The teleological Fallacy

That is, the illusion that you know exactly where you are going and that you knew exactly where you were going in the past, and that others have succeeded in the past by knowing where they were going.

The rational Flaneure however, makes a decision at every step to revise his schedule/targets, so he can imbibe things based on new information. thus, the Flaneure is not a prisoner of a plan. The opportunism of the flaneur is great in life and business-but not in personal life and matters that involve others. The opposite of opportunism in human relations is loyalty, a noble sentiment–but one that needs to be invested in the right places, that is, in human relations and moral commitments.

The error of thinking you know exactly where you are going and assuming that you know today what your preferences will be tomorrow has an associated one. It is the illusion of thinking that others, too, know where they are going and that they would tell you what they want if you just asked them.

Comments: in life, we often do not know what our goals are. Most of us choose default goals: to grow up, to go to school, to find love, to found a family, to raise children, to pay off the mortgage and save towards retirement, to see children get married and have grandchildren, to be healthy and to die peacefully, or to leave a name and legacy in the world after we die. These default goals seem to be built in us by nature as part of the basic instinct shared with other animals (say, to live and pass genes to offsprings) with small variations among individuals and in different times and ages.  Since we humans do not handle uncertainty well,  a tint of teleological fallacy is good for our mental health.

Comments: the trait of loyalty perhaps is conducive for survival as a collective whole.

America’s asset is, simply, risk-taking and the use of optionality, this remarkable ability to engage in rational forms of trial and error, with no comparative shame in failing, starting again, and repeating failure.

Comments: As someone who immigrated to the US after adulthood, I totally agree with this viewpoint. The most admirable traits of Americans are entrepreneurial spirit, risk-taking, and being less bounded by shame in failing–perhaps this is due to the diversity and the short history of the country. As a young country, we Americans are less bonded and burdened by traditions compared with citizens in China, India, and Japan.

Chapter 12 Thales’ Sweet Grapes

Story–Thales of the Militus— paid a small sum for the right to use others olive press and thereby made a fortune because it turned out to be a big year for olives. —the most ancient form of option—downside limited, upside unlimited.

Chapter 13. Lecturing birds on how to fly

Things that like dispersion

Authors, artists, and even philosophers are much better off having a very small number of fanatics behind them than a large number of people who appreciate their work. The number of persons who dislike the work doesn’t count—there is no such thing as the opposite of buying your book or the equivalent of losing points in a soccer game, and this absence of negative domain for book sales provides the author with a measure of optionality. Further, it helps when supporters are both enthusiastic and influential.

Comments: This point is very relevant for personalized social media, in particular, YouTubers, podcasts.  The illusion is that the larger the fan group is, the more influential this YouTuber or podcaster is. In reality, only loyal fans count; if those loyal fans happen to be influential, that will be even better.  Caleb, however, does not explain why.  I guess the majority of people are easily swayed by the opinions of others. Because of this, these people have equally swayed away, say by a rumor that defiles the reputation of their infatuated star/celebrity.  A loyal fan, however, will explain away the doubtful reputation of their beloved star/celebrity, or even defend their hero vehemently.

Harvard’s former president Larry Summers got in trouble (clumsily) explaining a version of the point and lost his job in the aftermath of the uproar. He was trying to say that males and females have equal intelligence, but the male population has more variations and dispersion (hence volatility), with more highly unintelligent men, and more highly intelligent ones. For Summers, this explained why men were overrepresented in the scientific and intellectual community (and also why men were overrepresented in jails or failures). The number of successful scientists depends on the “tails,” the extremes, rather than the average. Just as an option does not care about the adverse outcomes, or an author does not care about the haters.

