Tag: Antifragility
Free Markets and the Dangers of Optimisation Engines

Free Markets and the Dangers of Optimisation Engines

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Epistemic Status: 3/4 - Considered Opinion

In my last post, I discussed why I think that Capitalism can be a net positive for the world, along with why it shouldn’t be used as a bogeyman that stands synonymous with all of the ills and excesses of modern society.  Some of those ideas may come across as echoing the thoughts and words of Milton Friedman, who was famous for his laissez-faire free-market economics.  Friedman made some very good arguments, however I cannot agree with his entire worldview.

The issue that I have with Milton Friedman, and the free-market capitalist policies that he championed is not with the fundamental validity of the ideas.  It is well established and demonstrable that investment is generally beneficial and free-markets generally allow for higher growth and lower prices.  The problem is instead with the extremes that he took these underlying principles to.  His philosophy was one of unyielding faith that the free market could do no wrong, and that any and all attempts to regulate the market are harmful…

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In Support of Federalism

In Support of Federalism

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Epistemic Status: 3/4 - Considered Opinion

This post follows on from Legibility and Democracy.

Finding the best way to govern a country is an ongoing struggle throughout the world.  The introduction of the concept of legibility suggested that federations might be a good middle ground providing both legibility and democracy for the electorate.  Widening the scope beyond this, there are many other advantages of federations over unitary states…

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Heavy Tailed Distributions and the States of Randomness

Heavy Tailed Distributions and the States of Randomness

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Epistemic Status: 4/4 - Maximum Effort

I. Normality

The “Normal Distribution” (also called the Gaussian Distribution) is a very useful and well-studied tool for analysing data.  It is however often misapplied, despite the efforts of Benoit Mandelbrot and Nassim Taleb to raise awareness of areas where it might be inappropriate to use.  One reason people may be tempted to overuse it might be its name, which is a little too suggestive of it being some kind of “standard”, so henceforth I will use its alternative name to avoid perpetuating this any more than is inevitable.

The trouble is, that everyone is so familiar with the Gaussian Distribution, that it is very seductive to shoehorn your data into it and try to use the familiar techniques to analyse your data.  When people see a “bell curve”, their first thought is usually “looks like it is Gaussian distributed”, meaning that the data behaves like it has been sampled from the graph below…

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Genetic Modification

Genetic Modification

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Epistemic Status: 3/4 - Considered Opinion

Reading things like this article make me understand why Taleb comes across as so abrasive and frustrated in his books. Anyone saying “we’ve had X for decades, DECADES, and nothing bad has happened, surely this is evidence that it is fine” has completely and absolutely missed the entire reason that heavy tailed distributions are problematic. Say it with me one more time –

Sampling from heavy tailed distributions looks just like sampling from thin tailed distributions until an event in the tail occurs.

We have had the internet for decades, and everyone thought it would usher in a new era of knowledge sharing and democracy. Few predicted that it would so effectively facilitate the death of quality journalism and the rise of populism and fake news…

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Rethinking Education

Rethinking Education

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Epistemic Status: 2/4 - Speculative

The Blind Leading the Blind

The sizes of classes in schools has been a hot topic for years. Clearly 40 children in a class together don’t get enough instruction time from the teacher, giving rise to calls to invest more heavily in education so that class sizes can be reduced. I am inclined to think that this does not go far enough – it is a sticking plaster over a much deeper problem with the entire system of education which we rely on.

Class sizes even as low as 15-20 still leave the teachers in either a lecturing role, or spending less than half an hour per day with each student one to one.  This results in the vast majority of interactions at schools being between children and other children. Every year, school takes up around 20% of all the waking hours of children (1140/5840 hours), but add to this after school clubs, extra curricular activities and going out to play with friends, it is easy to see that children can spend a majority of their interaction time interacting with other children, rather than adults. This results in children developing their own independent cultures and norms, further distancing themselves from adults and adult interaction (not to mention exacerbating the perception by adults of children as silly and immature)…

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Combining Rationality and Antifragility

Combining Rationality and Antifragility

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Epistemic Status: 2/4 - Speculative

Bridging the gap between Traditionalism and Modernism

Traditionalism is manifest in a confidence that the way we have always done things is the best.  Modernism by contrast is a term used to describe the almost monomaniacal application of “scientific principles” to optimise every aspect of life.  Whilst in many ways the opposite of traditionalism, this confidence in the correctness of the approach is something that both modernism and traditionalism very much have in common.  The planned, orderly approach to things that modernism advocated, resulted in both huge advances and huge catastrophes in the ‘50s and ‘60s – huge rockets that could reach the moon, monoculture farming turning large areas of the planet into arid dust bowls, glittering skyscrapers providing homes and office space for thousands of people, sterile grid-based cities devoid of culture or community.  Clearly modernism was not all bad, but the negative consequences were remarkably far-reaching – if we view traditionalism and modernism as opposite ends of a spectrum, can we find a middle, and will this middle allow us to reap the benefits given by both approaches, avoiding the drawbacks of either…

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