Believing is Seeing

Any who read this blog regularly—all three of you—will note that I leave a lot of simple editing errors in posts, that sometimes get fixed later-on. It turns out that there is an explanation for such. I, and others like me, simply don't see these kinds of errors in text, particularly on the day I write and/or edit. This is one of the small morsels of insight I gleaned from Taleb's The Black Swan that fits nicely within what organizational psychologist Karl Weick calls "Believing is seeing!" Taleb captures it this way, when discussing his narrative fallacy which we dealt with recently. Taleb:

To see an illustration of our biological dependence on a story, consider the following experiment. Frist, read this:

A BIRD IN THE
THE HAND IS WORTH
TWO IN THE BUSH

Do you see anything unusual? Try again. …
Our propensity to impose meaning and concepts blocks our awareness of the details making up the concept. …

The scary part for me is that Taleb pigeonholes me among 'believers', those who are desperately, perchance intuitively trying to fit things into storylines or theories/models. I guess I'll plead guilty. But I do try to practice at "suspending judgment" and being open to alternative theory/method. Sometimes I even change my methodological stripes.

In my study of economics, for example, I have moved—through the years— from neoclassical, to neoAustrian (or maybe just Austrian), to heterodox (either as an ecological economics practitioner, or as a post-Keynesian financial economics practitioner (see, e.g. my Econ Dreams—Nightmares blog)). And I'm still searching.

So bear with me and my too many small (and larger) errors of syntax, calculation, method, theory, philosophy.

---

PS.. In the "experiment" above, the word the is written twice.

Comments

[c!]

I haven't read the book... with that being said, your snippets (both in this post and in the post below it) show an author whose words can be taken as a critique of not just science in general, but scientists in particular. The romanticism of science and mathematics: that the universe is logical, predictable, beautiful -because- of its structure, entices people who crave order and find comfort in it. I admit, of course, that I'm one of those people... one of the kind that gets frightened by the idea that some things just aren't all that predictable. How many people, for instance, would chafe at the idea that earth's climate could be random at some level?

This extends to popular culture as well, particularly in the context of fear. I think many people have trouble with the fact that terrorists are just plain hard to catch, for example. Without having read Taleb's book, I find it an interesting critique of certain cultural views and personalities. Perhaps you could confirm or deny this?

[Dave Iverson]

C!: "Taleb's book, . . .an interesting critique of certain cultural views and personalities."

Yes, in part.. In particular, a critique of narrow-minded economics and economists, philosophy and philosophists, ...bankers, ...government bureaucrats, ...historians, and other ideology and ideologues.

AND it's a critique of a culture based on what I call 'Technocracy', i.e. A culture based in the main on science and technology and the businesses that traffic in them, and a culture that deems science and technology as an unexamined and unexaminable 'good'.

It is also a thought-provoking look into the way we think, talk, act, and commune one with another. One that introduces readers in a soft way to complexity theory/practice/thinking without all the technical backdrop that can be obtained by looking through, say, the complexity theory books on my shelves, or the much-larger libraries that sit on many other people's shelves.