Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Bion, Black Swan, Freud, last year's picnic
Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Black Swan offers a devastating critique of the many conceptual errors we make to assimilate highly improbable events into the exact cognitive schema that they should shatter. Turns out that our conceptual universe apparently craves homeostasis and clings to what has worked so far in spite of evidence to the contrary (this, of course, is another version of the phenomenon of last year’s picnic, and also has resonance with Bion’s hypothesis about groups taking on their own survival as their primary task, and is related to the dialectic of eros and thanatos that Freud found at the logical end of homeostasis: death).
So, we stick to strategies that don’t work, explaining that they would have been entirely adequate if only it weren’t for x, where x = some highly improbable event. Of course, while the odds against any given highly improbable event are long enough to be ignored, the odds of an aggregate of all highly unlikely events are so substantial that long-term forecasting of any sort should be viewed with great skepticism.
So why are we able to habitually ignore the black swans that wreck the best laid plans? Because black swans look inevitable in retrospect. 9/11? The Argentine Currency crisis? The internet stock sell-off? The subprime mortgage meltdown? All have wreaked havoc on any long term financial forecasts since 1995, yet such forecasting continues because each looks like a one-time event, an inevitable correction or a one-time slip, and what are the odds that anything like it could ever happen again? Well, it depends what you mean by “like it”?
So, all this is covered in great detail in Taleb’s excellent book, but it brought to mind a reality that underlies our retroactive determinism: Our reality, at least in our imagination, is supersaturated with causes, each waiting patiently to be triggered, to release its ravaging effects on the world. Examples are all around us: when Russian intervened in the crisis in Georgia, we all said that the Caucuses are a tinderbox, just waiting to explode. When the the dotcom stocks tumbled or the subprime mortgage crisis hit, it confirmed what we knew all along: that nothing goes up forever. But the world is full of tinderboxes and things that will have to come down. Whatever gets blown up next, the cause is floating, unattached, through the milieau right now. The anger of the muslim world; the delicate environmental balances that stand on the brink of any number of catastrophes, etc,; the influenza killer virus/antibiotic-proof bacteria/the epidemic of whateveria…each is bound to happen. Most won’t, but when whatever happens does, its inevitable cause will be readily apparent. As it is now, only the paranoid focus on it.
Taleb offers many recommendations in negative: he’s against risk-mitigation strategies, long-term forecasts, and hates the banking industry. But as for positive recommendations, he can only recommend that we learn to accommodate black swans, that we build systems that presume their existence rather than holding the illusion of safety. He favors decentralization and wide-splatter, figuring that safety comes is meta-diversification and with enough separation between entities, the black swan’s ripple effect will be limited. Unfortunately, of course, we live in a world of ever-greater interconnectedness and webs of interdependencies.
I propose that we invent Lack of Information Technologies to compensate for the blade of uncertainty that hangs over us: technologies to help spread risks out, to help diversify our bets and set off alarms if we inadvertantly cluster too many resources on one outcome. These technologies would incur small losses in effeciency and order so as to maximize exposure to possible opportunities and minimize exposure to catastrophic meltdown. I have no idea what these technologies would be, but I’m working on it.
Among the several intellectual waves I’m surfing now, the one about how we deploy a vast bank of past data to understand and react to current situations has gotten the most airplay so far. It was on my mind this weekend when I was on a long run far from home. The shoulders of the roads were non-existence, the footing, often treacherous, and the traffic, heavy. My attention was focused on my footfalls without much exception and rarely did anything register in my peripheral vision. I knew that I was taking in far more visual data than I was really processing, and was marveling at the efficacy of the filter that allowed me to allocate my attention where it was needed.
One of the very few things that caught my attention was a long, black cable lying in the street that I initially mistook for a snake. Within a split second of asking the internal question, “was that a snake,” I turned my head and tested the better view of the impression from my peripheral vision against all known templates for snakes–black snakes, moving snakes, road-kill snakes, etc. It only took a fraction of a second to ascertain that none fit. While I could recognize the resemblance that caught my eye to begin with, it was clearly something like a cable or a large belt from a vehicle engine.
