A strange love: or how I learned to stop worrying and enjoy politics

I am interested in politics.

This is a matter of some concern.

The reason is simple: what goes on in Westminster is largely irrelevant to me and my life. I live in an advanced, socially stable, pluralistic liberal democracy. I have easy access to clean water, good housing, good food, healthcare, education, information, the company of others, culture, and the opportunity to pursue whatever idle desires may remain now that the problem of my personal comfort has largely been solved.

Politics, however, is a source of depression and irritation. There is so much wrong with how our political system works that observing it is like watching a man sweeping a dusty hall with the brush extension of a fully functional industrial-strength vacuum cleaner.

The costs of any possible, and hence marginal, improvements in my personal condition are so high that they outweigh the gains.

Spending more than £10.6 billion on an ID card system that might fractionally reduce the already miniscule probability of me dying in a terrorist attack is an act of such revolting waste and intellectual squalor that I am sick at the thought of it.

The act of vetoing the publication of the minutes of the meetings in which our government decided to embark on an illegal and murderous war (not to mention going to war in the first place) is one of cowardice, both political and primal.

There are better political systems out there. Ones that are more representative and more democratic. And yet we're stuck here with an absurd system of elected kingship.

Given the failure inherent in the Westminster of politics the rational response is to simply ignore the newspapers and blogs that discuss these remote phenomena and concentrate on things of genuine local importance, whatever they may be.

But I am, of course, not rational.

Given I cannot ignore this irrational interest in politics I can only ask the question:

Why am I interested in politics?

The stock answer is that I consider myself a responsible citizen and therefore ought to be aware of and engage in the democratic process. This is of course nonsense. The only duty of a citizen is to obey the law.

I suspect that the source of this political disease is similar to that of the unfathomable interest that some of my friends have in the game of association football. They, like me, lack the power to make any substantive changes to the rules of the game and who gets which job for which team, and frequently decry what they see as poor decisions on the part of those appointed, but ultimately it is the same impulse that leads them to read the sports pages just as I read the politics and business pages.

Chris Dillow comments on this idea of rational inattention of politics:

So, what would be wrong with someone who avoids, as far as possible, all political knowledge - they don’t buy a newspaper, ignore political websites, don’t watch TV news, turn off the radio when the news comes on, and so on?
The obvious answer is that paying attention to politics isn’t a matter of narrow utility maximizing. We should do so because virtue requires it. Being a good citizen requires us to follow politics.

But does it? There’s a long tradition of people shunning public life: monks, hermits, Voltaire advising us to cultivate our gardens, MacIntyre urging us to retreat into local communities. And what’s virtuous about wishing to impose one’s own ego and limited knowledge onto the rest of society?

Nor is it the case that ignorance about politics need, in principle, be associated with general ignorance or incuriosity. It’s perfectly possible in principle to be very informed and cultured on all sorts of matters whilst paying no attention to politics - just as one can be clever and cultivated whilst being ignorant about, say, fruit flies or medieval plainchant

Further: as Nassim Taleb argues in Fooled by Randomness politics is one of those areas of human endeavour where success has more to do with random luck than any exceptional, empirically measurable, skill. What Taleb says about corporate CEOs can be paraphrased for politicians:

Politicians are not administrators. [...] they are often "empty suits" [...] persons who are good at looking the part but nothing more. [...] what they have is skill in getting promoted within a political party rather than pure skills in making optimal decisions - we call that "political skill."

So not only do I lack the power to change things substantively, neither do most of the participants.

Another problem with politics is that most of it is filtered through what is written by journalists.

Taleb argues against listening to journalists' opinions on anything, as the skills required of a successful journalist are not those required of a good political scientist[1]:

A journalist is trained in methods to express himself rather that to plumb the depths of things - the selection process favors the most communicative, not necessarily the most knowledgeable.

To conclude. Politics is my idle entertainment. Just as some watch soap operas and others watch association football games, I watch Newsnight and read political blogs. It isn't all I do, of course, but at least it is explicable.

[1]: Taleb is also highly critical of the whole notion of "political science", but is even more critical of journalists, so I'll let that slide for a moment.

Trivium and the MBA

It occurs to me that in a couple of centuries historians will look at the MBA in the same way contemporary historians look at the trivium - as something someone has to possess to be considered educated.

Insert obligatory Talebesque derision of MBAs here

My reading list

Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Baghdad's Green Zone by Rajiv Chandrasekaran

Rationale: I wasn't paying very close attention to Our Glorious Ally's Recent Imperial Adventures whilst it was happening. Partly this was because this sort of thing is difficult to piece together when you're reading it on a daily basis in the newspapers and partly because I was busy being a truculent teenager.

Anyway this seems to be the standard text on the subject and will hopefully give me a good grounding in What the Hell Happened.

