth, nor the burden of business, nor the company of equals (many of different proclivities), nor the noise of the world, managed to temper this untamable love of erudition; & in my advanced age I feel it as intensely as when I was a student.] Huet did not think much of Montaigne (Montagne), whom he considered of mildly inferior intellect & knowledge (I read elsewhere that Montaigne barely knew Greek, a big deal for Huet; he snubbed Bayle because he did not know Hebrew). [Note: Montaigne was called Montagne at the time (the spelling Montaigne comes from the whim of a printer).] But he definitely despised Montaignes readers. ...le brviaire des honntes paresseux, & des ignorants studieux, qui veulent senfariner de quelque connoissance du monde, & et de quelques teinture des Lettres. A peine trouverez-vous un Gentilhomme de campagne qui
veuille se distinguer des preneurs de livres, sans un Montagne sur la chemine. [The breviary (or cliff-notes) of honest -lazy people and the studiously ignorant who (...) want to catch a tincture of the letters (...) It is hard to find a country gentleman who wants to distinguish himself from other hare-catchers without a Montagne on his fireplace.]
Fools do not want to accept that the real thing is better than the electronic. In other words, a text does not simplify a book. A book is so much real than a PDF on my hard disk. The experience of reading something you hold in your hands is more aesthetically rewarding: a book is better looking than a flat screen it has an extra dimension. But to me, the main advantage is that I remember far, far better what I read in a book. My memory solidifies around hard objects, specific books, parts of my library. The classical mnemotechnic originates with the Greeks method of the loci: it consists in attaching memories to physical objects, a stone in a wall, a specific part of a ceiling, etc. You imagine a building & invest some of the locations with things to remember. In Lurias account of the synesthete who could remember everything in great detail, there is a striking scene. Sh. [the patient-protagonist], has his memory failing him on a small detail because there is a cloud hiding the object to which the memory was attached. I do the same when I read a book: the ideas are incarnations in specific objects of my library. [ A rendering on a computer screen is not permanent, a book is]I remember specific pages & get in a state of rage when someone tries to help organize or alphabetize my books. I also remember the physical notes I jot down on the front of a book, &, five years later, looking at them triggers a chain of remembrances... In the picture above I took notes on the book & just glancing at the front pages allows me to remember the ideas of the book & the conditions under which I read them. The book above it is very comprehensive, very deep, & covers the main ideas in social science, so I do not want to miss anything & would like to retain most of its contents decades from now (I am still on page 300).
the recent amplification of the variations and the neglect of the commonalities. Set aside the Egyptian and Babylonian heritage, forget that Christianity (NEw Testament) is a Levantine (mostly Syrian) production; just consider that both East and West share the same alphabet: alpha (aleph), beta (bet->house ), delta (dal, dalet), gamma (jim, gimmel->camel )come from the Phoenician alphabet (bet and gml are still present in spoken Arabic and Hebrew); they evolved very gradually to take present shapes. But they are the same. Just think of the difference between uppercase printed letters and handwritten words: they would appear to be two different systems and languages to an observer who is not literate in the language. Both Euro-centrists and Occidentalists make the mistake of overcategorization. Further, the similarities between the Arabs and Byzantines have been downplayed by both sides. Take this fact I discovered on the plane back from Las Vegas. Four Caliphs had Greek-Byzantine mothers (Al-Wathiq, Al-Muntasir, Al-Muhtadi,& Al-Mutadid), and one of them (Al-Muntasir, Haroun Al Rashids grandson) was Greek! Add that to the fact that seven Roman Emperors were of partial or full Syrian blood. Finally I showed a graph of the rise of the US stock market since 1900, on a regular (non-Log) plot. Without logarithmic scaling we see a huge move in the period after1982 the bulk of the variation comes from that segment, which dwarfs the previous rises. It resembles Murrays graph about the timeline of the quantitative contributions of civilization, which exhibits a marked jump in 1500. Geometric (i.e. multiplicative) growth overestimates the contribution of the ending portion of a graph.
A certain business publisher told Rolf Dobelli (the Lucerne novelist) that he knows the cause of The Black Swans success, why it became a bestseller: It has an animal, and a color. He just looked at success and imparted a reason from the most visible traits. The publisher, being a prominent business publisher, did not look at the numerous flops that have both an animal and a color on their covers (there are 75 books with Black Swan in their title and they are uniformly distributed on Amazon (rank-wise). I did not even look for other colors or other animals). Nor did he read Chapter 8 of The Black Swan (my own The Black Swan) on silent evidence. Conclusion: I suspect that he got it backwards (he is a business publisher and should be particularly prone to the n. fallacy, be it only from reading all the crap he publishes). If anything, an animal and a color would have been historically associated with lower sales, which is the reason he has not noticed how many such books there are in the low-selling bins.
61 Aesthetics & Religion [Platonicity & Empiricisms]: Two Interesting Thinkers In More than One Respect
Religion has very little to do with belief; it is an indivisible package of aesthetics, ethics, social-emotional commitments, and transmission of , a set of customs and rituals inherited from the elders. Indeed the complication of belief is mostly a Western Christianity type of constructed problems, and a modern one at that: ask an Eastern Orthodox monk what he believes, and he will be puzzled: he would tell you what he practices. [I discussed the amin in an earlier note]. Orthodoxy is principally liturgy, fasting, practices, and tradition; it is an ornate religion that focuses on aesthetics and requires a very strong commitment. Belief is meaningless; practice is real. What we now translate by veneration, is literally bowing down to the ground a very physical act [Note that I am not partaking of the current debate on religion out of disrespect for almost all the participants: aside from being journalistic in the worst bildungsphilistinistic sense, particularly when they talk about probability, most are not even wrong]. Two thinkers stand out: the pagan apologist Libanius of Antioch (friend of the Roman Emperor Julian the Apostate) who attacked Christianity for the very same reasons he would defend it today against such philosophasters as Dawkins its destruction of the old practices, the abandonment of the accumulated mysteries, it simplistic move away from classical erudition. And, mostly, its belief . Libanius was a formidable orator, the last Greek purist in Syria. More on him, later. The second one is Saint John Damascene one of the fathers of the Greek Church, the one who attacked the iconoclasts and to whom we owe the restoration of icons. Saint John Damascene hAgios Ioannis Damaskenos, was unusual in many respects. He was Syrian, but not apparently Greek-Syrian, born (I assume) Yahya Ibn Mansour Ibn Sergion (Sergius). If his real name was Yahya, it would be Arabic for John the Syrian version would be Yuhanna, or modern Hanna . [Some documents claim that his name was Mansur, changed into Yuhanna]. Anyway, he was apparently Arabic not Syriac-Aramaic speaking, as he reportedly learned Syriac during his philosophical education. He was born in Damacus c. 678. He was trained to be part of the Omayad administration in spite of being a Christian, his father was the equivalent of finance minister of Al-Walid and John took that job as it was, as most professions were, hereditary. John was a true polymath, his areas were: music, mathematics, classics, oration, finance, logic, Christian theology, linguistics, etc. Around the age of 30 (or so), he left finance to become a monk and went to live at the monastery Mar Saba south of Jerusalem. Now the interesting part: in 726 the Byzantine emperor Leo issued his edict against the veneration of images. John of Damascus was the chief iconodule, and wrote three main treatises in Greek. He benefited from the Dhimmi protection of the Caliph as Christians could not be persecuted ...by other Christians. My ancestors benefited from such protection and you need to give credit where credit is due! Note here that it was Islam that protected the Greek Orthodox Church from the Byzantine Emperor. And note that John the Damascene never set foot outside the Arab rulers land. So the greatest single contributor to Greek Orthodox Aesthetics and Byzantine music was an Arabic speaking Christian operating in Arab land [note that St John calls Greek, by hellenoi , meant pagans Greek Orthodox meant Byzantine). This Arab protection did not prevent John from writing an aggressive treatise against Isl*m and its prophet. He was also called golden speech owing to his erudition ( I will translate when I have nothing better to do; I hate translating):
. .
. ( ) . . . 8 (735) .
Another historical irony early this century the now called Antiochian Greek-Orthodox church proceeded to translate from the Greek (Johns adoptive tongue) into Koranic Arabic (his native one) his hymns & chants. I wonder if he would have approved of it. Much of this activity took place at the Deir Balamand near my village of Amioun (around 7 miles). [One can listen to the Choirs of Balamand on U-tube, with some Greek left untranslated]. As Orthodox Christians (as well as the earlier Christians during the patristic tradition), liturgy, rituals and icons are central to our identity: Orthodoxy is embedded in icons. It is also embedded in chants. And not just chants: the lamentations of the epitaphion (say Zoi en tafo) require grueling episodes of fasting. When I probe into the demarcation between the holy and the empirical, I insist that both are physical. I dress up my ideas in stories I try to make good use of the narrative fallacy. Art is physical.
Time for some revision of historical reputations. Historians keep piling on the Byzantine for the alleged pettiness of their disputes. I hold that if the Byzantines argued, it was because it was a truly collegiate system & each bishop was entitled to voice his opinion. The system was (& still is) bottom up. The main Patriarchs now have more clout than in the past, but they cannot do anything without consulting each other. If the Westerners seemed more focused & less Byzantine, it was because their system was top-down & the Pope was the big boss. Also the dispute may have very little to do with a diphthong. Gibbon: The Greek word, which was chosen to express this mysterious resemblance, bears so close an affinity to the orthodox symbol, that the profane of every age have derided the furious contests which the difference of a single diphthong excited between the Homoousians & the Homoiousians . In the Nicene creed: , , OR is it . The difference is very deep. On that, later.
Even the lay population was heavily involved in the disputes: (...)the eager pursuit of religious controversy afforded a new occupation to the busy idleness of the metropolis: & we may credit the assertion of an intelligent observer, who describes, with some pleasantry, the effects of their loquacious zeal. 'This city,' says he, 'is full of mechanics & slaves, who are all of them profound theologians, & preach in the shops & in the streets. If you desire a man to change a piece of silver, he informs you wherein the Son differs from the Father; if you ask the price of a loaf, you are told, by way of reply, that the Son is inferior to the Father; & if you inquire whether the bath is ready, the answer is, that the Son was made out of nothing. [The observer was Gregory of Nyssa].
