Heroes Not Zombies

Black Swan, author, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, was interviewed recently for Philosophy Now magazine. I happened to be reading it the other day and it came back to my mind as I sat in a train outside Queen Street station for half an hour this morning while engineers attempted to unstick a “points failure”.

My core idea is about the effect of non-observables in real life. My focus is on the errors which result: how the way we should act is affected by things we can’t observe, and how we can make decisions when we don’t have all the relevant information.

I really like his phrase, “non-observables”. It immediately made me think of the Little Prince, and Saint-Exupery’s theme of how what’s invisible is most important in our lives. But that’s not exactly what he means. He’s particularly interested on those events and phenomena which appear unpredictably (for example, by studying swans, you would think one of their characteristics was that they are all white. It’s only when the black one turns up in another part of the world, that you have to abandon that belief). Of particular relevance for this time of year, is his parable of the turkey. The turkey concludes, on the basis of its daily observations, that’s he’s always fed at 9am and that the people who look after him do so very well, that they care for him and want the best for him. It’s only on Christmas Eve that he discovers this was a wrong conclusion.

The scientific method is based on “induction” – using particular observations to generate general laws which then allow predictions to be made. Taleb clearly points out the weakness of this approach.

…..induction presupposes that nature behaves in a uniform fashion, but this belief has no defence in reason.

I also like this phrase of his – “I’m interested in the ecology of uncertainty, not induction and deduction”. The ecology of uncertainty is such a great phrase. How often do we desperately seek certainty in order to make our lives predictable? But it’s a delusion. The world is full of uncertainty. In fact, the more complex the issue, the less certainty we can find. Human beings are complex adaptive systems. We aren’t able to predict, in individual cases, exactly what course a disease will take, nor, whether or not a particular treatment will work.

I’m grateful to Nassim Nicholas Taleb for his work on uncertainty. As science begins to grapple with complexity, scientists are going to have to learn how to handle “the ecology of uncertainty” instead of relying on induction.