No one at present dares to state the obvious: growth in society may not come from raising the average the Asian way, but from increasing the number of people in the “tails,” that small, very small number of risk-takers crazy enough to have ideas of their own, those endowed with that very rare ability called imagination, that rarer quality called courage, and who make things happen.

comments: Summer’s comments may well be true. Caleb’s conversation about the Asian way of raising kids may not be correct.  In east Asian countries, such as China, Japan, Korea, or Vietnam, the population is drastically more homogenous than that in Europe, the Middle-east, or America both in terms of race and cultural heritage because in these regions, there are rarely racial issues because the majority of the population belong to the same ethnical group. For example, the majority of Chinese are Han, even the mandarins who were the rulers in the Qing Dynasty were completely assimilated into the Han society and lost their Mandarin culture heritage.  In other words, the cultural “variance” of Asian society is small.  If the claim that the diversity of the U.S.  promotes the entrepreneurial spirit; then it is fair to conclude that the homogeneity of  East Asia is a hindrance to risk-taking and entrepreneurship percentage-wise.  However, this is not equivalent to the claim that East Asian countries are less entrepreneurial or innovative than America in the absolute sense because of the population size in East Asia.   On the flip side, for things/matters that share the same traits with a contagious disease such as fashion, information transmission, media, business models that rely on the internet,  it is quite reasonable to assume that they will transmit and spread at a much faster speed in east Asian than in Europe, middle east, or America because of the homogeneity of East Asian countries.

Jacob argued that even within the womb, nature knows how to select: about half of all embryos undergo a spontaneous abortion—easier to do so than design the perfect baby by blueprint. Nature simply keeps what it likes if it meets its standards or does a California-style “fail early”—it has an option and uses it. Nature understands optionality effects vastly better than humans, and certainly better than Aristotle. Nature is all about the exploitation of optionality; it illustrates how optionality is a substitute for intelligence. Since the result is often path-dependent and our life is short, fail early often is less consequential than fail later in life for individuals.

Comment: The statements above have a constraint. For trial-error to work,  the cost of error must be inconsequential. Somewhere in Steve Jobs’s biography mentioned that Steven Jobs would ask interviewees whether he/she had tried marihuana. Good that he did not ask about Opium which is much more addictive than marihuana.  In ancient times, behaviors that have dire consequences for individuals or the collective were often coded in religions or moral taboos such as Moses’ Seven commandments”. These codes often loosen up if technological advancement lessens the consequence of those behaviors. For example, it is taboo for a couple to have sexual intercourse before the matrimonial ceremony; as contraption technology improves, these moral codes gradually loosen up. This kind of change can occur in a matter of ten years. For example, when I went to college in the late 80s and early 90s last century, if a girl/boy stayed overnight at the dormitory of the opposite sex and being reported to the authority, often by angry roommates, the couple would be expelled from the university.  This was a very dire consequence because a college education was tantamount to a secured job and decent income after graduation; without it, one probably would have to do manual work and earn a pittance.  While the behavior is still frowned upon, the consequence is no longer so dire. First of all, young couples may be able to afford to spend nights at hotels. Second, universities permit students to marry once they reach the legal age for marriage.  In a sense,  social or economic changes will affect moral conduct and codes because those external conditions affect the consequences of certain behaviors.

It is worth insisting that the most wonderful attribute of nature is the rationality with which it selects its options and picks the best for itself—thanks to the testing process involved in evolution. Unlike the researcher afraid of doing something different, it sees an option—the asymmetry—when there is one. So it ratchets up—biological systems get locked in a state that is better than the previous one, the path-dependent property I mentioned earlier. In trial and error, rationality consists in not rejecting something that is markedly better than what you had before. Options benefit from variability, but also from situations in which errors carry small costs. So these errors are like options—in the long run, happy errors bring gains, unhappy errors bring losses. Even political systems follow a form of rational tinkering, when people are rational hence take the better option: the Romans got their political system by tinkering, not by “reason.”

We are managed by small (or large) accidental changes, more accidental than we admit. We talk big but hardly have any imagination, except for a few visionaries who seem to recognize the optionality of things. We need some randomness to help us out—with a double dose of antifragility. For randomness plays a role at two levels: the invention and the implementation. The first point is not overly surprising, though we play down the role of chance, especially when it comes to our own discoveries. There is often a long gap between the invention and the implementation.