It made me wonder at what pierced the filter on my attention: not the many other branches, leaves, litter, rocks or bits of engine detritus that I passed. The snake was different…animate, potentially dangerous, predatory, uncommon. It tripped some primal alarm system, taking the attention that was protecting my ankles from a bad sprain to check out something that could be potentially more hazardous.
This was a couple of days ago, and though I thought a great deal about this on the run, I was uncertain whether it deserved a blog entry. Yesterday, however, I was riding my bike and saw a long, brown seed pod in the road. It was in my path and I had to swerved to miss it. It looks like a snake, I thought, but corrected for the mistake I’d made on the run and dismissed the idea, marveling at how easy it was to let your imagination get the best of you. I had adjusted, not letting the past or the primitive fears of my neolithic ancestors get the best of me. I had changed and not been a prisoner to past behavior patterns.
When I rode by it, I saw that it was a small rattlesnack.
A great revolution in artificial intelligence has followed from the realization that we are such creatures of habit. Rather than trying to invent a computer that can think like us, AI engineers have begun to seek out massive archives of human behavior, organizing the data in such a way that a supercomputer can find relevant correlations and then probabilistically analyze the likelihood of any given possibility based on how often it has occurred in the past.
The best computer translation have leveraged our habitual cliches, utilizing one or another massive, multilingual corpus to create new translations of a given phrase or sentence by comparing it to a bunch of phrases or sentences a lot like it that have been translated before. Similarly, chess playing computers now contain massive stores of games played, so that the computer doesn’t have to treat every single possible outcome equally, but rather can separate the likely from the highly improbably based on a huge data set of past outcomes. (more examples of this phenomenon can be found in Ian Ayres book, Super Crunchers.)
So, our lack of individuality–the way that we habitually behave the way that we have behaved or the way that others behave–comes in handy for endeavors that profit from standardization. Constant newness would be chaos, but the endless repetition of the old and familiar is a form of death all its own.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: alienation, coaching, consulting, language, poetry, therapy
So said the French bad-boy poet Arthur Rimbaud. He noted that, like last year’s picnic in the previous post, memories of language’s past usage eclipse the possibility of authentic self-expression. We’ll call this the Foment-Effect, as everyone knows that the only thing you foment is revolution. The two words might as well be one. Given the verb, language speaks the object. We have no voice in the matter.
So what if we extend this. Whenever I say “gotcha” to indicate understanding, I feel possessed by my father, as it was something he said all the time. Prefacing our random thoughts with “So…” has spread throughout my office like a virus. Then there are words of the moment that possess our public imagination. We’ll call this the Hanging Chad Effect, after the previously unknown, somewhat naughty sounding, pieces of paper that symbolize the chaos of the 2000 election recount. These words evoke a shared set of thoughts that reveal how deeply our minds have been colonized by a groupthink more subtle and interesting than Orwell’s.
It’s interesting because it speaks to the presence of otherness within us. Our memories, associations, syntax and vocabulary are foreign objects within us. Like last year’s picnic, they can delimit our imagination of the future or author our words at a given moment. Rimbaud’s poetics were meant to free us from the tyranny of the expected, to jar language loose from its mooring in cliched usage.
Today, therapy, coaching and consultation are all tools that individuals and organizations utilize to perturb stuck systems and offer new ways of speaking and understanding.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: memory, novelty, repeition, visualization
The last post showed the utility of our massive bank of memories to draw on. Malcolm Gladwell’s New Yorker article demonstrates that this is what makes chess grandmasters, brilliant neurosurgeons and transcendental hockey stars. Yet the stickiness of memory has it’s problems: it narrows the attention and forecloses on previously unimagined possibilities.
An example: fMRI studies have shown that when we’re asked to imagine a lovely picnic with our family next summer, the same part of our brain lights up that stores the memory of the lovely picnic we had with our family last summer. This is why freedom is difficult: it breaks something; it breaks the bond between last summer’s picnic and next summer’s picnic. We have to go against our brain’s natural impulse to base our assessment of the present on its memories of the past.
What we want to do is imagine another picnic. Interestingly, the way the study accomplished this was to have the subjects imagine a picnic with Bill Clinton. This inserted a wedge between imagination and memory, forcing the participant to come up with something new.