Amioun
Controlled experiment can easily show absence of design in medical research: you compare the results of top-down directed research to randomly generated discoveries. Well, the U.S. government provides us with the perfect experiment for that: the National Cancer Institute that came out of the Nixon war on cancer in the early 1970s. Despite the Herculean effort and enormous expense, only a few drugs for the treatment of cancer were found through NCIs centrally directed, targeted program. Over a twenty-year period of screening more than 144,000 plant extracts, representing about 15,000 species, not a single plant-based anticancer drug reached approved status. This failure stands in stark contrast to the discovery in the late 1950s of a major group of plant-derived cancer drugs, the Vinca Alcaloids a discovery that came about by chance, not through directed research. From Happy Accidents: Serendipity in Modern Medical Breakthroughs, by Morton Meyers, a book that just came out. It is a MUST read. Please go buy it. Read it twice, not once. Although the author does not take my drastic stochastic tinkering approach, he provides all kind of empirical evidence against the role of design. He does not directly discuss the narrative fallacy(q.v.) and the retrospective distortion (q.v.) but he certainly allows us to rewrite the history of medicine. We did not realize that cures for cancer had been coming from other brands of research. You search for noncancer drugs and find something you were not looking for (and vice versa). But the interesting constant: a- The discoverer is almost always treated like an idiot by his colleagues. Meyers describes the vicious side effect of peer reviewing. b- Often people see the result but cannot connect the dots (researchers are autistic in their own way). c- The members of the guild gives the researcher a hard time for not coming from their union. Pasteur was a chemist not a doctor/biologist. The establishment kept asking him where is your M.D., monsieur. Luckily Pasteur had too much confidence to be deterred. d- Many of the results are initially discovered by an academic researchers who neglects the consequences because it is not his job --he has a script to follow. Or he cannot connect the dots because he is a nerd. Meyers uses Darwin as the ultimate model: the independent gentleman scholar who does not need anyone and can follow a lead when he sees it. e- It seems to me that discoverers are usually nonnerds. Egomaniacs, perhaps, but certainly of the nonnerd category. Now it is depressing to have to review the works of the late Roy Porter, a man with remarkable curiosity and a refined intellect, who wrote many charming books on the history of medicine. Does the narrative fallacy cancels everything he did? I hope not. But we urgently need to rewrite the history of medicine without the ex post explanations. Meyers started the process: he provides data for modern medicine since, say, Pasteur. I am more interested in the genesis of the field before the Galenic nerdification.
\ (The view from my study in Amioun. 2 parents, 4 out of 4 grandparents, 8 out of 8 great-grandparents, and 12 out of 16 great-great-grandparents (+ more) originate from the strip of 3 miles 3 villages -- on the left of the picture. All
grandparents great-grandparents, great-great-grandparents, and almost all great-great-great-grandparents are buried there. )
53 Spinoza or Averroes? Budapest -- One of the elements in Spinozas Tractatus is the separation between the sage endowed with esoteric
knowledge and the unwashed who need exoteric knowledge, hence religion, as guidance, as they cannot be left to their own devices religion becomes a package for the untrained, which explains its allegorical attributes, which the sage needs not take literally. Well, sorry, but this is at the heart of the thought of Averroes (Abul-Walid or In Rushd) who, c. 450 years earlier, held that religion was a way to bring philosophy (wisdom) to the masses the unenlightened, while the sages (ahl el hikmah) or philosophers ( followers of Aristotelian & Alfarabi logic and standards of evidence) had some dispensation from literal interpretation. Averroes, like Spinoza after him, saw no demarcation between religion (din = law) and philosophy (& between the righteous, the sage, the learned, and the secular saint). The very words esoteric and exoteric (batini and zhahiri) are his. I just cant believe how tolerant religion was in Averroess daysand how modern his ideas (and his brand of religious law) were. I wish the neocon-blabloIsl*mologists and sub-protoenlightenment-philistines (Harris) would go beyond the perceived CNN wisdom when they talk about tolerance & religions and, instead, tried to extend a hand to the Averroean in the land of Is**m. [The masses need heuristics they will create them themselves. I have been repeating that once you remove the opiate of religion the masses will ask to be fooled by randomness, & could substitute the far more criminal opiate of nationalism (WW1, WW2 + more) & the even more superstitious (and far less elegant) activity called economics]. I am spending a long weekend in Budapest on my way to Amioun, but cant get into touristy moods. Sole occupation: Platonicity, a-Platonicity, our dependence on heuristics for mental representations, and how a hyperempiricist can live in a hyperaesthetic soul, that kind of things... In other words, how to become a sage. On the plane I was immersing myself into Averroes (Abul-Walid ben Ahmad ben Rushd) in Fasl-il-Maqal wa Taqrir ma bayn al Sharia wal Hikmah minal Ittisal: On the Respective Roles of Religious Law and Philosophical Wisdom: A Decisive Tractate (Ive been reading it on my Mac laptop; pulling a leather-bound Arabic language book on a Transatlantic flight would cause my overweight businessman-on-the-seat-next-to-mine to have a heart attack).
52 Baudrillard-Give the Dead Some Respect-Against Atheism The man is dead. The body is still warm; someone directs uninhibited verbal poison at him. There is something sub-subsecond-ratish about trashing a thinker ad hominem (except to respond to ad hominem attacks as they usually come from easy targets). But worse: there is something shabby about using an obituary to sully someones memory. The gentleman in question is called Robert Fulford, of The National Post. The dead man is Baudrillard, a man of charm who knew that he was generally wrong, & whose ideas I did not share. This is making me develop great sympathy for Baudrillard and a profound disgust for Robert Fulford. This brings me to my comparative discussion Benoit Mandelbrot/ Susan Sontag that I truncated on the day Sontag died. I met both on the very same day, in New York, in October 2001. At the BBC studio where we were interviewed (separately) about our books, Sontag was told that I dealt in randomness and developed in interest in talking to me. When she learned by looking at my bio on the dust jacket that I was in markets, she gave me the look as if I had killed her mother. She turned her back to me as I was in mid-sentence, leaving me to the discomfort of having to speak without audience. It feels extremely humiliating to be speaking to someones back; it felt like the worst, most demeaning insult I ever had in my life. I swallowed my pride and, as I had an afternoon to kill, I forced myself to go to B&N get a copy of her book. I forced myself to enjoy her style, in spite of the frustration, and, after 4 pages, I was able to find it charming but I kept wondering & introspecting: had I not had witnessed closed-mindedness and abject manners, how would my appreciation of the text turn out to be? (Levantine patricians used to be taught that manners > acts; it is worse to be rude to someone than try to murder him.) A few hours later, the exact opposite encounter in every possible sense of the word took place. That evening I met Mandelbrot at dinner, a meeting which should remain one of the most important episodes in my life (I finally found someone to talk to about randomness). I continue with an excerpt from The Black Swan. When I first met Mandelbrot I asked him why an established scientist like him who should have more valuable things to
do with his life would take an interest in such vulgar topic as finance. I thought that finance and economics were just a place where one learned from various empirical phenomena and filled up ones bank account with f*** you cash, before leaving for bigger and better things. Mandelbrots answer was: data , a goldmine of data. Indeed, everyone forgets that he started in economics before moving onto physics and the geometry of nature. [Chap 16] In The Black Swan, right after the section that Ive just excerpted, I retold the Sontag episode and made a comparison between Sontag and Mandelbrots openness to ideas, a sort of comparative tableau of the literary intellectual v/s the scientist as a natural philosopher, etc. But I removed the part about Sontag on the day of her death, in December 2004, as it did not feel honorable & elegant. I remember rushing to my MS remove the section. I never put it back, never wrote about it until now. Even then, >2 years later, I would have preferred to avoid tinkering with someones memory and I am only describing the frustration of the episode. Oraisons funbres All men have flaws, all men have some measure of greatness in them. By the confirmation bias (q.v.), you can write a panegyric or you can write a philippic of the very same person. But nowhere the beauty of sentiment is greater than with the eulogy, the funeral oration the sanctification of someones memory, a sort of glorified look at the half-full side of the story. Entre ici, Jean Moulin, avec ton terrible cortege! (Malraux...you can see it on UTube!) Bossuet did close to 500 orations, only twelve of which were oraisons funbres; these are the ones we use to learn elegant French prose. Beyond the eulogy and the funeral oration, the more subtle elegy has a noble tone to it. True, do I care about the truth or about the sacred? Both, of course. The most potent memory of my visit to Saint Petersburg was the sight of young girls dressed in Sunday clothes coming to put flowers in front of Pushkins memorial statue. My soft spot for Mitterand comes from his expertise in cemeteries and his compulsive honoring of the dead (+ his obsession with Il deserto dei tartari). People who care care about the dead. I wonder if there is a code of honor of what to say about someone when the body is still warm. I dont like living in a world without elegance; I dont like living in a world in which people speak ill of the dead, & thanks to the long tail & the tailor made web, I would like to construct my own world in way that fits my sense of ethics/aesthetics. [Note 1: My Stand Againt Atheism. This, and many other things explain why I just cannot understand atheism. I just cannot. If I were to take rationality to its limit, I would then have to treat the dead no differently from the unborn, those who came and left us in the same manner as those who do not exist yet. Otherwise I would be making the mistake of sunk costs [endowment effect]. I cannot & I just do not want to. Homo sum! I want to stay rational in the profane , not the sacred.]