Medical researchers call such lag the “translational gap,” the time difference between formal discovery and first implementation, which, if anything, owing to excessive noise and academic interests, has been shown by Contopoulos-Ioannidis and her peers to be lengthening in modern times. The historian David Wooton relates a gap of two centuries between the discovery of germs and the acceptance of germs as a cause of disease, a delay of thirty years between the germ theory of putrefaction and the development of antisepsis, and a delay of sixty years between antisepsis and drug therapy.

comments: Caleb’s viewpoint may well explain why the Chinese invented powder, paper, the compass, and print; but modern technology never got developed in China. Since Han Dynasty, Confusious took the dominant position politically and culturally, while all other schools of thought were depreciated, the country became a more centralized empire, which may well contribute to the “transactional lag” that deterred industrialization from occurring in this vast empire.

The Soviet-Harvard Department of Ornithology

Consider two types of knowledge. The first type is not exactly “knowledge”; its ambiguous character prevents us from associating it with the strict definitions of knowledge. It is a way of doing things that we cannot really express in clear and direct language—it is sometimes called apophatic—but that we do nevertheless, and do well. The second type is more like what we call “knowledge”; it is what you acquire in school, can get grades for, can codify, what is explainable, academizable, rationalizable, formalizable, theoretizable, codifiable, Sovietizable, bureaucratizable, Harvardifiable, provable, etc.

Comments: Formal standard education has its iatrogenic effect. Those after schooling become rigid in thinking and forget the most obvious and the most fundamentals were called “fooled-by-books”—-(书呆子）。 There is another Chinese idom–describes the phenomenon that someone who is remarkably skilled in some area but with little or no formal education, “高手在民间。”  Perhaps great books in themselves are harmless. However, they will have undesirable iatrogenic  if  interpreted and applied incorrectly, or followed blindly,

The error of naive rationalism leads to overestimating the role and necessity of the second type, academic knowledge, in human affairs—and degrading the uncodifiable, more complex, intuitive, or experience-based type:

   Academia → Applied Science and Technology → Practice

While this model may be valid in some very narrow (but highly advertised instances), such as building the atomic bomb, the exact reverse seems to be true in most of the domains I’ve examined. Or, at least, this model is not guaranteed to be true and, what is shocking, we have no rigorous evidence that it is true.

The Harvard Department of Ornithology is now indispensable for birds flying. It will get government research funds for its contribution.

  Mathematics → Ornithological navigation and wing-flapping technologies → (ungrateful) birds fly

It also happens that birds write no such papers and books, conceivably because they are just birds, so we never get their side of the story. Meanwhile, the priests keep broadcasting theirs to the new generation of humans who are completely unaware of the conditions of the pre-Harvard lecturing days. Nobody discusses the possibility of the birds’ not needing lectures—and nobody has any incentive to look at the number of birds that fly without such help from the great scientific establishment. The problem is that what I wrote above looks ridiculous, but a change of domain makes it look reasonable. Clearly, we never think that it is thanks to ornithologists that birds learn to fly—and if some people do hold such a belief, it would be hard for them to convince the birds. But why is it that when we anthropomorphize and replace “birds” with “men,” the idea that people learn to do things thanks to lectures?

comments: based on this theory above, it seems that Socrates’ death was well justified because he confused the Athen youths on the basic human distinct, therefore confusing and corrupting them as Caleb dedicated a whole chapter to support this claim.  It is like the parable in Chinese, “邯郸学步“。 The story occurred in the Spring-Autumn period in China. A young man heard that people living in the city of Handan walked with an elegant gait. He wanted to walk elegantly so he went to Handan to learn how. He discarded his own way of walking, and diligently learn the Handan way–step by step with all nuance. However, three months later, not only he did not learn the elegant Handan way of walking, but he forgot his own way to walk. Consequently, he had crawled all the way to his home.

As per the Yiddish saying: “If the student is smart, the teacher takes the credit.” These illusions of contribution result largely from confirmation fallacies: in addition to the sad fact that history belongs to those who can write about it (whether winners or losers), a second bias appears, as those who write the accounts can deliver confirmatory facts (what has worked) but not a complete picture of what has worked and what has failed.