The Trouble with Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science and What Comes Next by Lee Smolin

Rationale: I enjoyed the discussion of theoretical physics in The Quark and the Jaguar by Murray Gell-Mann, which was published in the early nineties, and I also enjoyed The Sleepwalkers by Arthur Koestler. I really want to find out what's happened since, and what the current state of play is as regards Big Science.

This book was recommended to me by one of my physics teachers a few years ago, and at the time was being serialised in The Times. I skimmed through it a while back in a bookshop and was impressed by the tone and content.

Introduction to Materials Science for Engineers by James F. Shackelford

Rationale: this is one of the set textbooks for the course I am (if everything works out) starting in September (there will be a few of these to come).

Manufacturing Engineering and Technology by Serope Kalpakjian and Steven Schmid

Rationale: Again another set text. I want to have a vague familiarity with the course materials well before the course actually starts. The reason for this is that I learn best when presented with a fairly long runway. I also like the opportunity to become comfortable with a particular textbook layout before using it in earnest.

The End of Politics: New Labour and the Folly of Managerialism by Chris Dillow

Rationale: This book is much discussed by the likes of Alex Harrowell and Daniel Davis and Dillow's blog is quite superb. If his book is even half as interesting and engaging as his blog then this will be a worthwhile read.

The Hidden Family by Charles Stross

Rationale: I enjoyed the previous book in this series and since I finished it the sequence has been praised and commented on by Nobel economics laureate Paul Krugman. Definitely not one to miss out on.

Foundations of Engineering by Mark T. Holtzapple

Rationale: Another set text!

Mathematics for Engineers: A Modern Interactive Approach by Anthony Croft

Rationale: And again.

Management for Engineers, Scientists and Technologists by John V. Chelsom

Rationale: Same again - nothing to see here.

Traders, Guns and Money: Knowns and Unknowns in the Dazzling World of Derivatives by Satyajit Das

Rationale: I've read Nassim Nicholas Taleb's books,The Black Swan and Fooled by Randomness, and enjoyed them immensely. However I would like a more in-depth and technical look at all the derivatives, investments, quantitative finance, mortgage-backed securities and other paraphernalia of the ongoing economic troubles.

This book seems to get high reviews and from the brief excerpt on Amazon seem to capture this particular facet of the Zeitgeist rather well.

The Accidental Pornographer: A Story About Having a Go - And Succeeding... in Failing by Gavin Griffiths

Rationale: After reading Paul Carr's enjoyable account of trying and sort of not-quite failing,Bringing Nothing To The Party , I sought out similarly themed books. This looks to be one such in which the eponymous pornographer protagonist tries and fails.

And as an additional bonus he apparently meets none other than my favourite business antihero Felix Dennis!

Against a Dark Background by Iain M Banks

Rationale: Well, I'm reading this at the moment so I've rather jumped the gun as far as rationale goes. It is a spectacularly florid book with titanic set pieces and more Big Dumb Objects than you can shake a space elevator at. Truth be told it could easily gain from content-trimming if you prefer tighter reads, but I've always enjoyed Banks' Banksishness so it's all puppy for the fat as far as I'm concerned.

On The Origin of Wealth

After a brief hiatus I have started reading this book again. Everything Taleb has written, sans the epistemic philosophy and general snark, can be seen as a subset of this book.

As I read Beinhocker is discussing how the observation that businesses evolve in the marketplace can be applied to practical strategy. He makes the point that for the most part conventional strategy and long-term planning is futile in the face of the complex non-linearities of the marketplace.

Beinhocker grounds his descriptions of economic activity in modern physics itself, rather than attempting to ape physics as many early economists (like Jevons and Walras) did.

Beinhocker defines wealth as useful order. And order is information, and useful information is knowledge. So knowledge is wealth.

Beinhocker says that value is created by:

• Irreversible actions
• Local reductions of entropy and
• Fitness

Fitness is determined by an evolutionary process, the free market, which can be thought of as a knowledge-generating machine.

Beinhocker advocates ideas similar to Alex Harrowell of the Yorkshire Ranter (who I suspect is familiar with the book), stating that we need to build institutions that evolve more effectively.

This sentiment runs counter to many traditional conceptions of Big Man, top down, authoritarianism. Politicians are praised for ignoring evidence and not adapting to circumstances.

The scientific method and free markets work so well because they lead to the creation of a large number of ideas and then subject each idea to testing, selecting the most successful ones, replicating and recombining these successful ideas, then repeating the whole process continuously.

The outcome is a an increase in knowledge, and hence wealth.

Bildungsphilister

In The Black Swan Nassim Nicholas Taleb defines a bildungspilister as a philistine possessed of a fake, cosmetic culture.

Taleb borrows the term from Nietzsche, who used it thus:

A bildungsphilister is someone who reads newspapers and reviews and imagines themselves to be cultured and educated but lacks genuine, introspective erudition.

