Black swan

Notes on the Black Swan by Nassim N. Taleb:

Pg.36. Non-scalable and Scalable situations. ie: Mediocristan/guassian vs. Extremistan/Mandelbrot

Comparing situations in which the average value is largely unaffected by the addition of a new individual value (physically contrained sets like height or weight, or systems where something is constructed from scratch in each transaction) with situations that are unconstrained - such as personal wealth, or booksales - where there tend to be either absolute losers with zero sales or insignificant property, and true giants like Harry Potter or Bill gates - where the addition of a single extra individual (a black swan) can totally upset the previous average value.

Pg 40: The Turkey lesson about corroborative past - 1000 days of feeding, and on the 1001st day, a twisted neck.

Pg 54: The error of confirmation: "No evidence of X" is not the same as "Evidence of no X"

Pg 59: Switching things round:
"There are no black swans." -->
"All swans are white" ==>
"Anything not white cannot be a swan"

According to (faulty) confirmative logic, that which confirms the second - the sighting of a red mini for example, also confirms the former, that all swans are white.

Pg 68: Cost benefit + information:

*Information is costly to obtain, costly to store and costly to manipulate and retrieve.

To reduce these costs we use patterns and rules to compress/reduce the amount of information needed to re-create the object/event/uncompressed information

However - in so summarizing - we also add more 'order' to the world as we percieve it than there really is - and hence are prone to underestimating the degree of randominity extant in the real world.

Pg. 71 - this error of derived rules - the narrative falacy (drawing of 'story'-like conections between things perhaps not truly connected) and the ludic falacy (using a simulation or 'game'like abstract representation of a real-life situation to draw conclusions, predictions and rules concerning that real life situation - and placing too much faith in them) also effects memory - creating a palimpsest - as you remember not the actual event first recorded, but your memory of remembering of that event, and then the memory of the memory of remembering that event. Like a photocopy of a photocopy, sometimes the details get fuzzy, and sometimes parts of that attendent fuzz get interpreted as something else entirely.

Pg. 76: Narrative fallacy:

"Joey seemed happily married. He killed his wife."
"Joey seemed happily married. He killed his wife to get her inheritence."

The second intuitively seems more likely, though it is in fact not.

Pg. 80: The power of emotional connection - "One death is a tragedy - a million is a statistic." Stalin. That which cannot be easily and vividly imagined, effects us but slightly.

Pg 100: The problem of silent evidence, and the self-sampling assumption. ie: of course all gamblers have beginner's luck - otherwise they wouldn't have become gamblers. Those that prayed but drowned anyway, did not survive to tell the story of how their praying saved their lives.

Pg.107: That which does not kill you makes you weaker. The idea that people are somehow hardened through sub-lethal physical hardship and adversity - which 'weeds out' the weak from the strong - is fallicious because it neglects to state that the surviving 'strong' are also weakened by their trial. The progeny of those so selected perhaps, but again how much strength is derived from nurture, and how much from nurture. How much genetic, how much epigenetic..?

Pg 112: Visable effect. "Look at what I did for you." is more easily marketed than "Look at what I avoided for you." ie: A catastrophe visibly combatted is much more media-friendly than a catastrophe so well prevented that even its threat never broke the surface tension of public perception. (eg. the politician who has saved the most lives is actually the man who exposed the safety records of car manufacturers and made seatbelts maditory, but who even knows his name..?)

Pg. 139: People's evaluations of [the certainty of] their own knowledge is frequently exaggerated. Usually by a factor of twenty. A 2% estimate of error in some area of knowledge is in reality around 40 - 45%. A better education usually increases the error margin, rather than closes it. ie: a graduate is only slightly more knowledgable than X, but is many times more confident in that knowledge.

Pg. 146: Experts and and empty suits: Techné = craft. [know-how] Epistémé = knowledge. [know-what] Imagine you will have an operation - do you want 'know-how' in the form of a surgeon..? Or 'Know-what' in the form of a popular science writer..?