Comments: this made me remember one of my teachers’ comments who happened to be a neighbor. I had been a great student from primary school and up. Once I caught this teacher saying to the effect  that ” the parents of good students do not show appreciation for teachers’ effort.”   If his logic is right, then shouldn’t “the parents of bad students should complain about the incapability of their kids’ teachers.”  Hence, “if the student is smart, the teacher takes the credit”.  In a sense, the performance variance is due to the variance of students, not necessarily due to the success or failure of their teachers.   It is hard to measure how good a teacher is, based merely on students’ grades.

In pre-modernization ages, the way technology advances is more like as follows:

Random Tinkering (antifragile) → Heuristics (technology) → Practice and Apprenticeship → Random Tinkering (antifragile) → Heuristics (technology) → Practice and Apprenticeship …

Comment: Social science does not contribute to the progress of practice. On the contrary, the opposite is true:

   Practice → Academic Theories → Academic Theories → Academic Theories →Academic Theories … (with of course some exceptions, some accidental leaks, though these are indeed rare and overhyped and grossly generalized).

This is certainly true in my field; the so-called research in business school is always several steps behind the practice. Oddly, editors and reviewers often require scholars to add motivating stories in the opening of an academic article to justify the research—–de fact, recognize that the practice precedes the research.

EPIPHENOMENA

The Soviet-Harvard illusion (lecturing birds on flying and believing that the lecture is the cause of these wonderful skills) belongs to a class of causal illusions called epiphenomena. What are these illusions? When you spend time on the bridge of a ship or in the coxswain’s station with a large compass in front, you can easily develop the impression that the compass is directing the ship rather than merely reflecting its direction. The lecturing-birds-how-to-fly effect is an example of epiphenomenal belief: we see a high degree of academic research in countries that are wealthy and developed, leading us to think uncritically that research is the generator of wealth. In an epiphenomenon, you don’t usually observe A without observing B with it, so you are likely to think that A causes B, or that B causes A, depending on the cultural framework or what seems plausible to the local journalist.

Greed as a cause

With astonishing regularity, greed is seen as something (a) new and (b) curable. A Procrustean bed approach; we cannot change humans as easily as we can build greed-proof systems, and nobody thinks of simple solutions.

Likewise “lack of vigilance” is often proposed as the cause of an error (as we will see with the Société Générale story in Book V, the cause was size and fragility). But lack of vigilance is not the cause of the death of a mafia don; the cause of death is making enemies, and the cure is making friends.

Debunking Epiphenomena

We can dig out epiphenomena in the cultural discourse and consciousness by looking at the sequence of events and checking whether one always precedes the other. Further, Granger had the great idea of studying differences, that is, changes in A and B, not just levels of A and B.  Likewise, the important difference between theory and practice lies precisely in the detection of the sequence of events and retaining the sequence in memory.

Chapter 14 when two things are not the same thing

Serious empirical investigation (largely thanks to one Lant Pritchet, then a World Bank economist) shows no evidence that raising the general level of education raises income at the level of a country. But we know the opposite is true, that wealth leads to the rise of education—not an optical illusion. I am not saying that for an individual, education is useless: it builds helpful credentials for one’s own career—but such effect washes out at the country level. Education stabilizes the income of families across generations. A merchant makes money, then his children go to the Sorbonne, they become doctors and magistrates. The family retains wealth because the diplomas allow members to remain in the middle class long after the ancestral wealth is depleted. But these effects don’t count for countries. the idea of educating people to improve the economy is rather novel. The British government documents, as early as fifty years ago, an aim for education other than the one we have today: raising values, making good citizens, and “learning,” not economic growth (they were not suckers at the time)—a point also made by Alison Wolf.