Bildungsphilisters are prone to dogmatic, cliched, and unsubtle responses to events and things.

Taleb extends it to refer to anyone who has a high degree of education in one particular non-empirical field, who is prone to using buzzwords and ignores conflicts between the ideas they promote and the nature of reality.

Black swans and Google failure {Ramble}

Re-reading this article from last year in the Times (via George Dvosrky and BoingBoing) concerning Nassim Nicholas Taleb and black swans.

As I write Google seems to be going through a bit of a crisis, flagging all sites it's searches return with "this site may harm your computer" (it even spawned a Twitter hashtag #googmayharm) and redirecting you to an interstitial site:


Anyway it occurs to me that Google going bankrupt or suffering some huge failure that wipes out all the data stored in, say, blogger would be a black swan event. High impact and widely unpredicted.

This is exactly why I've taken to making local backups of my blog with this software using Blogger Backup. In the event of Google getting fubared I can be back up and running within two shakes of a Wordpress template.

I've also been doing something similar with my Delicious account, by using this website to create a local xml copy of all my Delicious bookmarks.

Incidentally Delicious is now becoming really useful: it's got to the stage (with 2096 tags and 2009 saved URLs) where it acts as a sort of private search engine of stuff I know I'll already be interested in.

But my obsession with long term data storage (and I mean for Long Now values of long term) has since been piqued by this article by Charles Stross. Stoss is talking about data formats being essentially forgotten after a few decades and data stored in those formats becoming inaccessible.

But the value of something like my Delicious xml backups may change for me because those websites might drop off the web.

So I'm currently looking for some software that will save all the pages associated with the URLs in my Delicious account as local html files.

LATER: Well Google is working properly and I found something like what I just described (a means to acquire local copies of all my Delicious sites) using the wget tool on UNIX based systems.

wget actually looks really awesome.

I know I should bite the bullet and switch to either Apple or Linux but I haven't got round to it yet, so in the meantime I'm looking for something similar to wget but for Windows...

On decluttering

As I mentioned in my previous post, some of the key ideas I've been exposed to over the past few months have been to do with decluttering.

Bruce Sterling's Viridian philosophy has at it's root an understanding that material possessions, beyond the tools we use every day, are essentially a tedious distraction.

As Sterling says himself:

It may belong to you, but it does not belong with you. You weren't born with it. You won't be buried with it. It needs to be out of the space-time vicinity. You are not its archivist or quartermaster. Stop serving that unpaid role.

The bulk of the stuff around me right now consists of various kinds of data-storage. There is also a lot of junk.

There are also some tools.

Why don't I lose the junk?

Nassim Nicholas Taleb makes a similar point concerning information: we are exposed to all sorts of information on a daily basis. But only a vanishingly small fraction is of any use to us.

The human mind being what it is additional information clouds our judgement of mundane, day-to-day matters as well as distracting us from what is truly significant (whatever that might be).

And finally Getting Things Done from David Allen. This strikes me as the ultimate in decluttering: it is the removal of all the nagging jobs and chores that we hold in our minds all the time and the placing of them elsewhere for processing.

Yet more GTD thoughts

OK, here's the thing: I've been trying to get my head round the utility of Eston Bond's Moleskine system, which he says is based partly on GTD and partly on PigPog.

Here's a brief summary of how the Moleskine thing is meant to work:

• Odd pages are numbered
• Pages 1 - 4 are the contents of the project pages
• Pages 5 - 123 are the inbox
• Pages 124 - 189 are the projects
  
• Pages 190 onwards are someday

The basic idea, which is taken from the processing component of GTD, is that you take all the things you need to without distinction or prejudice and write them down in the inbox section of this notebook.

Stuff that can be done within two minutes is immediately done. No ifs, no buts, no coconuts.

Stuff that requires a large number of discrete actions to be taken ("go on holiday to France" or "get a new part-time job") automatically becomes a project.

Projects are entered in the Projects section of the notebook.

All those things which you hope one day to do maybe but aren't really likely right now go into someday.

Inbox

Across each page in the inbox section the following is written:

Date | Task | Ref | Iteration | Project | Wait?

The date and task columns are fairly self-explanatory. The reference number is intended to indicate which page the task was previously entered in. The iteration is intended to indicate how many times the task has been moved forward in this manner.

If something has been upgraded to a project the project reference number is quoted in that column.

If something needs putting off for some reason then the Wait? column is marked.

My first problem is with the idea of moving tasks forward. If you're not waiting on something and not turning something into a project then why are you moving it forward?

Projects

The idea behind having a separate Projects section at the back of the notebook seems like a good idea initially: Projects need to be broken down into discrete units before they can be tackled.

But if the projects are all stuck at the back in the Projects section when do you process them?

And also: are you really going to enter discrete steps of projects in both the projects pages and in the inbox pages? Where's the utility of that?

Developing an alternative: WTD

Instead of Getting Things Done why not Write Things Down?