Peter Bevelin commented on the previous note linking it to the fallacy of silent evidence survivorship bias [cf. glossary
of The Black Swan]. He sees the compounding consequences of such distortions on cultural formation. Replication compounds distortions since new distortions will take place at every step; we lose track of the original and the true. Distortions have Fat Tails. [It resembles the distortions in Mertons cumulative advantage]. Indeed things, Peter, are far worse. Dan Sperbers model of contagion that Ive tried to explain to anyone who could listen to me is that things do not replicate without an agenda. These are notes I took after a long Sunday afternoon conversation at Deux Magots. The anthropologist, cognitive scientist, and philosopher Dan Sperber has proposed the following idea on the epidemiology of representations. What people call memes, ideas that spread and that compete with one another using people as carriers, are not truly like genes. Ideas spread because, alas, they have for carriers self-serving agents who are interested in them, and interested in distorting them in the replication process . You do not make a cake for the sake of merely replicating a recipeyou try to make your own cake, using ideas from others to improve it. We humans are not photocopiers. The idea of Sperber (counter the ideas of Blackmore, Dawkins, and other people who wrote on this before him) is that memes dont resemble genes. The comparison is naive, too naive one of those naive analogies. Culture has no DNA; it does not replicate mechanically like genes errors in replication are neither independent nor random: they are, I repeat,
self-serving; self-serving! [Ref: See Sperbers Explaining Culture. For Dawkins, see his foreword to Susan Blackmores book on memes. Luckily it seems that Dawkins and Blackmore have been cured of the meme theory]. [Note 1: Copyists and Replication: Arabic philosophy classics seem to show up in different versions. I have two copies of Averroess attack on my hero Algazel, (the Black Swan Problem), in the magisterial apology of Arabic Aristotelianism, Tahafut at-tahafut , one here and the other in Amioun. Two versions from different copyists, from different libraries, with entire sentences altered. Oh What! Look: the latin translation is used as a benchmark and you sort of retranslate into Arabic! Platonem sophistice refellit. is used between the two versions safestani or sifistai . A bored copyists can be unckecked in his entertaining alterations. Interestingly, the main divergence between WesternEuropean culture and the Arab-Islamic one matches the discovery of the printing press. Western books now replicated very faithfully, thanks to printed books; Arabic script (includes Turkish and Persian) needed to be copied by hand and depended on the cliques of copyists. Owing to the highly calligraphic nature of Arabic letters (although it has almost the same alphabet as the Latin, a letter changes in shape depending on its emplacement in a sentence: there are several ways to write consonants, and vowels are declensions of consonants, etc.) ; owing to such calligraphic complexity, an Arabic script printing press required a minimum of 900 characters, a typographers nightmare. See Wheatcrofts Infidels. I dont necessarily accept his argument that it caused the crossover between the two civilizations, I am certain that it caused differences in reliability of ancient texts.] [Note 2: Books . I got mail from readers of the previous note asking me to suggest good books on translation & language. I havent read a lot on the subject, just three books and a few articles, but two of these books Ive read and reread and been much attached to them... I read George Steiners After Babel twice but my notes are from 1988, so I dont know if it is still current. I recall being mesmerized by Steiners style and impressed with his erudition (as always what impresses me in a person is a combination of erudition and style), got plenty of anecdotes etc. Steiner like me attended a French Lyce & was forcibly polyglot for biographical reasons. But there is a better, deeper book, though not as poetically written, perhaps for the better. More recently I was very impressed by a little known book by Douglas Hofstadters Le Ton Beau de Marot . Hofstadter (more known for his Escher Godel Bach) is (unlike Steiner & I) a natural polyglot he grew up, I think, in the Midwest. I know about his generally unadvertised linguistic prowess from a common friend who saw him converse in Swedish with someone at a dinner party. It turned out that he can speak about any living language; those he doesnt know he picks up in no time. He seems to treat computer languages like human ones. He learned Russian to be able to do his own translation of Eugene Onegin. Le Ton Beau de Marot hit me as one of the best books Ive read in my life strangely it flopped. It could be that not too many people are interested in languages. Perhaps one day it will have the readers it deserves. Finally, there is Umberto Ecos book on translation, Mouse or Rat? but I recall finding it unusually dry for Eco, a bit theoretical, and I dont remember anything of its content [ it was not translated!].]
Being edited in your own language is enough of a problem. Translation can be severely distorting, frustrating, particularly
if you are familiar enough with the nuances of the language to be offended traductore traduttore! I was trying to copy passages from Platos Apology the central scene (for any epistemocrat) in which Socrates aggressively exposes the faux expert as someone who focuses on what he knows, unaware of his ignorance. I was trying to copy passages when something hit me: he who translated into Apology does not know either Greek or modern English. Someone needs to change the title. can mean a lot of things, but apology is certainly not one of them. It is more likely to mean: my my words above yours, or my turn to say it, even youre an idiot. It is even more aggressive than rebuttal. There is nothing apologetic in: , , , , . . Socrates indeed went after the faux expert without mincing words. . , -- . If anything, he very badly wanted to die for his idea. He was not a man who apologized for his convictions.
I had a similar experience when, in my classical period, I tried to read the old testament in the text. I knew a little bit of the Aramaic of the Northern Levant, but not Hebrew. I opened the book, started deciphering and was shocked after reading the very first sentence of the very first book, Genesis. What had been translated into In the beginning, G**d was not so in the original. Elohim is a plural form that could mean the gods. What is so monotheistic about the gods? And B-reshit does not necessarily mean the beginning I see no temporal dimension. It is from rosh. It is more likely to mean principally. Now these are the mistakes that someone with some motivation can detect. But things can get worse: so many corruptions will remain undetected. Quite a bit of the philosophical canon that people read in Greek was translated from the Latin, itself translated from Medieval Arabic. Even in the cases where the Greek original was eventually found, many the Latin authors used the 12th Century Arabic-Latin translations by Gerard of Cremona. Maimonides wrote Guide to the Perplexed in Arabic, but it is translated from the Hebrew and philosophers are getting his ideas second hand at best, third hand at the worst. Galens work transited via the Arabic. Indeed Sextus Empiricus escaped the corruptions because the Arabs hated his disrespect for Aristotle. Try re-translating into English the Spanish version of a paragraph translated into Italian using Google translator. What makes things worse is that the Arabic translators were Levantine Christian monks who were a mixture of copyists and translators. To make things worse, their Greek was not the Attic Greek of the Academia, but the severely corrupted Syrian Greek of the New Testament. As I am writing these lines, some writer on a hurry is translating The Black Swan into some language I am lucky to not be able to read. It is too late, now. The subsequent book should not be translated.
49 How Can You Tell a Cultural Philistine? I I received plenty of questions about the Bildungsphilister in my Black Swan Glossary. Trivial: someone commoditized
in his knowledge and tastes, lacking idiosyncratic traits. Say someone who likes Matisse because it is the thing to do and, when he travels, makes sure to visit Impressionist galleries arts museums in order to be sophisticated (true someone may be genuine in his love of Matisse but it should come from personal trial and error, after disliking the sculptures of the third floor, not because the vagaries of the auctioneers hammer. The same Bildungsphilister would have scorned Matisse before it penetrated our consciousness). Or someone who tells you that he loves French literature and then announces that his favorites are Flaubert, Sartre, Camus, literally authors commonly selected in a French literature class (there are thousands of French authors so you know that it is not his taste that is driving him, but that he is following a script and borrowing his selection from general accepted guidelines. It would be different is he said Modiano, Cesbron, Don, Vian, Allais, Bove, Gary, and Elsa Triolet. No two people have the same tastes so why should someone be exactly lined-up to the common canon?). The Bildungsphilister has a pathological vulnerability to cultural constructions. The same applies to the philisto-academic: he just follows topics used by others, ranking them by importance, without a shade of intellectual independence. In fact in academia the great dominant majority of workers are Bildungsphilisters, with a small minority of persons in possession of a brain on their own. It is even more widespread among philosophers: In fact I am still looking for a philosopher who could explain to me why the problem of induction is called Humes problem, not Huets problem. So I find it always suspicious when someones erudition matches the common culture, with minimal variations. Or when someones bookshelves match the Penguin classics section at Heathrow airport. Typically they a know a few things but they are not truly driven by intellectual hunger. They might do well in school because they focus on the curriculum, given that they have no taste of their own. Non-Bildungsphilisters Ive met: Benoit Mandelbrot, Scott Atran, Yechezkel Zilber (a Jerusalem autodidact)...
II
I just had to withdraw a piece from publication. The copy editor wanted to improve the sentences. I pulled it out
immediately upon hearing claims that she represented the general public, with the assumption that she knew what the general public needed not realizing that she was talking to an empiricist who despises impressions (based on anecdotal evidence) & pompously stated superstitious. There is an expert problem with copy editors particularly when they are self-appointed representatives of the general public. (Advice from book editors reminds me of Warren Buffets comment about people in limos taking stock tips from people who ride the subway). Fooled by Randomness was not copy edited (with close to 200 typos in the hardcover edition). My next book (post-TBS) will NOT be edited. An edited text is fake. Really fake. It is as shameful as ghostwriting. Raw literature used to resemble speech, in its messiness, idiosyncrasy, (& charm). Spelling was only made uniform very late, by printers, not by authors which explains the idiosyncrasies of medieval authors. This ethical stand means that I will not be able to publish Op-Ed, book reviews, etc. in the general public and academo-philistine press. I am now left to myself and the web.
48 The Ghost in the Machine I had a discussion with someone who wanted to interview me for a radio show on the Ipod shuffle. He had difficulty
digesting the idea that there was no functional difference between a selection randomized by the Ipod and a selection made by a DJ who is unknown to me. In both cases I cant predict the next song so I needed to treat both situations equally. As a matter of fact I would not be able to distinguish between the two if the songs came out from behind a curtain. But to him it was a big deal: in one case it was a random machine; in the other there was a human. I tried to explain that in the case of the Ipod it was not random, but near-impossible to predict the Ipod responds to a complicated equation. Perhaps the same applies to the human but it is not relevant: it is as hard to predict an anonymous DJs selection. This is the Fooled by Randomness problem. We have trouble accepting the absence of agency and like to anthropomorphize the unknown. He felt queasy with the Ipod because he was a priori certain of the absence of agency. This reminds me of the discussion with the academo-philistinic NYU philosopher about whether something was purely random or had unknown causes. I will disclose his name when I am finished reading his book. All Tawk. In my next book Fat Tony calls these kinds of philosophers colorless half-men (Fat Tony is not so politically correct).
