The editorial administratum of Forbes.com is wrong. The "Black Swans", the exceptional unpredictable events, that carry a huge impact will not yield to exploitation for the winners, it will end exploitation, in whatever way it could be imagined. An end to useless, precious time squandering, mind-numbing brain wastage, heart-rending anguish in the trivial pursuit of exploiting for financial gains. Instead it will be an enlightening journey to personal and collective fulfillment that only knowledge brings.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb's ideas are intriguing, and so after my own thoughts, is uncanny. Even the name given to his personal website is far-reaching, as he correctly contemplates individuals fooled by randomness. Even my current encounter, an unplanned haphazard www link journey, with the thoughts of Nassim Taleb, no matter how random it appears to be, will not succumb me into accepting it as random.
As a few hours ago, contemplating on the claims put forward by Carlos Gershenson, in his attempts to establish the connections between behaviour and the evolution of cognition specifically mentioned:
"We believe that, in order to model plausibly reasoned behaviour in an open, unpredicted, non deterministic environment, we should model first convincingly reflex, reactive, and motivated behaviours."
The appeal to an open, unpredicted, non deterministic environment stopped me in my tracks. It was difficult to accept the claim for an open, unpredicted and non-deterministic environment. It brought into my mind notions about local and global environment. Local environment, its limits defined by the extent of our sensoria, seemingly open, a matter of convention, but in reality closed irrespective of where the boundaries lie. Conventions based on the chosen variables and parametres imply the nature and degree of its openness. And via the variables and parametres the individual chooses to monitor, bounds local environment unpredictability and its apparent determinism or non-determinism.
Advancing knowledge gears changes, of kind, of range, of the variables and parametres monitored by human individuals, in personal and collective level, expand the boundaries of local environments, decrease unpredictability. Introduced changes gradually assume control over attitudes and behaviours and guide acts either in individual or collective capacity. Local environment expanded, widens the arena, an increase in phase space which deterministic chaos explores.
