Left Flank

Now that the Wall Street crisis has sat on the front pages for awhile, it's about time for scientific theories, not just political strategies, about how Wall Street humiliated itself. Science writers John Horgan and George Johnson bring chaos theory to the discussion.

One writer mentioned - and criticized - prominently in this diavlog is Nassim Taleb. Taleb argues about avoiding «The Fourth Quadrant», where statistics becomes a illegitimate route to certainty.

So the good news is that we can identify where the danger zone is located, which I call «the fourth quadrant», and show it on a map with more or less clear boundaries. A map is a useful thing because you know where you are safe and where your knowledge is questionable. So I drew for the Edge readers a tableau showing the boundaries where statistics works well and where it is questionable or unreliable. Now once you identify where the danger zone is, where your knowledge is no longer valid, you can easily make some policy rules: how to conduct yourself in that fourth quadrant; what to avoid.

So the principal value of the map is that it allows for policy making. Indeed, I am moving on: my new project is about methods on how to domesticate the unknown, exploit randomness, figure out how to live in a world we don't understand very well. While most human thought (particularly since the enlightenment) has focused us on how to turn knowledge into decisions, my new mission is to build methods to turn lack of information, lack of understanding, and lack of «knowledge» into decisions—how, as we will see, not to be a «turkey».

I warn readers, that the essay concerns statistics, not politics, or even economics as presented in lay terms. I'll admit I've had to listen to the diavlog twice and read graphs repeatedly, since I'm not a math buff. But, I sense that these arguments are valuable for policy and lay understanding as opposed to the orthodox models based on gambling now current. Or, instead of putting your money on «black», you can keep it on «red».

And, for «people» people, Saul Hansell has a related attack in the same voice, but with more human agency. Hansell criticizes «...Wall Street executives had lots of incentives to make sure their risk systems didn't see much risk.»

Whether you blame the universe or people for the current predicament, it's time to deepen the search for solutions.

Powered by ScribeFire.

Brian Ferguson talks about neolithic man's propensity to war.

Powered by ScribeFire.

I encountered Thomas Homer-Dixon's writing in the initial stages of my research on war and natural resources. He got lost in the bibliography, as it were. Based on what I heard on bhTV, I need to reconsider him. Like his interlocutor, John Horgan, I also associated Homer-Dixon with Jared Diamond, and others on the bhTV have confessed, that Homer-Dixon bummed them out-a feeling Diamond can invoke, too. That is, until one reads in Guns, Germs, and Steel Diamond's pro-market approach, or comparing the Dominican Republic's environmental record with Haiti's.

Dr. Gewertz still bristles as she recalls picking up «Guns, Germs, and Steel» and seeing that it had been framed around what was called «Yali's question.»

Yali was a political leader and a member of a «cargo cult» that sprung up after World War II. By building ritualistic landing strips and control towers and wearing hand-carved wooden headsets, islanders hoped to summon the return of the packaged food, weapons, medicine, clothing and other gifts from the heavens that had been airdropped to troops fighting Japan.

One day Yali asked Dr. Diamond, «Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?»

Thus began Dr. Diamond's tale about the combination of geographical factors that led to Europeans' colonizing Papua New Guinea rather than Papua New Guineans' colonizing Europe.

«We think he gets Yali's question wrong,» Dr. Gewertz said. «Yali was not asking about nifty Western stuff.»

With more of the cargo their European visitors so clearly coveted, the islanders would have been able to trade with them as equals. Instead, they were subjugated.

What Yali was really asking, she suggested, was why Europeans had never treated them like fellow human beings. The responsibility and struggle of anthropology, Dr. Gewertz said, is to see the world through others' eyes.

George Johnson recounts how he encountered "a clash of world views", and one foreign to his own: anthropologists in Arizona. His bhTV interlocutor, John Horgan, is dead on, too: the anthropologists' criticisms of Diamonds' two books ARE contradictory. They are not interested in Johnson's simple universal patterns, but in "exceptions". Talk about a weird world!

The first salvo of my response to the anthropologists is on the bhTV forum.