Comments: I agreed with the observation as well. As a collective, the education level rises as a country becomes richer. The U.S. is the country with the most universities per capita. However, a simple read of the biography of Andrew Carnegie and Rockefella told me that up till the mid-twentieth century, higher education in Europe was far superior to that in the U.S.  The rise of U.S. higher education benefited tremendously from the country’s rise as an economic power and the brain drain from Europe and around the world, especially during world war two.   A similar situation is happening in China. Not long ago, in the 90s last century, visiting professors from top universities in China such as BeiDa University, QingHua University would try to stay in the U.S. after their visas expired. Some even had to do manual work in order to survive. The reason is that they could earn four or five times more washing dishes in a restaurant in China town than a professor in an elite university in China then.  Twenty years later, the salary and benefits a professor can earn in China have been rising rapidly; the gap is shrinking and disappearing. As a result, many Chinese students who have earned a Ph.D. in the U.S. are competing for faculty positions in good universities in China; finding a job in the U.S. is no longer the best option by default.

It is unrigorous to equate skills at doing with skills at talking. My experience of good practitioners is that they can be totally incomprehensible—they do not have to put much energy into turning their insights and internal coherence into elegant style and narratives. Entrepreneurs are selected to be just doers, not thinkers, and doers do, they don’t talk, and it would be unfair, wrong, and downright insulting to measure them in the talk department. The same with artisans: the quality lies in their product, not their conversation—in fact, they can easily have false beliefs that, as a side effect (inverse iatrogenic), lead them to make better products, so what?

Bureaucrats, on the other hand, because of the lack of an objective metric of success and the absence of market forces, are selected on the “halo effects” of shallow looks and elegance. The side effect is to make them better at conversation. I am quite certain a dinner with a United Nations employee would cover more interesting subjects than one with some of Fat Tony’s cousins or a computer entrepreneur obsessed with circuits.

Comment: To succeed in modern societies, one has to pass a minimum bar in how to present oneself, including the way one dresses, speaks, and converses; without this, regardless how “great” one in some area, it is rare that one will receive due recognition and economical reward.

THE GREEN LUMBER FALLACY

So I saw the less is more in action: the more studies, the less obvious elementary but fundamental things become; activity, on the other hand, strips things to their simplest possible model.

PROMETHEUS AND EPIMETHEUS

In Greek legend, there were two Titan brothers, Prometheus and Epimetheus. Prometheus means “fore-thinker” while Epimetheus means “after-thinker,” equivalent to someone who falls for the retrospective distortion of fitting theories to past events in an ex-post narrative manner. Prometheus gave us fire and represents the progress of civilization, while Epimetheus represents backward thinking, staleness, and lack of intelligence. It was Epimetheus who accepted Pandora’s gift, the large jar, with irreversible consequences.

Optionality is Promethean, narratives are Epimethean—one has reversible and benign mistakes, the other symbolizes the gravity and irreversibility of the consequences of opening Pandora’s box.

You make forays into the future by opportunism and optionality. So far in Book IV we have seen the power of optionality as an alternative way of doing things, opportunistically, with some large edge coming from asymmetry with large benefits and benign harm. It is a way—the only way—to domesticate uncertainty, to work rationally without understanding the future, while reliance on narratives is the exact opposite: one is domesticated by uncertainty, and ironically set back. You cannot look at the future by a naive projection of the past.

An idea does not survive because it is better than the competition, but rather because the person who holds it has survived! Accordingly, the wisdom you learn from your grandmother should be vastly superior (empirically, hence scientifically) to what you get from a class in business school (and, of course, considerably cheaper). My sadness is that we have been moving farther and farther away from grandmothers.

Comments： this claim has some truth in it because grandmothers’ views have survived the test and trials of the time. Grandmother once suggested I study medicine as a doctor’s value appreciates over time when I chose majors before taking the national college entrance exam. Now, more than thirty years later, I thought my grandma was right.   Instead of a Business School professor who conducts research that is forced to follow the footprint of business practitioners, I find myself quite useless to others careerwise.

Chapter 16 History Written by Losers

A practicing laboratory scientist, or an engineer, can witness the real-life production of, say, pharmacological innovations or the jet engine and can thus avoid falling for epiphenomena, unless he was brainwashed prior to starting practice. I have seen the evidence—as an eyewitness—of results that owe nothing to academizing science, rather than evolutionary tinkering that was dressed up and claimed to have come from academia. Then I was hit with the following idea. We all learn geometry from textbooks based on axioms, like, say, Euclid’s Book of Elements, and tend to think that it is thanks to such learning that we today have these beautiful geometric shapes in buildings, from houses to cathedrals; to think the opposite would be anathema. So I speculated immediately that the ancients developed an interest in Euclid’s geometry and other mathematics because they were already using these methods, derived by tinkering and experiential knowledge, otherwise they would not have bothered at all.

