Unpredictable

غیر قابل پیشبینی

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Context •How We Got Here •Theory •َUncertainty •
Posted by Rezwan • Jun 23, 2009 • (0) Comments •
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The June 12 Election has sparked a crisis in our country. As events unfold, one thing is certain: No one knows how this will actually play itself out. There are too many variables and too many unknowns. There will be speculation, rumor, and assertion about what happened, what is happening, and what will happen. Like everyone else, I'm trying to make sense of unpredictable and inexplicable realities. But everything I think appears in my head surrounded by a host of disclaimers, skepticism, anxiety, righteousness.

My perspective, my feelings, really, are validated by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of “The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbably”.

In that book, he says that, as a teenager in Lebanon when the civil war broke out, he tried to “study theoretical and general accounts of wars and conflicts, trying to get into the guts of History, to get into the workings of that big machine that generates events.” To this end, the book that influenced him the most was Wiliam Shirer’s “Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent, 1934-1941.

…the diary purported to describe the events as they were taking place, not after. I was in a basement with history audibly unfolding above me (the sound of mortar shells kept me up all night). I was a teenager attending the funerals of classmates. I was experiencing a nontheoretical unfolding of History and I was reading about someone apparently experiencing history as it went along. I made efforts to mentally produce a movielike representation of the future and realized it was not so obvious. I realized that if I were to start writing about the events later they would seem more…historical. There was a difference between the before and the after.

The journal was purportedly written without Shirer knowing what was going to happen next, when the information available to him was not corrupted by subsequent outcomes. Some comments here and there were quite illuminating, particularly those concerning the French belief that Hitler was a transitory phenomenon, which explained their lack of preparation and subsequent rapid capitulation. At no time was the extent of the ultimate devastation deemed possible.

Taleb goes on to explain the value of the diary which has a strong corollary in the likes of the flood of emerging thoughts in the twitter stream. Diaries and online media streams provide an instant and chronological record of facts, rumors, declared beliefs and public sentiment. When this is over and done, historians and editors will “cheat” and introduce “retrospective distortions” in telling the story, by cutting out the elements written at the time that didn’t turn out to be relevant to what is happening.

The other thing Taleb says that I like, is that no one really knows the answer to our three questions. But some people are better at sounding like they do.

I noticed that very intelligent and informed persons were at no advantage over cabdrivers in their prediction, but there was a crucial difference. Cabdrivers did not believe that they understood as much as learned people – really, they were not the experts and they knew it. Nobody knew anything, but elite thinkers thought that they knew more than the rest because they were elite thinkers, and if you’re a member of the elite, you automatically know more than the nonelite.

It is not just knowledge but information that can be of dubious value….almost everybody was acquainted with current events in their smallest details. [but] you would get less and less information the more you read. Yet everyone was so eager to become familiar with every fact that they read every freshly printed document and listened to every radio station [and today watched every satellite channel and read every twitter] as if the great answer was going to be revealed to them in the next bulletin. People became encyclopedias of who had met with whom and which politician said what to which other politician (and with what tone of voice: “Was he more friendly than usual?”). yet to no avail.

In sum, the world is more random and complicated than people realize, but they strive for simplification and have an illusion of understanding. Due to “retrospective distortion” Matters can only really be assessed after the fact (and even then, victors write the history books. The past is always in dispute). And finally, authoritative and learned people are as clueless as the rest of us, but they sound a lot better.

What I like about Taleb's words are that they capture how I felt 30 years ago in the 1979 revolution. And they capture how I feel now. In 1979, I was shocked to find that it was so easy to turn a country upside down in a few months. And I found that adults were clueless. And they shush you incesssantly to try and listen to news, but the news doesn't tell you anything. Just more factoids, confusion, and other people guessing at what's going on. So eventually, I went to college, with the goal of figuring out humanity, to solve problems, because I figured people just didn't study these issues hard enough. And here I am, a planner. But really, nothing's changed. 2009, and it's the same swirl of people pontificating, chaos and crackdowns and rumors and opinions and summary judgments and hopeless shrugs.

I also like Taleb's nod to cabdrivers. You should know my credentials: I was, in fact, a cabdriver one summer in Berkeley. Working my way through college. My analyses also tend to suffer more than usual from narrative fallacy, probably because I write screenplays and want to make movies. I tend to prefer highlighting factoids and rumors that lend themselves to coloring this story in a more mythic way. And finally, I have a masters degree in planning, so I am full of theories, and will try to fit reality into them. So, please shoot me down as often as you can and point out my confirmation biases to me. I try to be conscious of them, but I'm probably not.

Nonetheless, I will engage in speculation because hey, everyone's doing it. And it will be interesting to see how close or far I am from reality over time. An interesting exercise in perception.

My bigger focus, however, will be on the visioning process. I am going to take advantage of these uncertain times to focus on describing not what I think will happen, but what I hope will happen, what I'm going to commit my life force to trying to make happen.

Perhaps this will appear delusional, wishful and whimsical.

Perhaps all anyone has to offer is their delusions.

Perhaps success is delusion that pays off.

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