It is frequent for critics to associate a writers personal linguistic style, idiolect, and idiosyncrasies to a specific
background it illustrates how we cannot distinguish what belongs to a background from what comes from individual temperament. Take for instance Herbert Reads English Prose Style, which was supposed to be required reading for a generation of English writers (now, luckily, it seems to be out of print). It contains horrifying and arbitrary rules of thumb. Hebert Read dumps quite severely on the early 20th Century English-language thinker, aesthete and belletrist George Santayana. He takes sentences of the fine man and tears them apart they are grammatically correct and syntactically fine, but, as with any independent and deep thinker, they are studded with idiosyncrasies. Read unhesitatingly attributes these traits to the unEnglishness of the very unEnglish Santayana (as he suffered the double handicap of being both Spanish-born and American-reared and educated) ; he makes the additional inference that such style is necessarily unaesthetic, even barbaric and polluting. I am convinced that had Santayana written under the pseudonym Nigel ParkerPindelburry, from Duckford, Cambridgeshire, Santayana would have been spared by the man these stylistic idiosyncrasies would have been instead attributed to his very English eccentricity indeed a sign of distinction and class. From Terraciano et al. I inferred that the similarities are mostly within professions, not so much within nationalities : a prostitute from Dallas is going to be far more similar (in her behavior) to a prostitute from Cannes than to an accountant
from Dallas; a philosopher from New York will be more similar to a philosopher from Bombay than to a New York trader, etc. I was clearly the victim of the nationality fallacy in the New Yorker profile (Gladwell) that attributed my ideas (and trading style) to my Lebanese background & the war given that it was so salient. I then searched & found 30 Christian Lebanese traders of my generation all (I mean all) of them sell tail options (i.e. bet against the Black Swan). On the other hand my associate Mark Spitznagel is from the MidWest.
44 Platonification & Commoditization of Happiness In his very brief philosophical tale, Histoire du bon bramin, Voltaire presented the central dilemma of happiness, that
between reason and felicity a question I often see misattributed to John Stuart Mill (by a long list: Nozick, Pinker, Seligman, among respectable people ...) Mill proposed the following formulation, around a century later, It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. Indeed Voltaire gave happiness a lot of thinking; his mistress & collaborator Madame du Chatelet wrote Discours sur le bonheur, a beautiful treatise on happiness. Note one attribute that I often find mentioned by nonacademics but that academics do not trumpet: financial independence as a condition for virtue. The bon bramin was wealthy hence needed nothing, therefore he did not need to fool anyone. [Il tait riche, et, partant, il en tait plus sage encore; car, ne manquant de rien, il navait besoin de tromper personne.] Voltaires point: It was clear that one should opt to not have common sense since common sense was behind our unhappiness. Yet I could not for the life of me find anyone who accepts to become an imbecile in order to be happy. From there I concluded that if we make a big deal about happiness, we make bigger deal of reason/reasoning abilities. [Il est donc clair, disaisje, quil faudrait choisir de navoir pas le sens commun, pour peu que ce sens commun contribue notre maltre. Tout le monde fut de mon avis; et cependant je ne trouvai personne qui voult accepter le march de devenir imbcile pour devenir content. De l je conclus que, si nous faisons cas du bonheur, nous faisons encore plus cas de la raison. ]
I have been a little puzzled by the common happiness studies: Subjective Well-Being, offshoot of the notion of utility that has been introduced into economics, hence social science, and has not left it yet. Utility is not measurable yet it is often handled as if it could be. It cannot be squeezable into one metric (on that later). It is not self- discoverable; it is extremely fragile to path dependence and framing. Path dependence: the utility of ending with a million dollars, like John in FBR, having had a 10 million net worth, is lower than that of starting with nothing and ending with half a million. Framing: You ask someone how is your sex life, then ask him if he is happy, you get a high correlation between the answers. But if you reverse the sequence of the questions you get uncorrelated answers. [Neoclassical economic theory is bankrupt on that account because framing make time-aggregation go bust and messes up the transitivity of choices hence optimization; but, again, neoclassical economics is frequently something for idiot savants]. But the worst is that a utility metric is not exactly what we may be seeking. It is not so simple and reductive. I am convinced that if utility has something to do with some forms of happiness, which I call commoditized happiness, I am not searching for it, or it is not central to me. I did not come to planet earth to accumulate positive hedonic experiences, some hedonometer to fill up like a bank account, or some blood flow into my left frontal lobes. Others perhaps might feel so, certainly not me. There might be huge variations between individuals I dont know about others. I do not know what I came here for, but it is certainly not to eat at Boccuse and argue with the sommelier about wine. I also get irritated with those who propose meditation and shmeditation into my inner something. I am not here to get into inner anything. I am a no nonsense fellow here to do things I dont know which things exactly, but those that feel right. Hedonic Treadmill: However I certainly do not buy the notion that money does not make you happy, counter to the literature on the hedonic treadmill. This idea stipulates that additional wealth leads to no long term gains owing to a reversion to a baseline. I agree with the reversion to a hedonic baseline. But if spending money does not make me happy, most certainly, having money stashed away, particularly f*** you money, makes me extremely happy, particularly compared to the dark years between the age of 20 and 25 when I was impoverished after having had an opulent childhood. There is something severely missing in the literature, the awareness of the idea best expressed in the old trader adage: the worst thing you could possibly do with money is spend it . Having no argumentative customers increases my life satisfaction. Not depending on other peoples subjective assessment increases my life satisfaction. Not being an inmate in some corporate structure increases my life satisfaction. Not doing some things increases my life satisfaction. Having the option to give everything away to go live as a hermit in the desert or as a social worker in Africa, increases my life satisfaction. Either nobody in these papers and papers tested for that, or he cant get it published. Ideally in an ideal situation you would live simply with a hidden stash somewhere that nobody knows about. Nobody hangs around with you because of your money; nobody laughs at your jokes because you are rich. Happiness and Randomness, another Inseparability (i.e., that between utility and probability): You cannot deal with Chance without talking about Happiness: events are not important in themselves; it is how they affect you that matters. It makes any theory of randomness inseparable from one of happiness. Happiness in many languages means luck. I was lecturing in Poland when, after stating the first sentence of this section, the audience was completely confused: randomness and happiness were translated into the same word! Indeed consider the fuzziness, in Germanic languages, between Glck (happiness) and its variations, like the English luck. In latin, felix initially meant lucky. Greek is more subtle (Eu-damon, makarios). But when I looked at Semitic languages : smh (sameach, Hebrew & Arabic) do not have anything directly to do with luck, rather some blessing from the God(s), like beatitude. Indeed of all the languages I looked at, Medieval (Classical) Arabic seems to have varieties: farah (eudamonic, from Semitic to blossom & grow), bast (hedonic), srour (felicity), the root wfc (mwaffac, in accordance with destiny) leads to luck, bhj (bahjat, ibthaj) is beatitude... Just like the ludic fallacy affects our idea of probability (we think it is measurable and visible), it affects our conception of utility. Note that another connection with fooled by randomness: the paradox of choice. We need a simple environment with not too many choices, and with not too many random variables. More, later.
Thank you Stan Young. I received vindication for the main idea of Fooled by Randomness, the idea of false pattern
detection that I later developed into the narrative fallacy, which I summarize as follows: statistical nonexperimental knowledge derived from looking at data is bunk, partly since researchers are very likely to show spurious patterns and regularities (or nonexperimental research leads to pseudoknowledge). Technology makes false patterns easy to detect, abundance of data make them more likely to be salient. If you have a million random and unskilled traders, you will see many people with Warren Buffets performance all of whom, you would be told, could not have been doing so well out of randomness and have a statistically significant performance. If you look hard enough at large datasets you will see some nonrandom regularity somewhere that will fool you, the result of searching and testing and the immensity of the datasets now available to us. Except that the vindication did not come from economists or philosophers of science (these fields, I keep repeating...), but from medicine . At the AAAS conference in San Francisco I was a discutant of session in which John Ioannidis showed that 4 out of 5 epidemiological statistically significant studies fail to replicate in controlled experiments. 4 out of 5 epidemiological studies are fooled by randomness! The epidemiologists worked hard on their computers until they found an association between symptoms and identified possible causes, and published the result for academic advancement. These results, of course, will be reported in the newspapers journalists and your family doctor do not understand the difference between back-testing and clinical trials. Another researcher, Peter Austin, showed how he could find links between health symptoms and astrological signs. (I once showed students that if you generate a 1000 histories for 1000 random variables, it would be close to impossible to not see a 95% correlation between two of them, and one that you know is entirely spurious something called the Wigner effect.) The problem is that even clinical trials fail to replicate about 25% of the time; simply, the researchers do so many of them that one strange result can show up by accident. It will be the one that is reported. The good news is that the FDA is aware of the problem; it does not like anything nonclinical. As we have more computers and more variables to work with (consider the genome project), our rate of false inference should shoot up. This is what happened in economics, since our ability to predict economic variables has not improved (& even degraded) in spite of zillions of papers showing statistically significant results from economic data. Rob Engel got the Nobel for ARCH that only works in past data (but does so beautifully), almost never out of sample. Multiple regressions are plain dressed-up b****t . I felt very vindicated in my new war against historicism & I am waiting for Stan Young to finish reading The Black Swan so can see the extent of this discovery on other fields of knowledge. This epidemiological story is the best argument against the historians ferreting out causes from the recorded data. Historians are between a century and a millennium behind science and too able b*****ters to do anything about it.
42 Completing Poppers Project Popper went after historicism by showing limitations in the possibility of knowledge of the future; I completed it by
showing additional limitations to such knowledge (nonlinearities and Black Swans). But what I mostly did is present a far worse limitation: that of the knowledge of the past itself (narrative fallacy).
41 Gossip The accepted idea is that conversation is a means to communicate ideas, practical information and intentions, for a useful
purpose, with some gossip and self-serving showoff here and there to enliven it. Yet most conversation is gossip and selfserving showoff , with ideas, practical information and intentions here and there to justify them.