This is similar to the story of the wheel: recall that the steam engine had been discovered and developed by the Greeks some two millennia before the Industrial Revolution. It is just that things that are implemented tend to want to be born from practice, not theory. Universities prospered as a consequence of national wealth, not the other way around. He even went further and claimed that like naive interventions, these had iatrogenic that provided a negative contribution. He showed that in countries in which the government intervened by funding research with tax money, private investment decreased and moved away. For instance, in Japan, the almighty MITI (Ministry for Technology and Investment) has a horrible record of investment. I am not using his ideas to prop up a political program against science funding, only to debunk causal arrows in the discovery of important things.

The Industrial Revolution, for a refresher, came from “technologists” John Kay invented the flying shuttle, which mechanized weaving, and in 1770 James Hargreaves invented the spinning jenny, which as its name implies, mechanized spinning. These major developments in textile technology, as well as those of Wyatt and Paul (spinning frame, 1758), Arkwright (water frame, 1769), presaged the Industrial Revolution, yet they owed nothing to science; they were empirical developments based on the trial, error, and experimentation of skilled craftsmen who were trying to improve the productivity, and so the profits, of their factories.”

comments: it is generally true many technological advances do not require a Ph.D. or a rock scientist’s brain but requires the opportunity to find out the problem and think of a way to improve it. If this is the case, then academies that are often isolated from practice have little or no chance to contribute.  For example, containerization greatly reduces transportation costs; its idea was started by a truck driver instead of a transportation engineer; it would be unthinkable that a professor who sits by a desk and stand before a group of students will devote his/her energy to a truck driver’s problem—how to effect unload or load a truckload of goods from a ship, such issues have no chance getting into the doors of a university office.

Governments Should Spend on Nonteleological Tinkering, Not Research

This reasoning is more against teleology than research in general. There has to be a form of spending that works. By some vicious turn of events, governments have gotten huge payoffs from research, but not as intended—just consider the Internet. And look at the recapture we’ve had of military expenditures with innovations, and, as we will see, medical cures. It is just that functionaries are too teleological in the way they look for things (particularly the Japanese), and so are large corporations. Most large corporations, such as Big Pharma, are their own enemies.

Decisions are largely a matter of opinion strengthened with “who you know” and “who said what,” as, to use the venture capitalist’s lingo, you bet on the jockey, not the horse. Why? Because innovations drift, and one needs flâneur-like abilities to keep capturing the opportunities that arise, not stay locked up in a bureaucratic mold. The significant venture capital decisions, Shapin showed, were made without real business plans.

Let us use statistical arguments and get technical for a paragraph. Payoffs from research are from Extremistan; they follow a power-law type of statistical distribution, with big, near-unlimited upside but, because of optionality, limited downside. Consequently, payoffs from research should necessarily be linear to the number of trials, not total funds involved in the trials. Since, as in Figure 7, the winner will have an explosive payoff, uncapped, the right approach requires a certain style of blind funding. It means the right policy would be what is called “one divided by n” or “1/N” style, spreading attempts in as large a number of trials as possible: if you face n options, invest in all of them in equal amounts.   Small amounts per trial, lots of trials, broader than you want. Why? Because in Extremistan, it is more important to be in something in a small amount than to miss it. As one venture capitalist told me: “The payoff can be so large that you can’t afford not to be in everything.

THE CASE IN MEDICINE

Matt Ridley’s Anti-Teleological Argument

The difference between humans and animals lies in the ability to collaborate, engage in business, let ideas, pardon the expression, copulate. Collaboration has explosive upside, what is mathematically called a superadditive function, i.e., one plus one equals more than two, and one plus one plus one equals much, much more than three. That is pure nonlinearity with explosive benefits—we will get into details on how it benefits from the philosopher’s stone.