Perhaps this is why visualization, “what if’ sort of exercises, and even hypnosis can facilitate novel solutions: it creates a new reality for the mind to draw on, instead of being limited to the same suite of memories its always relied on.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: adaptation, change, cognition, data mining, memory, repetition, supercrunching
I used to be great at throwing a baseball. I went to a small elementary school where there weren’t enough boys to field a full team and my parents never let me sign up for Little League, but I could always find someone to play catch with at recess. These are some of my fondest memories, and I’m still friends with one of the boys I played with.
I always wondered, though, how we got it right. At age eight, we could throw accurately from distances of anywhere from ten to well over a hundred feet. We could take into account the incline of the terrain, the wind, the arc of the ball, our level of fatigue, and even the quality of our grip on the ball. If there was going to be a close play, I remember being able to anticipate how the baserunner was likely to slide and to figure out where to aim the ball for the easiest tag. All this came together in the fraction of a second before I launched the ball.
So, how could I know all this? I also had a boyhood fascination with things military and I remember how hard it seemed to get an artillery cannon to launch a shell in a way that could take a fraction of these factors into account. It involved complex equations for each variable–gravity, wind, terrain, and trajectory–and required fat reference manuals full of charts, or, later, computers.
As for throwing the baseball, though, the answer seems to be that I remembered how to do it. In other words, I had thrown a ball so many times, over so many distances, across such variable terrain, into and against the wind, etc., that my neuro-skeletal-muscular systems could draw from this experiential data and make a very good guess as to what was called for by the specific variables of a specific throw. Some neuronal circuitry converted my sensory data (distance, wind, terrain, grip, etc.) into specific instructions for muscle fibers and the proprioceptive sense that told me that I was moving correctly through space.
So, what does all this have to do with anything? Well, what doesn’t it have to do with? We’re not like the computers that aim artillary cannons with equations. We’re data miners and supercrunchers, who utilize a lifetime of experience to make sense of and act at every moment of our lives. How do we guage the tenor of an interaction, when it’s appropriate to say something, how best to intervene in a situation, what to do when someone is angry with us, etc.? We do so by comparing it to all the data we have gained from past incidences of similar occurances.
This is an easy way to conceive of what have been known as unconscious dynamics: our tendency to repeat interpersonal dynamics, relive relational patterns and make the same mistake over and over again are simply because we’re modeling our current situation on memories, but behaviors that might have been adaptive and functional in the past can’t adequately recognize the newness, individuality and uniqueness of the present. The problem is that we live in a world more complex than the baseball infield. The sophisticated mind we have are adequate for relatively straightforward, honest activities that involve Newtonian physics or for the daily life dynamics of getting along in the social pack. We had to evolve these skills in order to hunt mastadons and to negotiate our primate social lives.
But we haven’t adequately adapted to a world where we are faced with unprecedented newness every day. We tend to assimilate new situations to old ones, getting stuck in rigid cognitive frameworks for situations that require change and transformation, not more of the same. This is one reason why it’s so hard to change and hard to get others to change.
There are a lot of things I’d like to think I’d be good at. Maybe I’d be a damn fine screenwriter, an inspired junior senator, or a top notch museum curator. I think I have what it takes to write novels, do stand-up and possibly design resorts with a social conscience.
But I’m not good at those things. How do I know? Because I don’t do them every day. The return on doing something isn’t just getting it done, it’s getting better at doing it. Conversely, doing something you have no interest in getting better at is a waste of resources better spent elsewhere.
Studies have shown that chess masters don’t think more moves ahead or compute their choices faster or more accurately than the less skilled player, they’re just more familiar with the possibilities. How do you get familiar with the possibilities? You play chess. A lot. Evidently, 10,000 hours is what you should plan to invest to become good at something. 40 hrs/wk x 48 wks/yr = 1920 hours/yr. That’s five years, full-time.
That said, it’s not just repetition, it’s repetition with a push. Doing the same thing in the same way is unlikely to make you better. Pushing yourself out of your comfort zone is. Take on a new challenge. Try a different way. Get a coach, mentor or adviser.
If I want to write, to develop my ideas and become fluent in their expression, or to get in the habit of pushing my ideas further, then blogging seems like a good way to do it. I’d like to think I’ll be good at it, but I know that I’ll only be good at it if I do it every day.
