No Change, so chance

Nothing has really happened since I wrote last. I helped flyer for a party, watched a couple of films (something I hadn’t done in quite a while) managed to stay away from the alcohol, ate good food and healed. It has possibly been the quietest days in the month of January. With January’s track record, that is a good thing.

So instead of boring you with my life, I’m going to bore you with my thoughts. Fun, aye?

I’m reading a book by Nicholas Taleb entitled ‘Randomness: Bla bla bla’ (it’s a bloody long title and if you want to find it, I suggest your just look up the author, rather than the book. He hasn’t written that much). Now I find him a very interesting writer because he writes about things that you don’t commonly find discussed in other literature. He talks about how we associate things with skill and ability that we really should ascribe to randomness, better known as luck.

One of his examples that I really like is that people often only look at the winners and say ‘wow, they must be really clever’ without looking at the pool that these people came from.

He uses that famous ‘if an infinite number of monkeys smack away on keyboards for long enough, one will produce the entire works of Shakespeare’ (though in his case it’s the Iliad). He then takes it one step further by saying something like, if there’s only ten monkeys and one re-produces the entire works of Shakespeare you’d be very impressed and might think that monkey an actual reincarnation. If, however, the original group is infinitely big, well then you’d not really be that surprised, as it would mean that random chance is probably the reason that that monkey did so well.

If we apply that in highly random jobs (he talks about stock traders, but you could also talk about gamblers, sooth-Sayers, soldiers, criminals, writers, painters, actors, etc.) then when there is enough people just starting out, some people are going to have stellar success just based on luck, with skill not playing any role. Of course, these people would probably think of themselves as brilliant and other people would emulate them, thinking that it was the way they did things – rather than random chance – which got them as successful as they are.

The funny thing is that there are probably people that have absolutely miserably failed using exactly the same tactics, but you never find out about those, because the losers never get interviewed or written about.

The result is that you’re probably copying the behavior of people who’s behavior has nothing to do with their success. It’s basically a supertition (which work on the same principle, if there are enough people that do a certain superstition then obviously one or two of them will always have the result happen every time after they do the superstition, like something goes wrong every time they spill the salt, simply because of random chance; but the people around them wouldn’t see it that way).

That thought is still banging around in my mind and it will probably force me to re-evaluate a number of my held norms and beliefs.

If nothing more interesting happens in the next few days, then more of this stuff is bound to come.