Expert professions: livestock judges, astronomers, test pilots, chess masters, physicists, accountants, pure mathematicians, insurance analysts (as long as dealing with constrained "mediocristan" subjects). The subject matter does not 'move' - chess is chess today, and chess tomorrow, the mechanics of flying does not radically change from day to day, today's cow is tomorrow's cow. ie: the black swan liability is low.

Non-Experts 'professions': stockbrokers, pyschiatrists, psychologists, court judges, councilors, intelligence analysts, financial advisors. High variability linked with overconfident evaluations and high margins of error... Empty suits and empty words, however convincing they may be.

Pg. 151 & 153: Accuracy of prediction. Study reveals that a PHD makes no difference in accuracy. However - a big reputation makes people worse at prediction than those who have none. Famous people also make bad predictors.

Pg. 159: Points of reference: A subconscious tendency to use (random) numbers as seed crystals around which to build belief. A study showed that people shown a (random) number were influenced by it in later tasks involved in estimation - a high number produced higher estimations than a lower number for example.

People find it almost impossible to evaluate something in isolation without some [arbitrary] point to work from.

cf: James No2's lack of absolute originality - everything is related to past matters. What goes before sets the stage for what comes after.

Pg. 171/2/3: Limitations on forecasting essentially historical events - Soft historical studies/social science - are too based in the narrative fallacy to be dependable as anything but fiction. Popper.

"Fundamentally unpredictable" to know the future is to make the future into the present. To correctly predict the future you must also predict accurately the technology of the future. If you can do that, then simply by idea difusion, you will probably be able to create the technology of the future today.

The law of iterated expectations - "If I expect to expect something at a later date, then I already expect that something in the present."

Predictions of the future are really merely re-runs of today and yesterday, perhaps with a few extra bells and whistles. ie: predict tomorrow with reasonable certainty, but not next week.

Pg. 178: problems with prediction from incomplete information. Billiard balls.

Two balls colliding - easy. Three, possible with precise knowledge of initial states... Nine - you need to take into account the gravitational effects of anyone near the table... Fifty-six impacts - you need to exactly know the states of every single elementary particle in the universe.

Billiard balls are easy - they have no personal needs, drivers or desires. predicting collisions between people however...

... And yet that is what social scientists and economists believe they can [reliably/accurately] do. To give themselves a leg to stand on they assume that everyone acts "rationally" (acting toward their best interests in all futures) and "coherrently" (adherring faithfully to habits and predilictions).

The chief fallacy of this is two-fold - it assumes everyone within a given sample has equal knowledge and the ability to put it into practice, and that all habits/predilictions are strongly held.

Given that people frequently make irrational and inconsistant choices - the general theories of economic optimization fail. There can be no "general theory" from which to make [long-range] predictions concerning any topic in which people are a variable - the branching error margins for their decisions/actions become exponential.

Pg. 195: Prediction errors and motivation [aka anticipated utility/affective forecasting]. It is thought a certain degree of prediction bias is innate and serves as a cue toward [beneficial/aversive] action. We overestimate, sometimes drastically, the impact of future events, both good and bad, on our lives. That new car becomes less a vehicle than a key to heaven; that impending redundancy becomes not so much a hiccup but an all consuming tidal wave.

Without such a fanfare and hullabaloo however - would we ever get up off the sofa..?

Pg. 196: Forward is easy, backward is hard. An ice cube is melting. Predicting the shape of the puddle it will make is difficult, but not entirely impossible, if you measure sufficiently well the starting conditions. But now, given a random puddle of water, try to reconstruct exactly what made it...

Helenus, of the iliad (son of priam and hecuba captured and made to tell the acheans how to capture troy) was a seer who predicted backward - seeing the past from its barest remnants.

Pg. 198: The death of determinism. Is everything determined..? Is randomness truly random or deterministic chaos...?

Random has no predictable properties, not even a predictable unpredictability. Chaos however, conceals a predictable order beneath a superficial surface of fake 'random'. It has predictable elements - but they are [very very] hard to know.

It doesn't matter. For any practical purpose, both are the same. Randomness is incomplete information. Opacity. And induction the fallacy of believing facet of life X. is non-random from insufficient observation.