Q (Penguin UK)- How do you write? Do you have a special room in which you
A- I need an aesthetic environment. I write in my literary library, the one that is unpolluted by technical books,
business material, and scientific papers it is like a sacred space. I also like to write in cafs away from business people, with bohemian people around. Writing is sacred, other activities are profane, and I dont want them to corrupt my writing.
39 Prostitution and the duality I remember trying to define prostitution. I was not able to do so (work is not prostitution). Then I realized that
prostitution is not doing something for money that one would not do otherwise; it is simply the violation of the sacred, its pollution. It is why we could not tolerate it when the novelist Fay Weldon featured Bulgari jewellery in her 2001 novel The Bulgari Connection this is prostitution while writing for money is not.
Erudition increases awareness of the Black Swan (and the understanding of the world); formal education decreases it.
37 On Voltaire
Voltaire is one of the very few philosophers who had a positive impact on real life, on people, on our society (Marx had
perhaps the greatest impact but I wouldnt say that it was positive). [some people with gastric stress refuse Voltaire the designation philosopher, as philosophe is not quite the same as philosopher one has to be less technical, be readable, & have some charm to be a philosophe]. Other philosophers write papers for other philosophers to write papers for other philosophers to use in their papers so they can get tenure, etc. what I call a closed academic loop. Modern analytic philosophers fall for the ludic fallacy the creation of a sterilized world in which crisp discussion can be held. Voltaire is also the wittiest thinker in our corpus; he did not take authority at face value. An iconoclast, he contrived to make enemies almost everywhere, unable to hold his tongue. He survived all other non-narrating thinkers thanks to his dynamic philosophical tales of which he did not think much at the time. He would be surprised to see how they fared while most of his other works fell into oblivion. (He thought that his legacy was in his formal tragedies, now thankfully dead, the last of which was (briefly) performed at the Comdie Francaise under orders by Andr Malraux in 1962 as the French government wanted to punish visiting Chinese officials and subject them to the most painful torture they could devise, toppling Chinese torture in effectiveness. After four hours of treatment, the Chinese delegates gave in and signed on every point in the bilateral treaty lest the experience would be repeated the next day). Voltaire is my kind of person: he hated dullness; he couldnt resist, while talking philosophy, making fun of dull people, such as, for instance, the dry Benoit Spinoza. He was also extremely independent financially, from his trading, despised all people who took themselves seriously, etc. Now I found this remarkable book I never suspected existed, a meditation about his ignorance (naturally out of print) Le philosophe ignorant (c.1766, Volume 5 of Mlanges): is it necessary for me to know? he asks. Here he goes after Descartes: Aritotle taught us that skepticism is the source of wisdom; Descartes delayed this thought, & both taught me to believe nothing of what they say. This Descartes, especially, faking doubt, talks with a highly confident tone on a subject he understands nothing about, ..., like physics. [Aristote commence par dire que lincrdulit est la source de la sagesse; Descartes a dlay cette pense, et tous deux mont appris ne rien croire de ce quils me disent. Ce Descartes, surtout, aprs avoir fait semblant de douter, parle dun ton si affirmatif de ce quil nentend point; il est si sr de son fait quand il se trompe grossirement en physique...] The problem is that he had high expectations from the scientific enterprise given his enthusiasm for Newtonian mechanics. We can see the birth of scientific optimism on our ability to see causes:
Nothing is without a cause...We invented the word chance to express the known effect of unknown causes. (Il ny a rien sans cause. Un effet sans cause nest quune parole absurde. [...] En effet, il serait bien singulier que toute la nature, tous les astres obissent des lois ternelles, et quil y et un petit animal haut de cinq pieds qui, au mpris de ces lois, pt agir toujours comme il lui plairait au seul gr de son caprice. Il agirait au hasard, et on sait que le hasard nest rien. Nous avons invent ce mot pour exprimer leffet connu de toute cause inconnue.) Voltaire was blinded by Newtonian mechanics, which might have helped that nasty slide into scientism & the ludic fallacy & the scientific arrogance of modernity, & the fooled by randomness effect of social science. But all in all, he is a role model for philosophers who need to deliver. As an intellectual fighting dogma he was far more charming (and deep) than his imitators, such as that sub-philistine Sam Harris who attacks religion in an anachronistic (and inelegant) way, etc. Unlike Bertrand Russell who tried to take similar political positions, but was a bit theoretical and misfit in his understanding of real things, Voltaire he had his feet on earth and loved ambiguity. Remember that he was a (successful) self-made businessman (on the side) and rarely failed to look at things they way they were he was also quick at realizing that intellectual integrity is greatly enhanced by financial independence.
36 Philosophers in Need of Adult Supervision: How they deal with Randomness [Part of my next book]
An analytic philosopher talking about uncertainty and probability can be like a (virgin) nun theorizing about sex.
What academic analytic philosophers consider truly random is almost always nonrandom (or the least random objects you find in the universe). What they think is nonrandom is the worst form of randomness as it is totally unpredictable. I wonder if they are doing it as a joke or if they need adult supervision. The only real philosopher of probability Ive met is the great Mandelbrot. I had lunch with a prominent analytic philosopher (whatever that means in the field of philosophy as I have no clue on what they base their hierarchy upon) who was a bit condescending with nonmembers of his rigorous species. Needless to say that academics always try to place you in some hierarchy or group; they get queasy if they cant find a neat box for you. So he kept asking about my activities, affiliations, etc., not my ideas, theories and what I was bringing to the table. I was feeling a little guilty coming in; I had been quite tough on philosophers in The Black Swan as I thought that they do not have the mechanism (nor the judgment) to decide what was relevant to the rest of us and was blaming them partly for the neglect of the Black Swan problem. Autocritique I thought is largely absent; outside critique of academic philosophy does not exist (you need philosophers for that). But I was having second thoughts, wondering if I was fair in dealing with them or if my frustration with philosophers was the result of a sampling error of those I tried to have a discussion with, or read, or if there were hidden jewels that could not reach publication. On my shelf I have books by Hacking, van Fraassen, Gillies, von Plato, etc. who all do not seem to get it no awareness of wild randomness (Grey Swans and Black Swans ) that Mandelbrot and I are obsessed with. Hacking managed to fall headlong into the ludic fallacy in his various histories of probabilistic thinking he is a dangerously ignorant fellow. See this link to see that philosophers have had no clue about the real problems (primo ,we do not observe probability outside of casinos, secondo, most of it is wild, or type 2, randomness). I am now convinced that effectively I was too soft on the philosophy establishment. They indeed need adult supervision at least that fellow. The fellow fell into the trap of insisting on the difference between the truly random (like quantum mechanics, or so we think) and nonrandom but for which we have incomplete knowledge. I was an idiot nonphilosopher for giving the same name to both he was acting as if I profane, was wasting his time. For him, the random does not have causes, the nonrandom does have causesso the distinction is interesting because he thinks that you can start looking for these causes. The rest does not seem interesting to him. My problem of course is causal opacity: we are limited in our ability to ferret out causes or in confirming our error rate in causal inferenceour track record has been horrible. I tried to explain that quantum mechanics (what he calls true random) was such a pure form of mild randomness in which we can predict in it better than anything; it is perhaps the only truly scientific field in which we have been successful we deal with a collection of a huge number of minutely small objects that obey better than anything in the universe the law of large
numbers. My table is the most deterministic object around as the fluctuations of the zillions of particles cancel out. In fact quantum mechanics is the perfect example of mild randomness (or what I call proto-randomness) which disappears upon aggregation/averaging. It is the purest of purest of the Gaussians with a minutely low variance. Consider that the coffee cup in front of me is random to him (quantum mechanics) but that the weather is nonrandom (if you know the causes you can effectively predict). To me the first belongs to the class of objects the closest to deterministic; it is subjected to mild randomness that obeys central limit (type 1) ; the second is wild randomness that we cannot truly tame (type 2). I show in TBS how it is effectively impossible to deal with the second. These are the two false distinctions made by philosophers: 1- Objective v/s Nonobjective probability. That distinction comes from the days when science was arrogant and could make claims of infallible knowledge of the world. There is certainly an objective probability, but we are not fully able to capture it. Until that day year 2 trillion and 26 in which we reach total knowledge, we should consider that all probabilities are nonobjective. It is long to explain here but I wrote about it in my central problem of small probability. 2- Truly random or Random because of incomplete information. It is impossible to know the difference; the distinction harks back to the days of scientism. It does not exist outside of a philosophy seminar unless we become omniscient persons equipped with total knowledge and ability to ferret out true causes. For us in real life, the main difference lies between mild and wild randomness . Thats it. It dwarfs anything else. A Workable Way Around the Problem of Induction. I also discussed the problem of induction with him. To no avail (he had a mental block about interesting subjects). To me the distinction between mild and randomness provides a practical way to deal with the problem of induction. Mild randomness is rather insensitive to the problem of induction (Your observation of the past can help you derive properties of the future; you can go from the seen to the unseen). Wild randomness is very sensitive to sampling error you do not have properties to base yourself upon. Once again, Mandelbrot wrote about it in the 1950s (I figured it out 30 years after the great Benoit M.).
