And speaking of genetics, why haven’t we found much of significance in the dozen or so years since we’ve decoded the human genome?
Well, if I generate by simulation a set of 200 variables — completely random and totally unrelated to each other — with about 1,000 data points for each, then it would be near impossible not to find in it a certain number of “significant” correlations of sorts. But these correlations would be entirely spurious. And while there are techniques to control the cherry-picking such as the Bonferroni adjustment, they don’t catch the culprits — much as regulation didn’t stop insiders from gaming the system. You can’t really police researchers, particularly when they are free agents toying with the large data available on the web.
I am not saying here that there is no information in big data. There is plenty of information. The problem — the central issue — is that the needle comes in an increasingly larger haystack.
This is an audio player from NYPL Live. (Perhaps it will turn into a video player later.) The conversation took place at the New York Public Library February 5, 2013.
How do we — as individuals and as communities — make decisions when faced with uncertainty, inexperience, lack of knowledge or chaos? Nassim N. Taleb and Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman have both devoted their careers to explorations of the decision making process: Kahneman approaching it through psychological study; Taleb through a philosophical lens. Their groundbreaking work has profoundly impacted our understanding of the decision making process today while raising new questions about how decisions are made in a world that is increasingly more difficult to comprehend.
Nassim N. Taleb is a former derivatives trader who became a scholar and philosophical essayist in 2006. Although he is currently Distinguished Professor of Risk Engineering at New York University’s Polytechnic Institute, he self-funds his research and operates in the manner of independent scholars. Taleb is the author of The Black Swan (2007–2010) and Antifragile (2012). His work focuses on decision making under uncertainty, as well as technical and philosophical problems with probability and metaprobability; in other words, “what to do in a world we don’t understand.”
Daniel Kahneman is a Nobel Prize laureate and the Eugene Higgins Professor of Psychology and Professor of Public Affairs Emeritus at Princeton University, and a founding partner of The Greatest Good, a consulting firm. Over a wide-ranging research career he has been involved in many fields of psychology, ranging from vision and attention to the study of juror behavior and the measurement of well-being. He is best known for his contributions, with his late colleague Amos Tversky, to the psychology of judgment and decision making, which inspired the development of behavioral economics. This work earned Kahneman the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002. Kahneman’s recent book Thinking, Fast and Slow is a best-seller in several countries.
Interestingly, each man was asked to write a biography of seven words or less. Taleb described himself as: “Convexity. Mental probabilistic heuristics approach to uncertainty.” Kahneman apparently pleaded with the moderator to only use five words, which were: “Endlessly amused by people’s minds.” Not surprisingly these two autobiographies are descriptive of the two men’s bodies of work. Much of the discussion at this event, however, was not about making decisions under uncertainty, but a sort of tit for tat, with Kahneman asking probing questions and making pointed observations of Taleb. Little of the Nobel laureate’s work was discussed.
HOW TO MAXIMIZE PRIDE — Modern thought and social science are grounded in the objective of maximizing “happiness”, “utility”, “utility of wealth”, “pleasure”, “experiences instead of possessions” or similar matters that are both selfish and over which you have little control. They turned out to be both mathematically and morally clumsy. Switch your objective to maximize “pride” and see how different –and more controllable — things become.
DEALING THE ANTIFRAGILITY OF ENMITY (HOW TO CONTROL ENMITIES BY TURNING THEM INTO SUBJECTS OF ENTERTAINMENT RATHER THAN OBSESSION). If you are human, you will not be able ignore some of your enemies, and there is no point doing so and playing fake Olympian as they will bother you even more when you try to push them out of consciousness recall that efforts to “not think” about something turns it into an obsession. Which is a good thing: without your enemies, life would be bland and boring; enemies are vastly more entertaining than friends, so one should exploit them. Instead of ignoring them, you should use them for fun and relaxation. Reliable enemies will be observing you, even spying on you, so feed them with information while making it seem hard to get. Nothing frustrates them more than a) the knowledge that you are enjoying yourself, or, b) if you happen to be troubled, that they are not the cause of your discontent. Never ignore interesting enemies as they may lose interest and you may develop other harmful vices. Make sure to sustain their envy or anger. The test is: if you think of your enemies outside of entertainment, you will be harmed by them and they may become fixations. Homo sum.