Pg. 205: Barbell strategy in investment - hyper-conservatism and hyper-aggression. Because risk assessments are always error-prone the best way to invest is in the same way as you would gamble so as to invite good fortune and minimize losses. ie, bet big on sure things, but also bet a little at huge odds just on the off-chance. "Medium sized" bets are the worst - they are lauded as 'safe' but for relatively little return in reality risk huge losses should you invest heavily.

ie: two horses: Mr. Racecourse-Rocket and Mr. No-Hoper. MRR always always places in every race he ever enters. Lousy odds, but a big enough bet each way will always pay for your dinner, if maybe not dessert. MNH however wins a race maybe once in a blue moon, (if there's always an eclipse at the same time) at truly stupendous odds (he's the google of racehorses) - put a fiver on him every week, okay, you'll bleed out slow, but if he ever comes in, you can retire.

ie: invest at both ends of the spectrum, at something like 85% / 15% split - but never in the middle.

(This btw. is also why casinos limit single bets to sizes that won't ever bankrupt them - because the combined losses of the many always more than cover the lucky high-rolling few on any given day).

Pg. 216: Sherwin Rosen - the economics of superstars. The differential in earnings between X and Y in extremistan professions - TV celebrity, sports and films etc is increasing. But this does not mean that X is hugely better than Y at their profession, only that these professions instigate a 'tournament' effect - the winner only has to win by even the merest of margins to scoop the whole pot.

Of course, they can also win by pure luck. And once the initial event has occurred, social coherence/adherence effects re-inforce the outcome as people gravitate toward the winner - heaping upon him or her the adulation and material prizes which may indeed make that person win yet again.

ie: two books in the same catagory - horror say - one's a Stephen King, one's a Mr. Nobody. All other things being equal enough people would instinctively buy the former over the latter to make sure that Mr. Nobody stayed Mr. Nobody, however good Mr. Nobody might really be.

Pg. 218/219 Merton's ideas of "preferential attachment" (herding in choices / preferences) and cumulative advantage (the first million is the hardest - success attracts greater successes etc.) leads to Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu noting the link between the globalization of culture and the increased concentration of success. ie - the tournament effect above doesn't really depend on the actual number of players, it still tends to funnel success toward an ever smaller proportion of the population - given that that population is sufficiently well linked together both in comms hardware/software and through shared cultural reference points. MTV say, or concepts of female beauty - Whatever the credo, a punter is still a punter.

In general - the big get bigger, and the small either get smaller or stay the same. ie: We feel - like female birds at a lek - more comfortable with choices that already have been agreed with. (Which also explains the sudden attractiveness you gain from having a girlfriend :) ).

Zipf's law. Linguistics - the idea that the more you use a word, the less effortful it will be to use again. ie: we tend to fish out words from our private lexus with an ease and regularity dependent upon the frequency of their past use. (on the part of the individual and within his/her linguistic enviroment - leading to local dialects appearing quickly if isolated sufficiently)

eg - in English there are roughly 60,000 main words, of which only a few hundred constitute the bulk of written English and even fewer in casual conversation.

Pg. 227: Michael Marmot - Whitehall studies - shows, even adjusting for disease, a higher social status positively effects longevity. eg: an Oscar is worth an extra five years of life to an actor.

People who live in societies with relatively flat social gradients live longer en toto than the populaces of steeply-graded societies. Being a loser kills.

Pg. 233. The Guassian lie: The precipitous fall off slopes of the bell curve - as you move away from the 'norm' - produce probabilities so unfeasibly low that black swans seem completely out of the picture in any sane world. Trouble is, it is massively sensitive to errors in the measurement of sigma (standard deviation) to the point where a very small miscalculation can result in gross (a factor of a trillion for example at 20-21 sigma) underestimation of risks - if a guassian curve is applied to a scaleable situation - such as the stock-market - and used as a reliable predictor of risk... everyone, sooner or later, is totally fucked.

A Mediocristan (guassian) plot has an inconstant (exponential for example) decline as you move away from the centre in either direction, and an extremistan (Mandelbrotian) plot - follows a constant decrease as you move away. Anticipating risks with much greater levels of probability.