Remarkably, to get a bit more philosophical with the ideas of Algazel, one can see religion’s effect here in reducing dependence on the fallibility of human theories and agency—so Adam Smith meets Algazel in that sense. For one the invisible hand is the market, for the other it is God. It has been difficult for people to understand that, historically, skepticism has been mostly skepticism of expert knowledge rather than skepticism about abstract entities like God, and that all the great skeptics have been largely either religious or, at least, pro-religion (that is, in favor of others being religious) classes than the strictly necessary.

Corporations are in love with the idea of the strategic plan. They need to pay to figure out where they are going. Yet there is no evidence that strategic planning works—we even seem to have evidence against it. A management scholar, William Starbuck, has published a few papers debunking the effectiveness of planning—it makes the corporation option-blind, as it gets locked into a nonopportunistic course of action.

Comments: Strategic plan–at least plans for five years ahead–is cast in stones. however, the situation changes; if one cannot adapt （which often is the case for an organization), then the strategic plan becomes a hindrance for the organization to adapt, survive and thrive.  A Chinese parable explains this folly ver well.  A man on a boat lost a sword because the sword slipped off to the water. The man quickly marked the spot on the boat where his sword was lost, saying’ this is the place I lost my sword, I should look for it later”.

In my own experience, a smaller unit within an organization often does not do strategic planning, such as a small academic department, or even a big one, because even such planning is meaningful, the strategic plan is likely to conflict with its counterpart in other departments within the same academic unit. unfortunately, this small-unit strategic planning occurred in a department where I served as a faculty member. It was even more unfortunate that this so-called strategic planning spanned over three years, only stopped by god—–lockdown due to COVIP-19.    As a matter of fact, the so-called strategic plan was used by a member who received a  Ph.D. from the same department and stayed as a teaching faculty member as a tool to gain his own personal influence over the group.   It was absolutely asinine that the senior members played along, although one of the colleagues who were about to retire, whispering to me ” this is a tremendous waste of time”.   I am so glad I no longer work for this university.

THE INVERSE TURKEY PROBLEM

In the antifragile case (of positive asymmetries, positive Black Swan businesses), such as trial and error, the sample track record will tend to underestimate the long-term average; it will hide the qualities, not the defects. In the fragile case of negative asymmetries (turkey problems), the sample track record will tend to underestimate the long-term average; it will hide the defects and display the qualities. Let me stop issuing rules based on the chapter so far. (i) Look for optionality; in fact, rank things according to optionality, (ii) preferably with open-ended, not closed-ended, payoffs; (iii) Do not invest in business plans but in people, so look for someone capable of changing six or seven times over his career, or more (an idea that is part of the modus operandi of the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen); one gets immunity from the backfit narratives of the business plan by investing in people. It is simply more robust to do so; (iv) Make sure you are barbelled, whatever that means in your business.

THE CHARLATAN, THE ACADEMIC, AND THE SHOWMAN

The fight between the “legitimate” doctors and the Others is quite enlightening, particularly when you note that doctors were silently (and reluctantly) copying some of the remedies and cures developed and promoted by the Others. They had to do so for economic reasons. They benefited from the collective trial and error of the Others. And the process led to cures, now integrated into medicine.

THE ECOLOGICAL AND THE LUDIC

As we saw with the fellow making the common but false analogy to blackjack in Chapter 7, there are two domains, the ludic, which is set up like a game, with its rules supplied in advance in an explicit way, and the ecological, where we don’t know the rules and cannot isolate variables, as in real life. Seeing the nontransferability of skills from one domain to the other led me to skepticism in general about whatever skills are acquired in a classroom, anything in a non-ecological way, as compared to street fights and real-life situations. But we find it hard to apply this lesson to technical skills acquired in schools, that is, to accept the crucial fact that what is picked up in the classroom stays largely in the classroom. Worse even, the classroom can bring some detectable harm, a measure of iatrogenic hardly ever discussed.

