Category: Books

Learning to Expect the Unexpected

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Former Wall Street bond trader and author of the quite useful book Fooled by Randomness pens an op-ed piece in today’s New York Times where he describes black swans (an outlier, an event that lies beyond the realm of normal expectations) with respect to 9/11 and the current investigation:

Most people expect all swans to be white because that’s what their experience tells them; a black swan is by definition a surprise. Nevertheless, people tend to concoct explanations for them after the fact, which makes them appear more predictable, and less random, than they are. Our minds are designed to retain, for efficient storage, past information that fits into a compressed narrative. This distortion, called the hindsight bias, prevents us from adequately learning from the past.
Black swans can have extreme effects: just a few explain almost everything, from the success of some ideas and religions to events in our personal lives. Moreover, their influence seems to have grown in the 20th century, while ordinary events ? the ones we study and discuss and learn about in history or from the news ? are becoming increasingly inconsequential.
Consider: How would an understanding of the world on June 27, 1914, have helped anyone guess what was to happen next? The rise of Hitler, the demise of the Soviet bloc, the spread of Islamic fundamentalism, the Internet bubble: not only were these events unpredictable, but anyone who correctly forecast any of them would have been deemed a lunatic (indeed, some were). This accusation of lunacy would have also applied to a correct prediction of the events of 9/11 ? a black swan of the vicious variety.

9/11 Panel Background

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I’ve been reading Steve Coll’s Ghost Wars, The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001.
Anyone interested in a deep look at how we arrived at the current situation in Central Asia should read this book. Coll follows our policies from supporting the Afghans & jihad fighters against the Soviets in the 1980’s to our complete withdrawal (the source of our problems, I believe) after the Soviets left (leaving Afghanistan to the Pakistanis/Saudis and others) through the 1990’s where a few tried to get those at the top engaged once again in the region as the Taliban rose to power (backed by Bin Laden and others) and finally, to 09/10/2001.
There’s been no shortage of discussion recently on this topic, including the recent charges/counter charges around Richard Clarke. Clarke’s White House role during the 1990’s is discussed extensively in this book. I believe Coll’s work provides a useful basis to get through the politics and discover that in reality, there was little leadership or will power to address these problems, until 9/11 (despite the Cole bombing, the African bombings and other telltale signs of what was to come).
The genesis of the problem is that we abandoned Afghanistan after the Soviets left (leaving it wide open for regional players), and did not re-engage in a serious way until post 9/11.
Fascinating read.

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William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition

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William J. Wineke writes:
William Gibson is credited with inventing the term “cyberspace” two decades ago and imagining a system he called the “Matrix” long before Al Gore “invented” the Internet. < He forecast the development of the digital world in his book "Neuromancer,” published in 1984, which won the Hugo, Nebula and Philip K. Dick awards for science-fiction writing. No fiction writer in the land is more associated in the public mind with the digital world than is Gibson. < His latest book, just released in paperback, is "Pattern Recognition” (Berkley: $14). It tells of Cayce Pollard, a market researcher who spends her time trying to recognize cultural and social patterns corporations can turn into cash. She becomes intrigued with a series of anonymous Internet video clips that have become an underground sensation.
Pattern Recognition is an excellent book.