33 The Birth of Stochastic Science: Language as a Bottom-Up Tinkering Process; the Case of Glander
Camps Bay, S.A. Jan 2007. Words crop up randomly and we select what we find pleasing or expressive, incorporating
those that fit into the corpus, and letting others decay. It is more complicated because it is communal. Just like science although people believe in purity and purification of languages the same way they think that knowledge is a nonrandom, directed process. But of course academia, as usual, represents a severe impediment to intellectual development. Formal French is an academic language (literally since the Acadmie Francaise, composed of forty constipated Frenchmen, regulates it). It is extremely poor in words and unwieldy but not to worry: the bottom-up spoken French slang argot is far, far richer, though not as rich as English, the free-market language. Some writers like Louis Ferdinand Cline and Frdric Dard wrote exclusively in argot both are the finest prose writers, although the latter, a far better prosateur, only wrote downmarket novels, close to 200 of them. It is an irony that the academy does not have a word for the process by which discovery works best but slang does. I was trying to describe in a letter what I am currently doing: French would not let me. But argot lends itself very well... I am involved in an activity called glander, more precisely glandouiller. It means to idle, though not to be in a state of idleness (it is an active verb). Gandouiller denotes enjoyment. The formal French word is ne rien faire (to do nothing), which misses on the active part so do words that have a languishing connotation. Glander is what children without soccer moms do when they are out of school. It resembles flner which has this perambulation part; though glander does not have any strings attached. The Italians have farniente but it is really doing nothing. Even the Arabs do not have a verb for glander: the construction takaslana from the Semitic root ksl denotes laziness (other words imply some inertia). Glander is how I write my books, how I brew ideas. Remarkably it best describes the notion of lifting all inhibitions to
tinker intellectually in an undirected stochastic process aiming at capturing some idea that will enrich your corpus. Researching or thinking smack of a top-down activity. Newton was my kind of a glandeur; In [Dijksterhuis 2004]: George Spencer Brown has famously said about Sir Isaac Newton that to arrive at the simplest truth, as Newton knew and practiced, requires years of contemplation. Not activity. Not reasoning. Not calculating. Not busy behavior of any kind. Not reading. Not talking. Not making an effort. Not thinking. Simply bearing in mind what it is that one needs to know.
32 The Birth of Stochastic Science: Galen and Stochastic Tinkering [notes to my Edge Annual Question 2007 Comment]
On some Air France plane- Jan 2007. We are better at doing than learning. Our capacity for knowledge is vastly inferior to our capacity for doing things our ability to tinker, play, discover by accident. Galen was against stochastic tinkering. Yet both le Docteur Favier (1906) and Henry Peacham (1638) The Valley of Varietie, Chapter V, give the following story they found in Galens work : a man is accidentally cured of a Disease which they call Elephantiasis, or Leprosie by drinking wine from a pitcher in which there was a drowned viper. The cure is now discovered. The Viagra discovery out of a hypertension trial has always been standard [Le Docteur Favier got the source wrong: it was not Subfiguratio empirica. But you dont have to be picky with men of great insights.]
31 Physical Risk Taking I am packing to go to Africa. I delivered the final corrections of The Black Swan on Friday, and I feel light: I can hope
for, not fear, physical adventures. Clearly the Black Swan obsession is so strong that I cannot separate the book and the idea from my identity. The last few years, something stopped me from taking some classes of physical risks, ones that never scared me before: my family members were provided for, but TBS was not finished. Usually, when I land in Beirut Airport, after having been deprived of telephone contact with the rest of the world, I am often apprehensive: what if a war broke out when I was in the sky? What would happen to the Black Swan idea if I am killed? But two weeks ago on my most recent visit to Beirut, I did not feel any fear at all, in spite of the riots, meaning that I am confident now that the idea can live without me perhaps even better without me, as my ego might get in its way on the occasion. The idea is far greater than the man. I am now finally free to be an ordinary person and take some classes of physical risks. I can now plan trips to places I would not have dared to consider last year: to assist the Christians of Iraq (the true victims they are the original inhabitants of Mesopotamia and still speak Assyrian), the Copts of Egypt, people deprived of hope.
28 Downtown Beirut: Things Are not as Black and White as the Slowthinkers & Semi-Slowthinkers Would Like Them to Be
Only in Beirut: a Christian Lebanese rioter in the midst of his allies: medieval Shiite clerics. Perhaps the story is not as black and white as the press wants it to be and the alliances less obvious than imagined by the simplistic press. Beirut, Jan 1. I took a walk with my cousins on New Years eve inside the area in downtown Beirut where the proHezbollah rioters have been staging an open-ended rebellion in front of the heavily guarded government building. I was initially nervous it was as if I had entered another continent and century. It was easy to detect that we were Christians: my cousin Helena was bareheaded in the midst of a crowd in which most women were veiled. But somehow the Shiites are used to Christians among them and put up with us: interestingly, some of the Christians rioters wear orange wigs. Only in Beirut: punk-style Euro-revolutionaries hanging around in the middle of bearded Medieval clerics in austere togas. The Shiites (and their Christian hippies allies) were holding a poetry competition on a gigantic stage, mostly consisting in anti-Siniora philippics. Huge loudspeakers broadcast it across downtown Beirut. It was expressed in the Lebanese dialect, according to the nonliterary, frowned upon noneducated oral tradition (called zajal) not in the literary classical Arabic an interesting statement of identity. Eerily, once you exit the heavily cordoned area, and enter the progovernment pro-Sunni zone (now called the I love Life zone), you hear tacky 1980s disco music blasting beyond tolerable loudness. It aims to neutralize the Shiite zajal poetry. There are spots where you can hear both. Whenever you get close to government tanks, you hear disco music. You move away, and it is Arabic chants or poetry. It is too bad that I have finished The Black Swan because I could have added the following discussion to that of the problem of absurd categories and alliances and the Platonicity of categorization in Chapter 1. We are suckers for simplifications and categories. There is something I am missing in the current map of alliances. Take the following. From what I understand, for a Shiite Moslem, a Sunni is not an infidel he is a pure Moslem of another tradition. A Jew and a Christian are people of the book, therefore not infidels, but non-Moslem under the protection of the Moslem law. But for a fundamentalist Sunni Moslem, a Shiite is an infidel that you can kill with impunity. A Christian is not an infidel (except for some Sunni branches that only accept as monotheists Christian Iconoclasts who refuse representations of Saints). A Jew, for a Sunni, is never an infidel, given the Jews staunch monotheistic credentials (El is Allah, or Eloh). Ironically, for a Sunni, a Jew is always more Kosher than a Catholic (you can see that in numerous Medieval Andalusians debates). In other words, theologically speaking, AlQaida is far more anti-Shiite than it is anti-Western. You can see evidence of that in Iraq. Now when I look more closely (and less naively) at Islamic fundamentalism, I seems obvious that the Wahabist regime of Saudi Arabia resembles far more closely my nightmare (as a Westerner): Saudi Arabia finances fundamentalism across the world and the nastiest brand at that. They propose the worst possible society I can think of. Women cannot drive in Saudi Arabia. But they can run for office in Iran. The Shiites are far more a natural ally of the United States and the West or at least something like the enemy of the enemy, that is terror-sponsoring Islamic fundamentalism. Furthermore, as a minority they own the oil fields of the Persian Gulf. To a Westerner, they are the lesser evil. The Byzantine emperor Herakles understood all that when he used the Bani Ghassan to guard his Empire he needed an alliance with a marginalized Arabic-speaking tribe to fight the Arabs. As Gibbon wrote: only a diamond can cut a diamond. I do not understand politics at all. Either alliances do not necessarily have to be rational, effective, or natural, i.e., they are the result of inherited chance relationships, or there is something missing in the current understanding & discourse of the situation in the Moslem world. Nobody seems to realize the absurdity of current alliances.
27 Beirut Graffiti
Beirut, December 30 2006. I came up with the definition of true freedom. You encounter true freedom in the following way: when what stops you from the expression of your real opinion is not fear of position (in employment) nor need to preserve a reputation (say in business, politics or academia) but merely tact and social elegance. You dont say it because you care & do not want to hurt other peoples feelings.
he had to go to Afghanistan to get away from everything he had learned about the human mind up to that moment. In short my position on religion is as following. Our minds are vulnerable to all manner of beliefs and want to be suckers for something. There is not enough cognitive energy in us to doubt everything so let us worry about Black Swans, those that can hurt us. Nationalism is murderous; it is far worse than religion. The other day my eye caught at the health-club a TV ad by democrats attacking Bush by stating that 3800 people died in Iraq. They omitted to mention the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis lest the Republicans question their patriotism. These foreign casualties do not seem to count because nationalism establishes clean balance sheets: countries are only responsible for their own citizens. Catholics would have never, never, never done that they believe in the fraternity of races. It creates the I and thou. & remember where the murderous notion of nation-state came from. Social science is more destructive than religion. I wrote in the opiate of the middle classes about the domaindependence of rationality. Rationality is costly; complete cross-domain rationality is impossible. I prefer to believe in the bishops rather than the stock analyst, be it on aesthetic grounds. Many problems associated with religion come from something else, mostly nationalism or other diseases. I observed the Lebanese civil war between Christian and Moslems: I am convinced that it was ethnic, not religious. Religious people on both sides tried to calm things down: all we saw were pictures of robed figures kissing each others on television while street militia fighters ignored their calls to calm down. Furthermore, the most murderous conflicts have not been between Islam and Christianity but within Islam, between Shiites and Sunnis, mostly because of the Persian-Arabian tension. Weinberg may know a lot about physics; he should stay away from historical analyses. To understand what I call the rationing of rationality, read bishop Huet or chanoine Simon Foucher (out of print). The argument is repeated (or rediscovered) by Karl Mannheim in Ideology and Utopia when he talks about what he calls a typically modern rationalistic disregard for the basic irrational mechanisms that govern mans relation to his world. I do not conceal that I have been reading theology. Finally, I have a thirst for aesthetics and I feel better after listening to Palestrina at glise Saint Germain des Pres or the holy week chants at the Greek-Orthodox churches of Amioun. The highlights of my last couple of years are Orthodox masses in Saint Petersburg and Bucharest, with churches full of crowds ensnared with the chants (I am GreekOrthodox). Stalin never offered anything to replace them. Nobody ever did.
intuitions yet survived in an environment that was not entirely from Mediocristan, as we were exposed during our prehistory to the occasional rare event with droughts, floods, and earthquakes. The other day, looking at my gray beard that makes me look ten years older than my true age, and the pleasure I derived from exhibiting it, I realized the following. Effectively, the respect for the elder in many societies might be compensation for our short-term memory. Senate come from senatus, aging in Latin; sheikh in Arabic means both member of the ruling elite and elder. These people had to be repositories of more complicated inductive learning that included information about rare events in a narrow evolutionary sense they can be deemed be useless since they are past their procreative age, so they have to offer some antidote to the turkey problem and prevent the less experienced members of the tribe from being suckers. In fact the elders can scare us with a story which is why we become overexcited when we think of a specific Black Swan. I was excited to find out that this also held in the animal domain: a paper in Science shows that elephant matriarch fill the role of super-advisors on rare events.