This works in essentially the same way except there are no iterations, references, maybes, or projects.

WTD would focus on discrete actions that need to be taken soon or at some time in the future.

The problem with WTD is it ignores the big picture: an entry like "Get a job" might remain for weeks whilst the lesser tasks that "Get a job" entails like "Write CV" and "Write covering letter" and "Buy stamps" are crossed out one by one.

In fact, this problem highlights a problem with the whole GTD philosophy as I see it: there are always some things that you need to do that you just do without needing to write them down and remember.

I will certainly do some more research into GTD (like buying the book [aha! I knew there was a catch!]), but in the meantime I'll explore my own needs a little further.

Furthering WTD: where's the utility?

Taking WTD as a starting point: what can I do to further my productivity?

Looking at the list of things I've created it strikes me that any stuff (the GTD generic term for "Things You Have to Do/Take Care Of/Deal With") can occupy any one of the following categories:

1. Stuff I need to do (e.g. "Get a job")
   
2. Stuff I don't need to do but would like to do (e.g. "Learn to program with Python")
3. Stuff I should do but probably won't (e.g. "Organise files")
4. Stuff I need to do and will do anyway (e.g. "Brush teeth")

As I see it the value in any productivity system lies in it's ability to encourage you to deal with all these categories of stuff.

All the extraneous stuff about references and iterations is all very well but I doubt it actually increases your productivity.

So, I'm going to dump the Moleskine in favour of a smaller and cheaper notebook (also one with diary functionality and maps and a pencil).

I'm also going to do some further research into GTD: I've only really touched the surface and I need to read the book.

I agree with this guy.

I think for my own happiness and peace of mind maintaining an elaborate system of references and iterations is less effective than having an ad-hoc scrawlbook.

And inevitably the ideas of GTD put my in mind both of Taleb's dictum to avoid information overload, and Sterling's thoughts on the Viridian design movement.

Taleb advocates information decluttering, Sterling advocates physical decluttering, and Allen advocates mental decluttering.

May Almighty illuminate our intellect and inspire us towards the righteous graph...

At the moment I'm reading The Origin of Wealth by Eric D. Beinhocker because Amazon kept bugging me with it every time I bought Taleb.

And those Amazon algorithms know their stuff: Beinhocker is like Taleb only more polite, less bombastic, and generally more interesting.

TOoW leaves out most of the epistemological stuff and concentrates on wealth. So far Beinhocker has gone over why neoclassical economics is nonsense (it treats the economy as a closed, non-dynamic system, which it isn't, and treats people as perfectly rational, which they aren't).

Beinhocker is working his way towards describing complex adaptive systems of the Murray Gell-Mann variety...

In the meantime he also writes about non-linear equations and deterministic chaos: like this equation here:

B_t+1 = r * B_t * ( 1 + B_t)

Where B is the value of something at time t, and r is some other number.

When r is set to 1:


Now if you set r to 2:




Now if you set r to 3.3:


Now if you set r to 4:


Which is, apparently, chaotic.

I had always thought that in mathematical terms chaos meant "randomness", but in fact the two are very separate ideas.

A system is chaotic if it:

1. Is sensitive to initial conditions,
2. Is topologically mixed, and
3. Has dense periodic orbits.

Now I understand the first of those points, but not the second or third.

More reading to do methinks...

THE SCIENCE OF LISTENER ATTENTION by Toby Zeigler

I heard, whilst watching the complete series 2 box set of The West Wing, Toby Zeigler mention something called "the science of listener attention" - I immediately googled it but could only find specific references to the episode and the script:

You want the benefits of free trade? Food is cheaper. Food is cheaper, clothes are cheaper, steel is cheaper, cars are cheaper, phone service is cheaper. You feel me building a rhythm here? That's 'cause I'm a speechwriter and I know how to make a point. It lowers prices, it raises income. You see what I did with "lowers" and "raises" there? It's called the science of listener attention. We did repetition, we did floating opposites and now you end with the one that's not like the others. Ready? Free trade stops wars. And that's it. Free trade stops wars! And we figure out a way to fix the rest! One world, one peace. I'm sure I've seen that on a sign somewhere.

I didn't think any more of it until I read what guestblogger Gareth L Powell was writing on Futurismic:

There are tried and tested techniques that advertisers have been using for decades – techniques that can be easily adapted to improve the response you get from your emails, subscription drives and blog posts.

The best known of these techniques is undoubtedly AIDCA. This formula is so powerful that it has remained in constant use since the 1950s, and has recently found a new lease of life with email and online marketing.

AIDCA stands for: Attention, Interest, Desire, Conviction, and Action. Over the next six days, I’ll be guiding you through each of these stages, giving you a powerful tool to use when you’re trying to elicit a response from your readership.

A coincidence, no? AIDCA sounds a lot like the written equivalent of the science of listener attention.