Observing my father close up made me realize what being a valedictorian meant, what being an Intelligent Student meant, mostly in the negative: they were things that intelligent students were unable to understand. Some blindness came with the package.

Chapter 17. Fat Tony debates Socrates

There is this error of thinking that things always have a reason that is accessible to us—that we can comprehend easily. Indeed, the most severe mistake made in life is to mistake the unintelligible for the unintelligent— something Nietzsche figured out. In a way, it resembles the turkey problem, mistaking what we don’t see for the nonexistent, a sibling to mistaking absence of evidence for evidence of absence. Perhaps—thus he [Socrates] should have asked himself—what is not intelligible to me is not necessarily unintelligent? Perhaps there is a realm of wisdom from which the logician is exiled? “What is not intelligible to me is not necessarily unintelligent” is perhaps the most potent sentence in all of Nietzsche’s century—and we used a version of it in the prologue, in the very definition of the fragilista who mistakes what he does not understand for nonsense.

It took me a long time to figure out the central problem that Nietzsche addressed in <The Birth of Tragedy>. He sees two forces, the Apollonian and the Dionysian. One is measured, balanced, rational, imbued with reason and self-restraint; the other is dark, visceral, wild, untamed, hard to understand, emerging from the inner layers of ourselves. Ancient Greek culture represented a balance of the two until the influence of Socrates on Euripides gave a larger share to the Apollonian and disrupted the Dionysian, causing this excessive rise of rationalism. It is equivalent to disrupting the natural chemistry of your body by the injection of hormones. The Apollonian without the Dionysian is, as the Chinese would say, yang without yin. it is indeed Nietzsche who was first to coin the term with reference to Dionysus, whom he called “creatively destructive” and “destructively creative.”

Nietzsche indeed figured out—in his own way—antifragility. French thinker Ernest Renan, knew, in addition to the usual Greek and Latin, Hebrew, Aramaic (Syriac), and Arabic. In his attack on Averroes, he expressed the famous idea that logically excludes—by definition—nuances, and since truth resides exclusively in the nuances, it is “a useless instrument for finding Truth in the moral and political sciences.” He believed that large social variations can expose us to unseen effects and thus advocated the notion of small trial-and-error experiments (in effect, convex tinkering) in social systems, coupled with respect for the complex heuristics of tradition. Also Michael Oakeshott, the twentieth-century conservative political philosopher and philosopher of history who believed that traditions provide an aggregation of filtered collective knowledge.

Clearly, Wittgenstein would be at the top of the list of modern antifragile thinkers, with his remarkable insight into the inexpressible with words. And of all thinkers he best understands the green lumber issue—he may be the first-ever to express a version of it when he doubted the ability of language to express the literal. In addition, the fellow was a saint—he sacrificed his life, his friendships, his fortune, his reputation, everything, for the sake of philosophy.

comments: language is an invention of mankind for the purpose of communication, i.e., transmitting thoughts and ideas in a society. There are insights and thoughts that may not be easily expressed with words, i.e.,  inexplicable.  The feeling invoked by the sight of a splendid sky just before sunset, or a mother goose leads a group of gosling in a grassland on a sunny morning is hard to express unless one is a poet or well educated in literature; nevertheless, the feeling invoked are the same whether he is a Nobel laureate in Literature or an illiterate peasant.

Philosophers talk about truth and falsehood. People in life talk about payoff, exposure, and consequences (risks and rewards), hence fragility and antifragility. And sometimes philosophers and thinkers and those who study conflate Truth with risks and rewards.

To conclude this section, note that doing is wiser than you are prone to believe—and more rational. What I did here is just debunk the Lecturing-Birds-How-to-Fly epiphenomenon and the “linear model,” using among other things the simple mathematical properties of optionality, which does not require knowledge or intelligence, merely rationality in choice.

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p class=”p1″>Remember that there is no empirical evidence to support the statement that organized research in the sense it is currently marketed leads to the great things promised by universities. And the promoters of the Soviet-Harvard idea do not use optionality, or second-order effects—this absence of optionality in their accounts invalidates their views about the role of teleological science. They need to rewrite the history of technology.