4 ms·

>The interactions matter more than the nature of the units. Studying individual ants will never (one can safely say never for most such situations), never give

>The interactions matter more than the nature of the units. Studying individual ants will never (one can safely say never for most such situations), never give us an idea on how the ant colony operates. For that, one needs to understand an ant colony as an ant colony, no less, no more, not a collection of ants. This is called an “emergent” property of the whole, by which parts and whole differ because what matters is the interactions between such parts. And interactions can obey very simple rules. I wish Taleb would give more on identifying & learning on a systems wide approach. For abstractions and "less than obvious" spheres this becomes difficult to separate the forest from the tree, or is the forest the system, or the genera of the plant in question, or its bordering systems, etc... behaviors and patterns which are emergent only at the individual level make '10,000 foot views' harder to perceive, let alone examine and extrapolate from "obey very simple rules"

K0SM0S 7y ago
I really appreciate Taleb's ideas in general, but this one strikes me as emotionally-driven, vastly more "intuitive" than substantiated. It's a like a world chess master or NBA player telling others "play better!" — what Taleb means here, imho, is that too many scientists fail to propose models that fits his mathematical perception, his world view, but if it were that simple, he'd have a book called "system thinking". He touches a lot on how he views things, so you can infer a lot of his mental framework from reading e.g. the Black Swan or Antifragile — both great in their own respect. But simple rules on this topic, that would/will be groundbreaking. I honestly pride myself as a "transdisciplinary" mind (which comes with a lot of "imposter-of-all-trades" syndrom, but meh, it's also humbling to realize the path to knowledge may not be the most rewarding short-term path). Taleb is one of those relatively "wide" minds, he's able to speak with substance on a lot of domains, but like many abstract thinkers I think he displays a lot of the casualness towards the difficulty of actual implementation. It's great to talk about systems but the reality is often about refactoring horrible codebases and if it works you'd rather spend more money on the actual mission that making things and concepts prettier. Even, especially at the edge. My 2 cts obviously. TL;DR, I wouldn't look much into it. It's one of those things we only hear because who says it is famous, not because there's so much velocity to the idea.

K0SM0S 7y ago

I really appreciate Taleb's ideas in general, but this one strikes me as emotionally-driven, vastly more "intuitive" than substantiated. It's a like a world chess master or NBA player telling others "play better!" — what Taleb means here, imho, is that too many scientists fail to propose models that fits his mathematical perception, his world view, but if it were that simple, he'd have a book called "system thinking". He touches a lot on how he views things, so you can infer a lot of his mental framework from reading e.g. the Black Swan or Antifragile — both great in their own respect. But simple rules on this topic, that would/will be groundbreaking. I honestly pride myself as a "transdisciplinary" mind (which comes with a lot of "imposter-of-all-trades" syndrom, but meh, it's also humbling to realize the path to knowledge may not be the most rewarding short-term path). Taleb is one of those relatively "wide" minds, he's able to speak with substance on a lot of domains, but like many abstract thinkers I think he displays a lot of the casualness towards the difficulty of actual implementation. It's great to talk about systems but the reality is often about refactoring horrible codebases and if it works you'd rather spend more money on the actual mission that making things and concepts prettier. Even, especially at the edge. My 2 cts obviously. TL;DR, I wouldn't look much into it. It's one of those things we only hear because who says it is famous, not because there's so much velocity to the idea.