And further serendipity ensued with the discovery of this gem of an article by Cory Doctorow on how to write productively amidst the storm of distraction and noise that we are all constantly confronted with:

Researching isn't writing and vice-versa. When you come to a factual matter that you could google in a matter of seconds, don't. Don't give in and look up the length of the Brooklyn Bridge, the population of Rhode Island, or the distance to the Sun. That way lies distraction — an endless click-trance that will turn your 20 minutes of composing into a half-day's idyll through the web. Instead, do what journalists do: type "TK" where your fact should go, as in "The Brooklyn bridge, all TK feet of it, sailed into the air like a kite."

My recent hostility towards the stormy cloud of the media was piqued by reading two excellent books by Nicholas Nassim Taleb: Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan.

In both books Taleb criticises (amongst much else) the idea that people are "well informed" if they read the newspaper every morning.

Taleb describes the difference between the contents of daily newspapers and the contents of published books as akin to the difference between noise and signal.

No one can realistically know what medium-term relevance the daily churn of events will have on the markets, or the economy, or science, or technology.

Those events that are significant are so widely discussed and reported that it is practically impossible not to know that they are happening.

Which brings me back to the science of listener attention: if advertisers have such supposedly powerful techniques to get my attention how do I continue to effectively control my informational consumption? How do I robustify my memetic input? How do I screen my prospective mindmates? How do I let the good in and leave the bad on the magazine stand?

By reading more books and fewer nespapers.


[Gareth L Powell is a guestblogger on Futurismic]


Addendum:

In Fooled by Randomness Taleb mentions a preference for the classics, on the basis that if they've remained relevant and discussed for so long they must have value to them.

I wouldn't go as far as to say that lastingness is a guarantor of quality: but I take the basic point that if literature has survived for a long time it's worthy of respect.

{Although on a more technical point: later on in the book Taleb discusses the survivorship bias (go Google it). How does he know that the classics (i.e. ancient greek and roman literature and philosophy) are not simply prevalent because of the survivorship bias? Perhaps if the Library of Alexandria hadn't burnt down we'd consider the works in there to be of superior quality? Lasting historical relevance of books is a randomness-prone property. However I still agree with Taleb that reading about long-lasting ideas and reading older books is a workable heuristic for dealing with the "what will I read" question...}

He also mentions he reads weekly magazines like The Economist and The New Yorker on the basis that these have had enough time for news and ideas to be processed and contain potentially useful knowledge, as opposed to irrelevant data.

And yes: I am aware of the irony that I've resolved to read and write more but have also been watching The West Wing but whaddayagonnado - it has already taught me something today:

Beware of political speechwriters.

Living the good life elegantly

One of the ideas Nassim Nicholas Taleb comes back to again and again, both in The Black Swan and Fooled by Randomness is that you can and should live elegantly.

Living elegantly means being stoical about loss and disaster, and not working too hard or becoming overly stressed when things don’t go your way.

It also means avoiding “noise.” In this context noise is the constant humdrum flow of news and factoids that we all expose ourselves to in this information-saturated age. Reading the paper every morning doesn’t make you any more informed than someone who spends their time reading philosophy and history textbooks.

Taleb argues that the older something is the more likely it is to be of value: things that aren’t valuable tend not to be preserved or sustained in culture. This leads to an interesting comment on religion: whyever people believe in god is beside the point, millions of people do and have believed in God for thousands of years so there must be some psychological or cultural value to it. I’m inclined to agree with this, but not with the general point that “because we’ve always done it” is a good argument in favour of anything.

My objection is to the imposition of religious cultural values on those who do not believe: particularly the recent complaint to the ASA that the atheist bus is "offensive."

Stephen Green, national director of Christian Voice, sez:

"There is plenty of evidence for God, from people's personal experience, to the complexity, interdependence, beauty and design of the natural world.

"But there is scant evidence on the other side, so I think the advertisers are really going to struggle to show their claim is not an exaggeration or inaccurate, as the ASA code puts it."

Taleb would of course point out that you can't prove a negative ("God does not exist") and I would point out that the atheist bus does not claim to: "There is probably no God."

This statement is induced partly from lack of any indication of the existence of God so far (based on repeatable experiment, rather than subjective experience) and deduced from the internal inconsistency of most conceptions of God.

In The Black Swan Taleb presents a strong finding from cognitive psychology called the information bias that shows that being exposed to information more frequently does not necessarily improve your ability to make decisions.

Taleb also argues that being presented with a constant barrage of negative news is also bad for you from the point of view of happiness.

