I am going to tell you a secret. I know what is going to happen in education, the economy, and in the geo-political landscape we live in.
You would, I hope, think I was crazy. And yet, we read every day the pundits of all stripes who predict the future. We tend to listen to them because they have the title of 'expert' attached to them in some way.
Beware of experts and beware of black swans. Black swans are events that no expert can predict. The author who has resurrected this concept in the last decade is Nicolas Taleb. His book, Black Swan, gives those of us who depend on 'experts' a lesson in why almost all experts get it wrong about what the future will bring.
Here is his summary of the book from a NY Times interview:
""What we call here a Black Swan (and capitalize it) is an event with the following three attributes. First, it is an outlier, as it lies outside the realm of regular expectations, because nothing in the past can convincingly point to its possibility. Second, it carries an extreme 'impact'. Third, in spite of its outlier status, human nature makes us concoct explanations for its occurrence after the fact, making it explainable and predictable."
"I stop and summarize the triplet: rarity, extreme 'impact', and retrospective (though not prospective) predictability. A small number of Black Swans explains almost everything in our world, from the success of ideas and religions, to the dynamics of historical events, to elements of our own personal lives."
Most of us live in a world of white swans. They are what we see every day. But Taleb is persuasive in demonstrating that there are always events, natural or man-made, which alter the world. It could be the internet, or a world war, or the black plague, but sooner or later something big is going to happen in virtually any area of life. The hedge fund guys who recommended this book to me knew enough that markets are volatile and took precautions before some of the recent financial crises hit. I am also telling people that there are black swans circling above in the world of education.
I will address some of the ones which are flying high above. Whether they land anytime soon, I cannot predict. But I can say I have seen the feathers dropping and so have university presidents around the world. In the meantime , if you hope to prepare for some of the changes, one way is to think about turning to Taleb again.
He has a brilliant mind and today his newest book was released. I include the outline here. To some, it will appear like Greek. And this is not an accident. Taleb, like a number of influential theorists today,(for example, Jonathan Haidt, the star in the world of positivist psychology who combines up to date neuroscience with ancient wisdom in his Happiness Hypothesis), are returning to the wisdom of the Greeks and Romans for answers to questions that are as important today as they were 2000 years ago.
Whether we are capable of mixing the best of the past with the newest scientific discoveries is an open question. Do you think we can do it? If not, are you ready for the black swan to land?
**********************************************************************************************************************************
THE ANTIFRAGILE: AN
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER 1. Explains how we missed
the word “antifragility” in classrooms. Fragile-Robust-Antifragile as
Damocles-Phoenix-Hydra. Domain dependence.
CHAPTER 2. Where we find
overcompensation. Obsessive love is the most antifragile thing outside of
economics.
CHAPTER 3. The difference between the organic and the
engineered. Touristification and attempts to suck volatility out of life.
CHAPTER 4. The antifragility of the
whole often depends on the fragility of the parts. Why death is a necessity for
life. The benefits of errors for the collective. Why we need risk takers. A few
remarks about modernity missing the point. A salute to the entrepreneur and
risk taker.
BOOK II: MODERNITY AND
THE DENIAL OF ANTIFRAGILITY THE PROCRUSTEAN BED
CHAPTER 5. Two different randomness
categories, seen through the profiles of two brothers. How Switzerland is not controlled from above. The
difference between Mediocristan and Extremistan. The virtues of city-states,
bottom-up political systems, and the stabilizing effect of municipal noise.
CHAPTER 6. Systems that like
randomness. Annealing inside and outside physics. Explains the effect of
overstabilizing organisms and complex systems (political, economic, etc.). The
defects of intellectualism. U.S. foreign policy, and pseudostabilization.
CHAPTER 7. An introduction to naive
intervention and iatrogenics, the most neglected product of modernity. Noise
and signal and overintervening from noise.
CHAPTER 8. Prediction as the child of modernity.
BOOK III: A
NONPREDICTIVE VIEW OF THE WORLD
CHAPTER 9. Fat Tony, the smeller of
fragility, Nero, long lunches, and squeezing the fragilistas.
CHAPTER 10. In which Professor
Triffat refuses his own medicine and we use Seneca and stoicism as a back door
to explain why everything antifragile has to have more upside than downside and
hence benefits from volatility, error, and stressors—the fundamental asymmetry.
CHAPTER 11. What to mix and not to
mix. The barbell strategy in life and things as the transformation of anything
from fragile to antifragile.
I
V: OPTIONALITY,
TECHNOLOGY, AND THE INTELLIGENCE OF ANTIFRAGILITY (The tension between
education, which loves order, and innovation, which loves disorder.)
CHAPTER 12. Thales versus
Aristotle, and the notion of optionality, which allows you not to know what’s
going on—why it has been misunderstood owing to the conflation. How Aristotle
missed the point. Optionality in private life. Conditions under which tinkering
outperforms design. Rational flâneur.
CHAPTER 13. Asymmetric payoffs
behind growth, little else. The Soviet-Harvard illusion, or the
lecturing-birds-how-to-fly
effect. Epiphenomena.
CHAPTER 14. The green lumber
fallacy. Tension between episteme and trial and error, and the role through
history. Does knowledge generate wealth, and if so, which knowledge? When two
things are not the same thing.
CHAPTER 15. Rewriting the history
of technology. How, in science, history is rewritten by the losers and how I
saw it in my own business and how we can generalize. Does knowledge of biology
hurt medicine? Hiding the role of luck. What makes a good entrepreneur?
 |
| Taleb portrait from The Economist |
CHAPTER 16. How to deal with Soccer
Moms. The education of a flâneur.
CHAPTER 17. Fat Tony argues with
Socrates. Why can’t we do things
we can’t explain, and why do we
have to explain things we do? The Dionysian. The sucker-nonsucker approach to
things.
BOOK V: THE NONLINEAR
AND THE NONLINEAR
CHAPTER 18. Convexity, concavity,
and convexity effects. Why size fragilizes.
CHAPTER 19. The Philosopher’s
Stone. Deeper into convexity. How Fannie Mae went bust. Nonlinearity. The
heuristic to detect fragility and antifragility. Convexity biases, Jensen’s
inequality, and their impact on ignorance.
BOOK VI: VIA NEGATIVA
 |
| Review in Times of London |
CHAPTER 20. Neomania. Looking at
the future by via negativa. The Lindy effect:
the old outlives the new in
proportion to its age. Empedocles’ Tile. Why the irrational has an edge over
the perceived-to-be-rational.
CHAPTER 21. Medicine and asymmetry.
Decision rules in medical problems: why the very ill has a convex payoff and
the healthy has concave exposures.
CHAPTER 22. Medicine by
subtraction. Introduces the match between individuals and the type of
randomness in the environment. Why I don’t want to live forever.
BOOK VII: THE ETHICS OF
FRAGILITY AND ANTIFRAGILITY CHAPTER 23. The agency problem as transfer of
fragility. Skin in the game. Doxastic commitment, or soul in the game. The Robert Rubin problem, the
Joseph Stiglitz problem, and the Alan Blinder problem, all three about agency,
and one about cherry-picking.
CHAPTER 24. Ethical inversion. The
collective can be wrong while individuals know it. How people are trapped into
an opinion, and how to set them free.
CHAPTER 25. Conclusion.
EPILOGUE. What happens when Nero
leaves to go to the Levant to observe the rite of Adonis.
 |
| Nicolas Taleb |
No comments:
Post a Comment