Saturday, September 27, 2008
The Rapture of Calamity
A great discussion between two science journalists about, among other things, the exhilaration of calamity.
And here an article about the limits of statistics and how the experts play the public for fools.
So knowledge (i.e., if some statement is “true” or “false”) matters little, very little in many situations. In the real world, there are very few situations where what you do and your belief if some statement is true or false naively map into each other. Some decisions require vastly more caution than others—or highly more drastic confidence intervals. For instance you do not “need evidence” that the water is poisonous to not drink from it. You do not need “evidence” that a gun is loaded to avoid playing Russian roulette, or evidence that a thief a on the lookout to lock your door. You need evidence of safety—not evidence of lack of safety— a central asymmetry that affects us with rare events. This asymmetry in skepticism makes it easy to draw a map of danger spots.
This is the “black swan” thesis, that anomalies might exist; that statistics might not indicate their significance. A singular anomaly might render all the preceding data useless, reality exploding in our faces. Sounds familiar, doesn't it?
John Horgan noted that this is a variant of the argument between Stephen Jay Gould of the messiness of reality — a kind of inherent humor embedded in the system that finds an unexpected use for structure — and Dawkins' anally precise vision of reality (Panglossian Paradigm).
The exhilaration of calamity is the explosion which makes, for a precious moment, things new and unfettered, the mind and the moment at one.
George Johnson offered this quote,
“Everything was so clear that day, so unencumbered by theories and opinions, by thought, even. It just was.” — Ken Kesey in an email sent to friends after September 11, 2001.