I’d like to draw a link between what Taleb says and the ideas of the Viridian design philosophy. In Bruce Sterling’s last note he says that people should minimise the amount of badly-designed clutter in their lives so that they might be happier. In the same way Taleb is advocating a reduction in information clutter, and concentrating on quality rather than quantity of data.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Felix Dennis

In his answer to the recent Edge Question 2009 (What will change everything?) epistemiology philosopher Nassim Nicholas Taleb touches on a topic close to my heart [from Edge.org]:

People want advice on how to get rich –and pay for it. Now how not to go bust does not appear to be valid advice –yet given that over time only a minority of companies do not go bust, avoiding death is the best possible –and most robust --advice.

Taleb is fond of pointing out that the "how I did it" genre of business/entrepreneurship books is essentially useless as a source of business advice because all the writers (who he asserts consist entirely of successful, retired entrepreneurs) suffer from the survivorship bias - the only reason they're in a position to lecture anyone on how to succeed in business is they did not fail.

As huge numbers of business startups do fail and the defining component of success is not failing there is very little value to be gleaned from reading the memoirs of self-indulgent millionaires.

The exception is magazine entrepreneur Felix Dennis, owner of The Week and The First Post (both of which I have stopped reading on Taleb's advice).

The reason Dennis' book How to Get Rich was so disappointing to this reviewer was that the he found the book largely anecdotal [from the FT]:

...this book is not so much about how we could get rich as how Dennis did.

The author has the good taste to admit that you have to be a little lucky to get on the rich list - as well as brash and single-minded. Unfortunately, he also has enough bad taste to reprint some of his own poetry, most of which revolves around himself and his pots of money.

Dennis' poetry notwithstanding I found the book both highly general but also highlighted by a series of anecdotes that show just how lucky Dennis was.

His first big break was when he wrote an exclusive biography of a kung-fu practitioner Bruce Lee just before the star died in mysterious circumstances, resulting in a surge of public interest and demand just as Dennis published the book.

On another occasion when Dennis was flogging membership packs for the Bruce Lee fan club the packs were shown on TV by a journalist who felt they were bad value for money - as a result thousands more people bought them.

Yet another time it was discovered (as Dennis was en route to his Caribbean home of Mustique) that his publishing company was due to suffer a catastrophic cash-flow crisis. The discovery was due to a change in accounting software that highlighted the problem just in time to avert bankruptcy.

Dennis is entirely open that his success is in large part down to luck, but he also includes a very practical point: when it comes to getting rich, it's what you own that counts, not your prestige, not your job title, or personal power.

And Taleb is wrong to say that you don't get books that describe how not to start a business. Raconteur and new media whore Paul Carr does just that in his amusing and entertaining account of how he failed to become a wealthy and famous web tycoon entitled Bringing Nothing to the Party: True Confessions of a New Media Whore.

I'm gradually coming to suspect that entrepreneurship is for suckers - if you really want to become happy, it's best to get a well-paying and reliable job that you enjoy.

Or better yet, rather than be a hacker, be a backer. Taleb mentions somewhere in The Black Swan that investors in companies make more money overall than individual entrepreneurs.

This is perhaps the story to take away from The Second Bounce of the Ball by Apax founder Ronald Cohen.

"Success," like most other abstract qualities, is largely subjective. Life is for living, not ferretting around for dollars and euros. As Brian Micklethwait writes in his essay What the Success Books Say:

Success means having a success attitude. Success means thinking successfully. Success means having, or cultivating, a "positive mental attitude"

Putting aside my nerdy and maladjusted obsession with the wealthy I care more about living elegantly and happily than mere money.

What I'm reading now

• M150 Data, Computing and Information: Unit 5 Storing, getting and sending your data, OU.


• T173 Block 3 Patents: The engineer as innovator, OU.


• The Quark and the Jaguar: Adventures in the Simple and the Complex by Murray Gell-Mann.


• Sams Teach Yourself Java 6 in 21 Days by Rogers Cadenhead and Laura Lemay.


• Economics for Dummies by Sean Masaki.


• Four Laws That Drive the Universe by Peter Atkins.

I recently (and finally) finished reading Arthur Koestler’s The Sleepwalkers. It was referenced in The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

Taleb said that Koestler highlighted how the idea that science has progressed in a straightforward fashion is wrong. Science has evolved through a series of sudden breakthroughs, and with much time wasted in intellectual dead-ends.

Taleb describes the most valuable property of the scientific method and the free market as “stochastic tinkering.” Having lots of people messing around with different ideas and business models increases your exposure to potential breakthroughs.

The idea that history is a series of clear and well defined developments inevitably leading to some outcome is a canard. History is a random and chaotic process.

Science and the free market are also random and chaotic. However it is precisely because of this randomness that science and the free market are so powerful.

Because the free market encourages new ideas and methods and allows successful ideas to achieve success at the expense of less successful ideas the ultimate outcome is a system that maximises the potential for good ideas to achieve widespread adoption.

Similarly with science. Good ideas succeed at the expense of bad ones. However in the scientific method the ideas are judged on the basis of the successful predictions they make, or the fact that they have yet to be disproved by experiment.