The key is to correctly apply the right curve to the right situation, rather than a one-size fits all approach.

Pg. 244: How do you tell where you are..? If you are dealing with yes/no questions, in which magnitudes do not matter or are non-existant (dead/not dead - pregnant/not pregnant - have a something/Don't have a something) then you are in mediocristan. If the magnitude does matter (how much money - how many hits) then you're in extremistan.

Pg. 250: Guassian Assumptions:

One: coin flips have no memory. They are isolate in time and space. You never 'get better' at flipping coins, a head today does not influence the likelihood of another tomorrow.

See - "preferential attachment" and "cumulative advantage" both mean real-world events do not obey Gaussian assumption. Suddenly forty heads in a row becomes more likely than a completely random mix.

Two: Random walks without wild leaps. A Guassian world view has steps of equal (value one) length. The real world has indeterminite step lengths (usually value one) and contains the possibility of a wild leap in times of acute stress.

Pg. 290: Popper. [paraphrase] "Philosophy collapses into empty sophistry without being based around problems that lie outside the strict philosophical domain."

...Continued...

How to grow Religions

Just as there can be no atheism without an opposing God, I do not think you can have an ethereal religious system that is not also in some way a reaction to the 'real' state of man, and as such will always reflect more of simple human needs and drives and vices than it ever does of some more divine will.

For a belief set to remain distinct enough to copy itself, or at least allow its accurate reconstruction down through multiple generations - especially before the advent of widespread recorded media - it must be resistant to blurring. By this I mean, contain some internally driven self-referential logic that automatically leads the individual or group adherring to its system to deny almost point blank another conflicting system.

I know this is a little circular, self-fulfilling, but the criteria for 'scientific' testable/falsifiable critique is largely unavailable to religions to provide a proxy for dierct conflicts of words or deeds. (And never really would have been available anyway, or even desired at the time when such things would have made a difference). To remain distinct enough to become a mainstream religion, such a religious system of belief would always have to have had a 'this is the one true word' clause in their somewhere, along with a system of punishment for those who would embrace the changes an embracement or even sometimes a simple tolerance of another close, physically and metaphysically, system.

It would, to my mind, be even more unlikely that two mainstream religions like Christianity and Islam would become instant friends, than to have the current situation. It has to be this way.

I think that mainstream religions, to dip into symbolic evolution, are - after fulfilling their chief purposes of linking the reality/concept of God to humankind, or infinite to finite or whatever terminology suits - are also constructed to last.

The idea of God, or Gods is intuitive - it instantly draws parallels however consciously or unconsciously in the mind of the aspirant with paternity, less frequently maternity, and hierarchy, as well as an answer to the natural question arising from the state of being a technological ape - "I make things, what is made needs a maker, who made me..?" - ie the idea of God at its most simple, most naked, is almost instantly transferrable between location or culture simply by virtue of being communicated by humans.

There is also, in the times of primitive creation myth cycles, less hardcore reason for doubt. The "well it could be true" factor is much much higher when you literally don't know how anything, natural or unnatural, works. Think of how astonishingly difficult it would be now to create a wholly new God concept not based on any of the current accepted deities, and have it flourish.

So, we could reasonably assume that there used to be as many Gods as there were groups of people, back in the day, and that beyond the actual central concept of 'Supernatural being' they were extremely diffuse. Some whispy idea of your Dead Dad looking down and commentating on your hunting skills would suffice, because your Dead Dad didn't really have any other, more organized pantheon to compete with.

And it is the idea, and its implications, of inter-religious competition that I want to explore.

A deity without competition need not punish, nor reward, to establish itself. Intuition, imagination and boredom in any given group of people will suffice. As will any local hallucinogenic substances, and natural outflow from already ingrained ritual activity. People like to dance, sing and do things together. The reason matters less than the activity, at least in the beginning - novelty being its own reward.

But when groups merge or conflict, or even simply come within 'knowing' range, then so do pantheons. And let the best pantheon win. So how does a particular system of belief recruit some faith from its followers..?

