Apologies again for the light posting. I'm rather overwhelmed at the moment. But I did want to say something else about Nassim Nicholas Taleb's "The Black Swan," which I ran out and bought this weekend because Stuart Buck, who's one of the smartest men I know, said he liked it so much he read it twice. I had several hours yesterday while waiting in the hospital with Matthew, and got through a few of the early chapters. In a perfect world, I could repair to my nearest Oxford pub, and sit there until I finished the thing. The book is compulsively readable. I'm hooked.
Taleb's discussion of the role of randomness in our lives, and how we cannot anticipate freak events (all we can know for sure is that they'll happen, sooner or later) makes me reflect on how I've never really gotten over watching 9/11 unfold right before my eyes. The anger is gone, mostly, but the sense of dread and unease isn't. I saw -- we all saw, but I saw it and heard it and smelled it, and I couldn't get away from it for a long time, because you always smelled it when you went outside for months afterward -- that our entire world could change radically in the course of a morning. Taleb talks about how his native Lebanon had lived in relative communal piece for centuries, such that nobody there could imagine the civil war that came upon them in the 1980s. And when it did happen, everybody assumed it would end quickly, because, well, it had to. But it didn't, and it was terrible.
I wonder if in some small way, I have a touch of the dread that people who went through the Depression (a far more traumatic event, cumulatively, than 9/11) do. My dad and mom have different attitudes toward money. He was a child of the Depression; she was born just after it ended. Neither had much money growing up, but my father is far more cautious with it, as if he feared the Thing coming back. Taleb makes me wonder to what extent much of my own intellectual preoccupations these days, and for the past few years, grow out of a general fear that everything around us that seems solid is really not, and that all this could be revealed to us in a terrible Black Swan moment. And that most of my work is done in light of preparing for the next Black Swan moment, such that whatever it is, we are as prepared to deal with it and prevail over it, no matter what it is.
But that's not what this post is about.
Taleb identifies an interesting Information Age paradox: the more information an individual takes in, the less he knows. To be precise, the less he knows about what he needs to know. That is, he doesn't appreciate the difference between information and knowledge. Information thus becomes "toxic," in Taleb's view, because it causes us to make poor choices based on a false picture of the world, a picture informed by "noise" -- that is, information that has not been properly processed, weighed, measured, and placed in context. Taleb:
"The more detailed knowledge one gets of empirical reality, the more one will see the noise (i.e., the anecdote) and mistake it for actual information. Remember that we are swayed by the sensational. Listening to the news on the radio every hour is far worse for you than reading a weekly magazine, because the longer interval allows information to be filtered a bit."
What if we are being poisoned by toxic information? What if having more information about the whole wide world at our fingertips, instantly, is not making us smarter and stronger, but in fact dumber and weaker? What if the wise man is not the same thing as the well-informed man, and one would be better off doing what Taleb did, and swearing off the daily newspaper and spending that time reading serious books instead?
Would you be better off canceling The New York Times and committing yourself to reading Dostoevsky and Faulkner instead? Is the man who travels around the world constantly and reads several papers and websites a day really more knowledgeable about the way the world works than the farmer who tends his field and takes care of his animals and his little patch of ground in the world?
I told you it was a heretical thought for a journalist.
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above by west coast Caroline at 7:11pm and not a San Francisco liberal
The phenonomenon of the psyche that explains the experience we enjoy by getting engrossed/enchanted (reading this thread or a good book) is in fact the same one: Mihály Csíkszentmihályi coined the term flow for it back in the mid '70s
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)
and it captures the rapid adoption of new technologies perfectly - the reason we "slide rather than decide" (as Helen Alvarez quipped on this evening's PBS Newshour) is because we'll chose gadgets that indulge the final phase of "flow" (= absorbing, effortless action) rather than stop and discern what it takes to move to the initial phase of a new period of "flow" (concentrating and focusing on clear expectations and rules of an attainable goal aligned appropriately with one's skill set and abilities, aka the prime reason for acting in the first place).
One can "slide rather than decide" even while reading a good book, if one isn't aware of the prime reason, ie one's conscience is disengaged while "flowing". All our activity ought be oriented on becoming a better person. Aome of us are lucky (or blessed like Norm Abram who can "flow" into almost any piece of carpentry that would send the rest of us into paroxisms of anxiety) and have a station in life that is predominantly end-stage flow, but other careers are endemically-cyclical and one must engage and diengage constantly. Young bodies are more able to cope, I think with certain characteristics of such careers, indeed medical researchers have found that men endowed with highly potent testosterone surges performed more aggressively and more profitably as commercial equity traders, than yields achieved by older men or women traders. That fact doesn't mean only such candidates ought be employed - knowing what we do about Black Swans, means that its also more likely that such traders will be behind the losses that cost us our prosperity, and thus balanced diversity in hiring is prudent!
See its so easy to be reasonable! There are principles that we can test for their reasonableness and make educated guesses. Anything else we must entrust to God (or to other's reasonableness, preferably folks who also are guided by similar principles, or failing that faith in God).
Two points of view about the concept of information overload:
1. Religious: St. John Chrysostom, a lifelong celibate, wrote some of the most incredibly sage, balanced and even practical advice about marriage. And St. Mary of Egypt learned the Scriptures during 47 years of solitude in the desert without the aid of any book or human teacher. So no, I don't think you have to be wired to the latest news and taking part in global discussions in order for your thoughts and ideas to be relevant.
2. Secular: Malcolm Gladwell's wonderful book, "blink," explores the idea that while information helps our decisions to be better informed, an abundance of information may result in poorer judgment. The example study he quotes is in a hospital: when doctors know too much information about their patients, it clouds their natural "instincts," which are themselves based intuitively on the factors that are the most important. When too many voices are talking at once, it's hard to decide which one to listen to.
Not heresy - truth. No offense to newspaper reporters, of course.
James P writes: Maybe Timothy Leary was right: turn on, tune in, drop out. Too bad he was talking about dope.
Maybe we need a Hippie Movement II, not based on drugs or casual sex, but on everything that was *good* about Hippie Movement I - communitarianism; making your own new art, culture, clothing; "back to nature;" the (re)discovery of alternatives in learning, in childbirth, in medicine.
We have a ready-made source for HMII, Stefanie. We are called neo-pagans. ;-)
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