In the free market good ideas are judged on the basis of how profitable they are (theoretically).

Gell-Mann touches on many of the same ideas as Taleb, particularly regarding complexity and what Gell-Mann refers to as “complex adaptive systems.”

Damn you Taleb

Bearing in mind Nassim Nicholas Taleb's admonitions to stop reading newspapers, I have been making an effort to avoid doing so.

The problem is I am finding it extremely difficult. I can just about avoid watching TV, but I spend so much time online it become difficult to avoid looking at newssites. Even worse (when I do) reading articles like this:

Churnalism and all other forms of sponsored or assisted reporting are deplorably remote from Steer's ideal of the reporter as author of history's first draft. They are really little more than sordid compromises which famous newspapers and broadcasters feel forced to make in a plummeting market.

I believe that one day and somehow web-based news outlets will find a way to finance expensive, agenda-setting journalism. But that is a faith-based position, not an entirely rational one. The website does not yet exist that can afford to send correspondents on speculative foreign missions or to fund expensive long-term investigations.

As yet, despite the brilliance of sites such as this one, the best online journalism remains dependent on revenues earned by its paper and broadcast parents and upon journalists employed and paid primarily by old media outlets.

The problem with this is that I simply don't even buy newspapers. On the other hand I don't buy blogs, and there are some excellent weblogs that are completely free (The Yorkshire Ranter, Charlie's Diary, Stumbling and Mumbling etc).

The problem with blogs is that for every reasonable blog there are thousands of unreasonable ones. If people don't like what one blog says they can just go and find one that says stuff they like - I'm probably guilty of this myself in my blog selection.

This leads to what the one of the guests on Andrew Marr's Start the Week (in which he recaps some of the more profound biotechnological and computational stories of the past year) describes as counter knowledge.

Perhaps I should just go cold-turkey on all forms of media, including blogs and newspapers, TV news and so forth?

The problem is if I did that I wouldn't know what to think! I need to know more before I can make reasonable judgements, and the only way I can find out more is if I read more, and the only way I can read more educational stuff is if I read books (including textbooks).

One of the comments on this blog post on Overcoming Bias (another excellent blog) puts it rather well: the "opportunity cost" of reading newspapers is very high.

Thoughts on "The Black Swan"

Having read "The Black Swan" by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (his website is here) I have come to a few conclusions:

1. I spend too much time reading newspapers and on trivial and timewasting exercising (writing this blog post does not qualify as it counts as practice in writing and helps me organise my thoughts).
2. Much of what I believe about the world isn't based on any kind of objective reality, but rather a collection of superstitions, cognitive biases[link], and predjudices.
   
3. In certain non-empirical fields there is little value in deferring to experts if your intention is to accomplish something (like building a bridge, or making money).
4. The value in the "free market" has less to do with competition and more to do with the resultant levels of "stochastic tinkering" that have the potential to lead to hugely influential but unpredicted developments.
   

The Book Itself

Taleb is arrogant, irreverent and amusing - all qualities I value in anyone. He writes engagingly, occasionally dipping into anecdote (for illustrative purposes, not necessarily to support his argument).

The Black Swan

A Black Swan is an unpredicted event that has a huge impact. Human beings tend to ignore Black Swan events when making decisions about the future, despite the fact that Black Swans tend to have an overwhelming effect in history, science, business, finance, and individual lives.

Black Swan events are outliers, they have an extreme impact, and third human nature has the tendency to attempt to "explain" the Black Swan after the fact, making it seem predictable and obvious.

Extremistan and Mediocristan

Taleb defines two areas of human experience: in Mediocristan things tend to behave in a fairly orderly and predictable manner. The distributions of height in a large population, for example, remain relatively close to a normal Gaussian bell curve even if you were to add the world's tallest man to the population - because he is not 3 kilometres tall he does not effect the overall distribution.

In Extremistan, on the other hand, outliers have a disproportionately large effect. The distributions of personal net worth in a large population, for example, will be completely thrown out of whack if you add Bill Gates to the population.

Power Laws and Guassian Bell Curves

In Extremistan, power laws (Pareto's Principle, Zipf's Law) and fractal relationships are the norm. In Mediocristan Guassian bell curves are the norm.

Taleb believes the bell curve is misused in it's application in investing (I wasn't aware the bell curve was used extensively in finance).

Scalable and Non-Scalable Professions

Inequality tends to follow a power law. The richest 1% own 50% of all assets, whereas the poorest 10% own substantially less than 10% of all assets.

With regard to income some professions lend themselves to black swans and power laws, and others don't. Medical doctors and priests will tend to earn roughly a certain amount, which will fall somewhere on the bell curve of income for that particular profession.

Writers, venture capitalists, entrepreneurs, and scientists, on the other hand, all occupy extremistan, or black swan territory. Some writers (like J.K. Rowling or Terry Pratchet) earn collossal amounts of money per hour worked whereas the vast majority will struggle to earn anything.

