Category: Science/Technology

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With 500 of My Closest Friends

Naira Gasparyan really wants to connect with me on LinkedIn. My email inbox has a second reminder about Naira’s urgent plea of last week, reminding me that Naira, from the Central Bank of Armenia, could help me grow my network. Meanwhile, three Facebook posts this week start with “I am tired of seeing all these posts that…” Also, my bank has started a blog with tips to help people save for retirement, but they have somehow inadvertently mapped my blog’s personal bio into their author set, so that when you google my name, it shows up under the bank. They no longer accept customer support emails, though, so I had to add them to Facebook and then Messenger their support team to get this fixed. Coincidence? Hardly.

Welcome to our messy new society of app-based relationships. We have waded into the sea of people available through these icon buttons, and now the surf of voices is tumbling us merrily about. All the foibles and follies humanity has to offer are right at our fingertips, and, like everything else at our fingertips, it’s making us more divided and confused instead of tightly connected.

Who are all these People? Oh wait—that’s funny–

Take Facebook, for example. Continue reading “With 500 of My Closest Friends”

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I Didn’t See That Coming

Why don’t we anticipate large scale events better? Giant hurricanes (again, the 3rd in ten years)…500 year floods (again, the 3rd in Houston in three years by at least one account)… the crash of the economy… the election of crazy people… the list is getting pretty darned long.  People’s inability to see the coming tsunami wave is analyzed quite well in a book I recently read: The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

The human mind suffers from three ailments as it comes into contact with history, what I call the triplet of opacity. They are:
a. The illusion of understanding…
b. The retrospective distortion…
c. The overvaluation of factual information and the handicape of authoritative and learned people
—The Black Swan

Taleb’s book is only ten years old but already a classic. I read it on the mini-bus driving around the quiet hills of Ireland, and I can’t imagine a better way to absorb such an indictment of our human myopia. It’s very readable; there are some numbers in it, but mostly in the footnotes or the appendix. Most of it is anecdotes and stories, which is kind of ironic, since one of Taleb’s main points is that we rely on anecdotes to understand things because we can’t cope with the math. As it turns out, that’s probably okay, because we aren’t using the math properly anyway.

The Illusion of Understanding–Don’t Be the Turkey
One way Taleb says we fail to predict properly is in our inability to understand the world in front of us. The world is complicated and large; it’s hard to take it all in. As a result, we either (a) conclude that we can’t predict anything because it’s too complicated or (b) we rely on simply models and create quasi-statistical understandings entirely based on the present. These models fall apart if what our scope is limited. The best example of this is Taleb’s Turkey analogy.

The turkey, born on January 1st, for example, learns to look forward to the chef. The chef feeds him every day, lovingly popping the tastiest grains and morsels into his little mouth. For 330 days, he sees that chef come over and knows, from experience, that something good’s gonna happen.

Until it doesn’t. Continue reading “I Didn’t See That Coming”

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Not to See the Eclipse

Road Trip II: Up to Portland

Summer jobs when you’re in college are a grind  — hot, low-paying, mostly boring. Chasing shopping carts around in a parking lot. Xeroxing rolodex cards. Interpreting cheeseburger orders in sophomore-level Spanish through the drive-thru window. Our youngest Lee has been pulling 5:30 am shifts most of the summer, unloading the trucks at Homegoods, schlepping rugs and mirrors around for hours. If they’re lucky and get a full shift, then they  spend the second half smiling at customers who give long elaborate stories about why they have no receipt but want to return this ceramic dog with a chip in it.

It seemed to me Lee deserved a road trip before heading back to school, so we were determined to take one. A close friend lives just up in Portland. That’s only two days drive. Synchronize your watches! Pack up the car! We’re heading north!

Continue reading “Not to See the Eclipse”