I'm sorry to say that in my view, it is by using fear. Fear of death, fear of famine and disaster, fear of disease. But this hardly needs saying. But I think at least in its early stages of competition, religion does not need to up the stakes higher than simply temporal, mortal punishment.

It can also recruit more positive aspects by association, just like Coke recruits positive association from the latest crop of Popstars, or Scientology recruits it from Tom Cruise.

Groups become bands, and bands become chiefdoms and chiefdoms become states and states become empires. And with empires come Emporers. And with Empororers, or at least Augustus (Octavius) Caesar, come Empire cults, more political entities than religions but functioning as such all the same.

How can another religion however focussed, however resolved, compete with one upheld by the political and military might of an Emporer..? Easy, by doing the oone thing it can do, that Caesar cannot, and that is move the supernatural goalposts.

Caesar is mortal, and his power is necessarily finite. He has limits. What is the best he can do for you, what is the worst..? And what do either of these courses of action cost him..? At worst, Caeser can have you personally tortured and killed, and your friends, and your entire familly. At a push he could raze the place you came from and put your entire race to the sword - but you'd really have had to have pissed him off for him to expend so much resource on revenge. At best Caesar cold exhalt you beyond all men, save himself. But again, you'd have had to have done something inordinately just 'WOW' to have earned such a similar expenditure of resource.

And this is where supernature, which has no limits to its power save the imaginations of its adherrents, wins out. There are limits to how much pain Caesar can make you suffer, before you finally die. God has no such limits, especailly if you have a soul. And better still, this terrible ability to punish costs the temporal extention of God - the adherrent religious system... Absolutely nothing save invective and maybe a few engravings. Similarly, God has no limits on how he may exhalt you, which again, cost nothing.

But there is a flipside also. Because neither everlasting damnation, nor everlasting life, costs anything very much, at least on the part of the religious system involved, it can also be dispensed with impunity, which means, unlike the hard work you'd have to do in order to get Caesar to really seriously punish you, or the even harder work you'd have to do to get him to exhalt you, to recieve either punishment or exhaltation from a religious system you would hardly have to work at all by comparison.

Live peacefully by its central directives - get the gold rung - one far surpassing even Caesar's abilities to give.

Break a minor rule and risk absolute hell.

A truly supernatural religious system allows the underachiever to experience extremes they could only have drempt of prior. It opens Valhalla to everyone, and makes the heroes make room at their mead tables for the riff-raff, it opens heaven and puts angels, like common staff, on the doors.

After that, a religion becomes its own empire, aquires wealth and power in its own right, becomes kingmaker, rather than simply being dependent on kings. Ethereal reward and punishment for the masses, material and political reward and punishment for the influential few. Momentum.

Anyway. Sorry for the massive missive. Let's cut to the chase.

A religion can do all of the above things, the rags to riches tale, without having to be 'true', simply by being convincing, or at least being espoused by those who are capable of being convincing, physically or oratorically, and meeting the requisite terms of reward and punishment.

But still, there is more to religion than simply "Here is God. He is the true and only God. Obey him or else." All that is simply packaging - to borrow a metaphor from genetics - it is the transcriptory mechanism that copies the central message of DNA through the generations. The message of DNA constructs bodies of varying fitness in competition with the surrounding enviroment and the other bodies around it. The central message of religion constructs peoples of higher or lower populations, also in competition with those around it. The central message is a facillitator of the principle of coherrence.

To bind a group of people together, to be of one mind and one purpose requires more than biology can supply. It requires an intergrating set of Culturally and/or religiously driven morals, virtues or whatever you wish to term them, which provide a comon ground upon which for people who do not know each other very well to base mutual trust, in order for them to co-operate.

I'll admit to knowing very little of the intricacies of religious morality, but what I do know is that from old testament to new, revenge in equal measure turned to forgiveness and this I think, is key.

I know this from game theory. A social strategy which forgives, beats a social startegy that does not. It does so because a forgiveness clause allows two people, or two groups of people to overcome a mistake, a slight, a trespass and continue to work together.