18 Spurious Debates
Aug 31, 2006
b) For me randomness is incomplete information. Then I realized that it was the same for the ancients: see Ciceros De Divinatione , Liber primus, LVI 127 Qui enim teneat causas rerum futurarum, idem necesse est omnia teneat quae futura sint. Quod cum nemo facere nisi deus possit, relinquendum est homini, ut signis quibusdam consequentia declarantibus futura praesentiat. (He who knows the causes will understand the future, except that, given that nobody outside God possesses such faculty ...) 2:) Consequence: I am re-reading Medieval Arabic-language thinkers (my education, alas, stops at Averroes Lebanese Christians tend to stop there before it becomes too Islamic and less Arabic and I was only recently that I discovered that Maimonides wrote in Arabic); there seems to be no incompatibility between faith and science (say no conflict between evolution and religion): for them, He is fate he incorporates evolution. He is the most abstract concept, allowing no possible anthropomorphic analogy (especially for Sunnis). Epistemological consequence: randomness is what you dont know
, nothing else.
thought that they were inductive in their approach. He uses the same quote from Francis Bacon I give in the Black Swan. But the empiricists did not use the past in an inductive way, only as a their basing themselves on experience was epilogismum not . It is what became later known as the Poperian unfalsified idea. et sensum et vocans epilogismum hoc tertium, multotiens autem et preter memoriam nihil aliud ponens quam epilogismum, in Galens extant Latin version of the Outline of Empiricism Subfiguratio empirica [in addition to perception and recollection, the third method is epilogism, as the practitioner has, besides memory, nothing other than epilogism] Their negative empiricism was well know by later thinkers and had to be accepted for Victor Brochard to publish his doctoral thesis in 1878 at the University of Paris on the subject of error, title De l erreur [unknown work, but just made available by the Bibliotheque Nationale]. It was not too developped yet, but he got the idea of knowledge by the negative. However, later Brochard wrote the best book I could find on ancient skepticism Les sceptiques grecs, in1887, in which he presents Menodotus ideas on empiricism his books have been introuvable for a long time. The more I probe, the more I find that todays modern ideas on induction were quite ancient. I will discuss Pascals presentation at some point. This makes me ashamed of having wasted time reading modern philosophers. The ancients were much closer to practice and had more respect for it than the university philistines. Their wisdom is far more valuable to us.
16 Bastiat, Phonies, and Commoditized Uncertainty [Excerpt from TBS] (June 17, 2006)
The greater uncertainty principle states that in quantum physics, one cannot measure values (with arbitrary precision) of certain pairs, such as the position and momentum of particles. When you hit a lower bound of measurement, what you gain in the precision of one, you lose on the other. So you have this incompressible uncertainty that, in theory, will defy us and remain an uncertainty. This minimum uncertainty was discovered by Werner Heisenberg in 1927. I kept insisting here how ludicrous it is to talk about it and present it as something that has anything to do with uncertainty. Why? First, this uncertainty is Gaussian. So on average it will disappear recall how no single number will change the total weight of a thousand people. We may always remain uncertain about the future positions of small particles, but these are very small, numerous, and average out, for Plutos sake, they average out! They obey the law of large numbers we saw in the last chapter. Most other types of randomness, do not average out! If there is something on this Planet that is not so uncertain, it is the behavior of a collection of sub-atomic particles! Why? Because as I said earlier, when you look at object composed of a collection of particles, the fluctuations of these particles will tend to balance out. But political, social, and weather events do not have such handy property, and we patently cant predict them, so when you hear people presenting the problems of uncertainty in terms of subatomic particles, odds are that the person is a phony. As a matter of fact it may be the best way to spot a phony. I often hear in discussions the following of course there are limits to our knowledge, invoking the greater uncertainty principle as they try to explain that we cannot model everything. But I cant predict what I will have for lunch today, for Jupiters sake, I cant figure out oil prices, I cant figure out if a war in Sudan might degenerate into something serious, I cant figure out what will happen with the spread of religious fundamentalism, so why the hoot do I care about subatomic particles that, anyway, converge to a Gaussian? People cant predict how long they will be happy with a recently acquired object, how long their marriage will last, how their employment will turn out, yet they talk about subatomic particles as limits. I said that they ignore Mammoths in favor of matters they would need a microscope to see and even a microscope would not show anything as we are talking about matter of an even smaller dimension than the microscopic. I will go further and state that these people who worry about the pennies, not the dollars, can be dangerous to society. They mean well, but, invoking my Bastiat argument of Chapter 8, they are a threat to us. How? Because they are wasting our studies of uncertainty by focusing it on the insignificant. Our resources (both cognitive and scientific) are limited, perhaps too limited. They increase the Black Swan risks that way. The Platonification of uncertainty is such that we create categories for me-too people to call them uncertainty so they can study them. This commoditization of the notion of uncertainty is worth further discussing here as symptomatic of Black Swans.
15 Anatomy and Function: Sextus Empiricus Vindicated [Excerpt from TBS] (June 13, 2006)
(The empirical school of medicine was suspicious of theories. They did not believe that one should draw inferences about function from the observation of anatomy. In this section I explain why I prefer the Society of Judgment and Decision Making types of experiments to the Platonicity of neuroeconomics). I am careful of making my argument [about the errors in judgment stemming from shortcuts in reasoning] focus solely on these specific organs in the brain, since we do not observe brain functions very well. Some people try to identify what is called the neural correlates of, say, decision making, or more aggressively the neural substrates of say, memory. The brain might be of a more complicated machinery than we think; its anatomy has fooled us repeatedly in the past. We can, on the other hand assess regularities by running precise and thorough experiments on how people react under some conditions and keep a tally of what we see no different from experiments in physics. For an example that justifies such skepticism about unconditional and naive reliance on neurobiology, and vindicates the ideas of the empirical school of medicine to which Sextus belonged, I bring the example of the intelligence of birds. I kept reading in various texts that the cortex is where the animals did their thinking, and that the creatures with the largest cortex had the highest intelligence we humans have the largest cortex,
followed by businessmen, dolphins and our cousins the apes. Well it turned out that some birds, like Parrots, have a high level of intelligence, equivalent to that of the dolphins, but that the intelligence of birds correlates with the size of another part of the brain, called the hyperstriatum. Similar mistakes were made in the past concerning Brocas area as the center of language. So neurobiology with its attribute of hard science can fool you into some Platonified, reductive statement. I am amazed that the empirics, by advocating skepticism about linking anatomy and function, had such insight no wonder their school played a very small part in intellectual history. As a skeptical empiricist I favor the experiments of empirical psychology to the MRI scans of the neurobiologists, even if they appear to be less scientific to the public. Bacon was tough on the empirics whom he accused of going from experiment to experiment. It is around the time of the publication of the Organon that they fell off intellectual history.
14 Historians and the Predictable PseudoRandom [Excerpt from The Black Swan] (June 11, 2006)
Recall what I said in Chapter x, that it was easier to go from theory to practice (the wrong way) than from practice to theory. Let me try another example in addition to the ice cube to illustrate this point. Take a personal computer. You can use a spreadsheet program to generate a random sequence, a succession of points we can call a history. How? The computer program responds to an equation of a chaotic nature that produces numbers that seem random. The equation is very simple if you know it, you can predict the sequence. However, from the sequence it is almost impossible for an unaided human being to find the equation and predict further sequences. I am talking of a simple one-line computer program (called the tent map), generating a handful of data points, not the billion of simultaneous events that constitute the real history of the world. In other words, if the role of history is nonrandom, responding to some equation of the world, so long as reverse engineering such equation does not seem within human possibility, it should be deemed random and not chaotic deterministic. Historians should understand to stay away from chaos theory and the difficulties in reverse engineering except to discuss general properties of the world and learn the limits of they cant know. This brings me to a greater problem that the historians craft. I will state the fundamental problem of practice as follows. While in theory randomness is some intrinsic property, in practice, randomness is incomplete information, what I called opacity in chapter 1. Non-practitioners do not understand the subtlety. Often, in conferences when they hear me talk about uncertainty and randomness, philosophers or sometimes mathematicians bug me on the least relevant point, whether it is true random or deterministic chaos. A true random system is random and does not have predictable properties. A chaotic system has entirely predictable properties but they are hard to know. So my answer is dual. a) There is no functional difference in practice between the two since we will never get to know the difference. If I see a pregnant woman, the sex of the child is a purely random number to me but not to her doctor who might have done an ultrasound and seen the sex. So randomness is fundamentally incomplete information b) The mere fact that a person is talking about such difference implies that the gentleman never made a meaningful decision under uncertainty and does not realize that they are indistinguishable in practice. Randomness in the end is just unknowledge. The world is opaque and fools us with appearances.
