I couldn’t agree more with Ken Orr’s remarks about the vague usage of terms that one might expect to have clearly-defined meanings. But this is what you must expect at the interface between the worlds of human enterprise and scientific precision. There is a theory – which I find intuitively plausible – that natural language evolved largely to help people inspire and motivate others. Or, if you prefer to look at things that way, to manipulate and exploit them. Wherever you see natural language (English, French, Russian, etc.) being spoken under normal everyday conditions, you will see brands being talked up, deals offered, and haggling engaged in. Right from childhood, “smooth talkers” have a definite …
Author
Tom Welsh
Jan 152010
Jun 122007
Have you read Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s best-selling book “The Black Swan” yet? Like his first, “Fooled by Randomness”, it’s a terrific read – although lots of critics are hammering him for arrogance and self-indulgence, both in the media and on Amazon. Taleb is smart, self-made, opinionated, and a maverick. His main thesis is that human beings are fatally over-inclined to see patterns and “stories” where there are none. One of these patterns is the bell curve, to which he says statisticians, economists, and all sorts of clever people are unduly attached. Most often, when something important happens, nobody predicted it. Like the crash of 2000, or the sudden rise of Java. Or the Web. The …
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