05 Jun The mind can be a wonderful tool for selfdelusion (NASSIM NICHOLAS TALEB)
The mind can be a wonderful tool for selfdelusion—it was not designed to deal with complexity and nonlinear uncertainties.! Counter to the common discourse, more information means more delusions: our detection of false patterns is growing faster and faster as a side effect of modernity and the information age: there is this mismatch between the messy randomness of the information-rich current world, with its complex interactions, and our intuitions of events, derived in a simpler ancestral habitat. Our mental architecture is at an increased mismatch with the world in which we live. This leads to sucker problems: when the map does not correspond to the territory, there is a certain category of fool—the overeducated, the academic, the journalist, the newspaper reader, the mechanistic “scientist,” the pseudo-empiricist, those endowed with what I call “epistemic arrogance,” this wonderful ability to discount what they did not see, the unobserved—who enter a state of denial, imagining the territory as fitting his map. More generally, the fool here is someone who does the wrong reduction for the sake of reduction, or removes something essential, cutting off the legs, or, better, part of the head of a visitor while insisting that he preserved his persona with 95 percent accuracy. Look around at the Procrustean beds we’ve created, some beneficial, some more questionable: regulations, top-down governments, academia, gyms, commutes, high-rise office buildings, involuntary human relationships, employment, etc. Since the Enlightenment, in the great tension between rationalism (how we would like things to be so they make sense to us) and empiricism (how things are), we have been blaming the world for not fitting the beds of “rational” models, have tried to change humans to fit technology, fudged our ethics to fit our needs for employment, asked economic life to fit the theories of economists, and asked human life to squeeze into some narrative. We are robust when errors in the representation of the unknown and understanding o f random effects d o n o t lead t o adverse outcomes—fragile otherwise. The robust benefits from Black Swan events, the fragile is severely hit by them. We are more and more fragile to a certain brand of scientific autism making confident claims about the unknown— leading to expert problems, risk, massive dependence on human error. As the reader can see from my aphorisms, I have respect for mother nature’s methods of robustness (billions of years allow most of what is fragile to break); classical thought is more robust (in its respect for the unknown, the epistemic humility) than the modern postEnlightenment_ naive pseudoscientific autism. Thus my classical values make me advocate the triplet of erudition, elegance, and courage; against modernity’s phoniness, nerdiness, and philistinism.! Art is robust; science, not always (Lo put it mildly). Some Procrustean beds make life worth living: art and, the most potent of all, the poetic aphorism.
THE BED OF PROCRUSTES
Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