13 The Logic of Prediction Errors [Excerpt from The Black Swan] (June 11, 2006)
One main life expectancy is from Mediocristan, i.e. is subjected to mild randomness. In a developed country a newborn female is expected to die at around 79, according the insurance tables. When she reaches her 79th birthday, her life
expectancy, assuming that she is in typical health, is another 10 years. At the age of 90, she will have another 4.7 years to go. At the age of 100, 2 years. At the age of 119 , if she lives miraculously that long, she will have about nine months left. As she lives beyond the expected date of death, the number of additional years to go decreases. This is the major property of random variables related to the bell-curve. The odds of a large number is small, so the conditional expectation of additional days drops. With scalable variables, the ones from Extremistan that we encounter in real life, you will witness the exact opposite effect. Say a project is expected to terminate in 79 days, the same expectation in days as the newborn female has in years. But the errors are scalable, i.e. power-law distributed. On the 79th days, if the project is not completed, it will be expected to take another 25 days to completion. But on the 90th day, if the project is not completed, it will have about 58 days to go. On the 100th , it will have 89 days to go. On the 119th , it will have an extra 149 days. On day 600, if the project is not finished, you will be expected to need to wait an extra 1590 days. As you see the longer you go, the longer you are expected to wait. This subtle, but extremely consequential property of scalable randomness is unusually counterintuitive. I believe that this is the core reason for our missing in our forecasts as we do not take into account the logic of the large deviations from the norm. The distribution is Mandelbrotian. This idea can illustrate many phenomena; it applies to the completion date of your next opera house, the time a refugee is expected to wait until he can finally return home, or the day when the next war will end. Note that A-L Barabasi just recently proved that it applies to the time between an email you send to your favorite author and the time it will take for him to reply the expected time between a letter and its reply in the correspondence of Darwin as well as that of Einstein was not Poisson, but fractal.
beliefs. Hence two conversation with him last week, one of which with Gloria Origgi, another cross-border researcher with equally interesting pursuits: she does epistemology of social knowledge (she paid for lunch). Sperbers work on the epidemiology of representation provides an original, rich and powerful body of work that goes deep into the issue of the mental, the cultural, and the informational and breaks away from the naive and reductive analyses and comparative statics we read in the literature on nature, nurture, memes, etc. He presents a new set of inseparabilities: that of information, the transmission of information, and the reception of such information. Memes are not just replicated. They are transmitted by agents that have a mission, our need to use them in some way or another. First, a word on the naive separation of nature and nurture. If culture depends on biology, or biology results from some environmental pressure, then we have a severe problem isolating the two in any form of quantitative measurement. Take a function F that depends on two variables, X and Y. Say that X depends on Y in some manner. Consequently, any form of comparative statics, of the sort that messed up economics in the past, say what happens to F if X increases or decreases becomes misleading because when X moves, so does Y; X does not go up in isolation. Likewise, multiple coefficients in a linear regression become hard to compute, making regressions of the type F(X, Y)= intercept + a1 X + a2 Y + errors completely suspicious. Typically one of the two parameters a1 or a2 will be overestimated (and the other underestimated to compensate), depending on how the model is calibrated. We need X and Y to be made orthogonal, i.e. independent. Statisticians call this problem colinearity, a common trap in econometrics. So we need to do a transformation into two new variables that are orthogonal say X and Y, called principal components, and those may not bear any resemblance with the original X and Y. I am not even discussing the problem of nonGaussian errors in the residuals. So you cannot separate culture and biology if culture depends on biology. Our minds were shaped in some form by the nature of information; information also depends on the structure of our minds. So far it may appear obvious (but easy to forget), except that Sperber adds another restriction: the transmission of information is not a carbon-copying process. People are self-serving in the way they replicate they copy in order to satisfy their own interests. Dawkins meme idea assumes that memes replicate like genes; they dont. The act of copying is a function of our biology and mental architecture, themselves function of culture. Hence when we talk about modularity, it is foolish to study the modularity of the minds without looking at that of the information itself. Culture is modular. The result is that there are severe restrictions on the process of the formation and spread of representations. Primo, cultural epidemics have a method to their madness, namely, basins of attraction how strong the attraction and the pull to a basin is something for me to study later. Sperber, formerly an anthropologist, considered how groups geographically separated from each other form similar beliefs, particularly with religion. Secundo, the beliefs themselves are subjected to restrictions. Consider the application of Sperbers idea on how ideas come and die to our use of the Gaussian, or similar intellectual frauds. Tautologically, truth does not spread by itself, without contagion look at the true history of science full of ideas that only stuck centuries after they were first introduced. For such contagion, you need self-serving agents who benefit from it in some form or another.
...their determining, from the sole observation, of the nature of the necessary relationship between the cause and the effect, as if it one could not witness the effect without the attributed cause of the cause without the same effect.
Nothing is logically necessary , as Algazel points out, about such relation, which is the point Hume made about the nature of causation. The contemporaries were not too excited by the discourse. The great Aristotelian Arabic philosopher Ibn Rushd, known as Averroes, wrote a reply to Algazel called On the Incoherence of the Concept of Incoherence, Tahafut al Tahafut . Later, Marx and Proudhon played the same game: the first wrote Philosophy of Misery, the second answered with a treated called Misery of Philosophy. But that is not the end. Popper continued the pun with his attack on Marx called: Misery of Historicism. Perhaps one day I will be lucky enough to read an attack on my book with a diatribe called The White Swan. At the core of Algazels idea was the notion that if you drink because you are thirsty, thirst should not be seen as a direct cause. There may be a greater scheme; in fact there is a greater scheme that is being played out, but it could only be understood by those familiar with evolutionary thinking. In that, Algazels critique of causality was far more advanced than Hume, though nobody could see it without grounding in evolutionary theory. I was introduced to the distinction between different evolutionary notions of causality by my friend Terry Burnham who has a dream to make all human sciences a part of biology. Strangely something rang familiar with his distinction... it was Algazel whom I read as a teenager. We can easily have an illusion of causality, with what I called cosmetic cause. Why do you eat? Because you are hungry? Come on, this is not the true cause! An evolutionary thinker would dislike your answer as naive and limited. He would say the following: if your genes were not endowed with the desire to eat to consume calories, you would not have been among us today. So hunger is not the true cause of eating; it is only some weaker cause, it is only how your genes manifest their goal, not the end goal, which is not the satisfaction of hunger but survival. Likewise why do you get interested in some private semi-aerobic indoor activity with someone of the opposite (or perhaps the same) gender? The answer is for pleasure but you would be missing a layer of causality: you would not be here today if we humans did not have a propensity to procreate and mother nature is giving you an incentive to do so. So you are seeing the how and mistaking it for the why. The idea becomes clearer if, like Terry, you look at humans as just animals moved by instinctive mechanismsand rob them of the free-will that is so ingrained in our self image. The (re)originator of this idea was the evolutionary biologist
Ernst Mayr. He was a colorful fellow who stayed colorful a long time; that is, he lived one hundred and one year, and kept working throughout, producing a clearly written book called What Evolution Is a few years before his death, which I read with delight, not knowing (or guessing) the age of the author. He introduced in 1961 a distinction of the different types of causes. The first, he called proximate, the second he called ultimate. [Note: most people refer to Niko Timbergens text] The proximate is the cause directly seen here, the pseudo-cause I drink because I am thirsty; I do not cheat because I am honorable; I will go up to your bedroom because its fun; I punch people on the nose because they cheat at Poker; I protect my family members because I am a good relative. Or there is the why and how an animals primary objective is to transmit its genes, and what we may be seeing is how it does it so there is not true end explanation. This can also explain some of our activities like helping a stranger, an act that cannot be narrowly explained, and do not appear to be explainable to a narrow-minded thinker, but have an ultimate cause altruism is what made societies exist and helped our communal survival. In a way Algazel builds on Aristotle to attack him. Aristotle already saw the distinction in his Physics between the different layers of cause (formal, efficient, final, & material); it is just that he thought that 1) they overlapped; 2) he could observe them. He also saw that the idea was limited to physics because outside physics God could stand outside causality unmoved mover.
Geneva debate. I cringe when I hear the word equilibrium. Most people use it without understanding it. They make it concrete just by talking about it. It is the worst of metaphysics. Probability may eventually mean something (though nothing concrete). Not so with equilibrium.
Athenian Stranger to Cleinias: In that the right and left hand are supposed to be by nature differently suited for our various uses of them; whereas no difference is found in the use of the feet and the lower limbs; but in the use of the hands we are, as it were, maimed by the folly of nurses and mothers; for although our several limbs are by nature balanced, we create a difference in them by bad habit . Laws. The Platonist of all Platonists, Plato himself, believed that we should use both hands with equal dexterity. It would not make sense otherwise. He considered our favoring one limb over the other a deformation caused by the folly of mothers and nurses. We had to wait until Pasteur to accept that nature is asymmetric: chemical molecules are left or right-handed. This asymmetry matters considerably for their functioning. Platos influence was said to have delayed our understanding of the dynamics of stars. We were set back by this insistence on seeing full circles in the motion of planets, not an elliptical one. It made more sense that way: nature was supposed to like circles. Even Kepler had a hard time making a leap to the ellipse circles were sticky in our minds.
I used to think that people treat their knowledge as personal property, something to protect, a hard-earned investment to guard against the disorderly and APlatonic truth. Robert Trivers made me realize that perhaps the entire business of knowledge came just as a tool for self-deception. We may have acquired the desire to know things first so we could fool ourselves others perhaps, but ourselves first. No matter where I look, the curse of the Platonic fold shows up that exact boundary that is far worse than pure disorder. Deceit is worse than disorder.
The Platonic Fold Touches the Real World (October 18, 2005)
I think I found another boundary of the Platonic fold with the following problem. Someone offers you the following wager: you are shown two closed envelopes with a check in each. One contains twice the others but you do not know which one. You can open and see the contents of the first, 1)then accept the money or 2) reject and switch to the other one (but you cannot go back to the first). This appears to be a problem because no matter which one you open, the second will be better in expectation and it should be optimal to switch. This appears to be what is called a paradox. But there is something wrong somewhere in the solution of unconditional switching, or the way the problem is presented or something else. We need some contact with reality mathematics is sterile otherwise. The solution is that it is a Platonic fallacy. The someone cannot be anonymous. There needs to be a texture to his gift. There is no such thing as a pure gift by a generic someone with infinite wealth. You need to have an idea about what he is expected to put in the envelope; if you expect to find $100, with an upper bound of $250, and the envelop contains $200, then switching is not a good idea. You may also need to take into account the reason for his offering the wager. Is he bluffing? There is no such thing as unconditional probability. This is not a paradox.
I contrast Platonicity and Aplatonicity: it is the difference between isolated classroom pure and formal problems and those that cannot be reduced or extracted from their context. Platonic randomness lends itself to explicitly defined forms. As to Aplatonic uncertainty: its shapes remain completely unknown. Even the dimensions (i.e., how many sources of randomness there are) remain hidden.