Empiricism and the Problem of Induction

How do we know that what happens in the past will continue to happen in the future? Taleb likes empirical philosophers like Francis Bacon and Karl Popper, and Sextus the Empirical. In trying to find knowledge about the world it is better to prove conclusively that something doesn't work than that it does - in fact you can't prove that something always works.

Knowledge, therefore, emerges from negatives. Disproving something adds to knowledge.

Platonism and Theories

Taleb rails against creating a theory and then selecting evidence to fit the theory. He dislikes the application of game theory to economics, and portfolio theory to investment. He describes the mistake of focusing on elegant, tractable mathematics at the expense of empirical knowledge as platonicity, and any knowledge divined from such abstract mathematical theorising is "nerd knowledge."

Cognitive Bias and the Narrative Fallacy

Correlation does not equal causation. Post hoc ergo propter hoc.

Terry Pratchett and Taleb

Pratchett comments extensively on the human desire to create stories (the Discworld is a world that runs on narrative, rather than physical laws) and on the fact that million-to-one chances occure nine times out of ten.

Also Pratchett's uber-politician Lord Vetinari is the embodiment of the knowledge that in an unpredictable world what people really, really want is for tomorrow to be pretty much the same as today.

Arthur Koestler and Taleb

Skimming through The Sleepwalkers by Arthur Koestler (which I have read) I can see many parallels between Taleb's dislike of platonism and Koestler's similar criticism of excessive theorising in physics.

Taleb refers to Koestler's book in The Black Swan in the context of the inadvertant nature of much scientific discovery.

Koestler was also intensely critical of the dogmatic nature of theoretical physics (as he perceived it). Koestler's problem was that, unlike classical physics, quantum electrodynamics involved fields and quanta that could be one or the other or something else, depending on your perspective. I personally think the problem is more to do with the fact that QED is counter-intuitive. We humans have evolved in a quasi-classical environment and just aren't set up for thinking in terms of the quantum environment of the very small.

Hayek and Stochastic Tinkering

Taleb believes the value in free markets lies in their ability to generate new idea in a process of stochastic tinkering. This apparently is what Hayek thought.

Taleb is also a fan of Francis Bacon and Karl Popper. Does not like Platonism - mistaking the map for the territory and overextending the use of models.

Whither singularity?

Both Kurzweil and Taleb are obsessed with the fact that humans tend to have an "intuitive-linear perspective."

Taleb doesn't comment on the singularity directly. He does refer to the importance of power laws and such.

Conclusions

There is a lot of food for thought in this book, and I intend to read a lot more about the various topics that Taleb raises.

As ever at this stage in my education any new knowledge raises more questions and than it answers.

However as Taleb's central point is that the world is in many ways fundamentally unknowable and unpredictable perhaps this is a good thing.

The objective of learning is not simply to know a load of facts, but rather to become comfortable with the limits of your understanding. To transform unknown unknowns into known unknowns and to cope as best you can with those things that remain unknown unknowns.

That is a LOT of money - what about global warming?

I've been pondering something for the past few days: the British government can rustle up £37 billion at short notice to solve a banking crisis:




So what about global warming? What about energy security? Couldn't these issues be greatly improved by this cash?

I suspect the reason has to do with the fact that the situation around global warming is extremely uncertain: governments still aren't entirely sure if it will happen as advertised and if it does, will it be all bad?

Bjørn Lomborg and Freeman Dyson have both pointed out that there are potential upsides to global warming and climate change. Bjørn Lomborg claims:

According to the first complete peer-reviewed survey of climate change’s effects on health, global warming will save lives. By 2050, global warming will cause almost 400,000 more heat-related deaths each year – but 1.8m fewer people will die from cold.

And Freeman Dyson claims:

...if the increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is allowed to continue, shall we arrive at a climate similar to the climate of six thousand years ago when the Sahara was wet?

Second, if we could choose between the climate of today with a dry Sahara and the climate of six thousand years ago with a wet Sahara, should we prefer the climate of today?

My second heresy answers yes to the first question and no to the second. It says that the warm climate of six thousand years ago with the wet Sahara is to be preferred, and that increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere may help to bring it back.

I am not saying that this heresy is true. I am only saying that it will not do us any harm to think about it.

What I am certain of is that climate change lies in Taleb's fourth quadrant and is liable to be rife with black swans, and maybe a few white ones.

Then there is the misrepresentation of academics' views by the media.

There is also the obvious fact that no one is entirely sure what the best course of action is. Some advocate nuclear power, others advocate wind, tide, and solar power.

I am inclined to agree with the politicians: this is a complicated and unpredictable situation. By all means do something (at least only for reasons of energy security - a much more explicable problem, if no more tractable) but don't imagine we understand everything.

[image from the BBC NEWS]