And it is this commandment to forgive, driven home into the group psyche by the ultimate example of Christ upon the cross that is important, whether or not he was ressurected, whether or not he was the son of God.

...Continued...

Outside-In Evolution

The conventional view of evolution is an "inside-out" approach concerning the action of internal biochemical mechanisms constructing a vehicle of varying parameters around itself to further its own replication.

If we were to watch this process contained in a bubble in which there was no negative feedback - each individual was inviolate with regard to its fellows and nothing was ever killed and nothing ever died of its own accord - and there were no issues of resource scarcity or competition - then the only seeming 'direction' we ever might be able to observe the total population heading would be one of speed of replication. The highest proportion of the population of such a bubble would always be the phenotype which replicated the fastest.

This would be pure "inside-out" evolution, which has no regard for external enviromental factors.

However, of course, no such thing exists. Death always weilds his scythe. The ultimate critic, The ultimate aesthete, with his own unchanging criteria - "Does it work..?"; "Does it work better..?"

But then, as the vehicles become more complex, and compete, various different fundamental schisms occur. Small - in the form of parasites and bacteria, and viruses at the extreme, does battle with big - in the forms of plants and animals. And this leads, pretty much invariably, to sexual, rather than asexual reproduction.

A society of hermaphrodites - true equals in the sexual game of life - is unstable, invadable by specialists - This battle leads to yet another schism, this time within species themselves, rather than between - and usually the production of two distinct specialised sexual characters - the carrier and the impregnator - the female, and the male.

At this point, inside-out evolution begins to give way to outside-in - As competition shifts from the purely 'speciel phenotype vs. the enviroment' to 'Y vs. X'. Of course the internal component is never lost, but the external factors become ever more numerous.

Death alters his criteria from a simple "Does it work..?" to a more convoluted addition "Is it attractive..?" From there, it moves onto more bio-philosophic ground - From "Is it attractive..?" to "Is it trustworthy in its attractiveness..?"

Which shifts the ground to truth vs. deception played out in flesh.

However, once a species becomes sufficiently cognitively complex, and able to manipulate and mould its enviroment rather than simply be manipulated and moulded by that enviroment... Then the outside truly becomes able to worm its way in.

The question then, after this short introduction - to what degree is it empirically valid to discuss evolution at the scale of not DNA, but of individual, and group behaviour..?

To make my own position clear - I believe that in a sentient species such as ourselves, indeed in any sentient, social and technologied species, evolution curves back on itself, and becomes a loop - we create our own enviroment both physic and metaphysic, and evolve in accord with it - according to the 'suction' caused by the social and cultural topography apparant at any given time.

DNA, our old master, is relegated simply to a means, the ends now co-opted by the very vehicles it created to aid it.

...Continued...

Beginnings

Hey kids. To give you some idea of when I'm writing this: I'm watching you my son, playing Spyro on our knackered old playstation. You're only wearing your red pants because it's August, and as hot as a big pile of hot things. Your sister is sitting on the floor nearby; it's well past her bedtime - she's just demanded that her nappy be removed for the umpteenth time and we are no doubt just waiting for the next surprise puddle of wee.

So, how am I going to do this..? Part of me wants to structure everything, part of me just wants to kick back and ramble on about this and that. call me a lazy old dog, but I think the ramble part wins - I can always go back and edit later. Or not.
I've been thinking a lot about confidence, how to win it, how to fake it, where to find it in the first place. A lot of people never find it their entire lives - they remain shrinking violets, ever at the beck and call of others, toadying up to whoever's got the best posture in the room. These poor unconfident sods however are unfortunately the people who run the shop, society-wise. Beware of offending them, for they can be merciless. But, I'm getting a bit ahead of myself.
There are a few common sayings that show the way I think:

• "Never judge a book by it's cover."
• "Clothes do not make the man."
• "Just be yourself."
• "It's what's on the inside that matters."

They show the way because they are all hopelessly and utterly wrong.
TBC.

note: 2010 jun. Obviously my stock of wisdom amounted to less that I'd estimated... LOL.