The Black Swan - Mandelbrot vs. Gauss
I completed reading The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
While I reject Taleb's admittedly humanist viewpoints on life, I have been invigorated by his postulations about reality, or more narrowly, nature, being governed by Mandelbrotian laws more so than by Guassian ones, although both have their usefulness in mathematical theory and practice. I performed some additional research at the time that I finished the book, and found that Mandelbrot is a man that has redefined the field mathematics through his work in deterministic chaos - aka, fractals. I remember now learning about fractals and the "Mandelbrot set" in high school calculus, but never really thought much of it at the time. Now, however, I see that the idea that chaos and uncertainty in mathematics can actually help us make light of our world in ways in which traditional mathematics simply cannot. (Much like quantum mechanics has helped revolutionize, and confound, the field of theoretical physics.)
This is why it seems even more odd to me now, having researched more about Mandelbrot, why Taleb would be a humanist if, even in the presence of seeming chaos and randomness, there is order to be found in the mathematical theories of fractals and deterministic chaos such as Mr. Mandelbrot has been able to find. (Taleb actually talks in his book about spending time learning from Mandelbrot directly, so clearly he knows and understands the man's work quite well.) A humanist largely believes in the immutability of the rationality and authority of humanity, generally arising as a belief that humanity is the ultimate pinnacle of evolution on this planet. But such a belief seems to fly in the face of the extreme design to be found in nature, rational thought, and the human mind and body. In other words, if we are all products of chance evolution and randomness producing immense complexity in reasoning capabilities within our brains, how is it that there is incredible design and structure to what appears to us at times to be so chaotic? Or, to put it another way: how does reason, logic, design, order, and structure arise from that which is purely random and orderless?
Mandelbrot has shown that even that which appears random (fractals) comes from incredible design and actually helps explain that which would appear totally random. And Taleb is, in essence, arguing that this apparent randomness and chaos, particularly in the economy, can in fact be understood under Mandebrotian laws, rather than the typical bell-curve Gaussian laws, and so is not random but orderly and more complex than it would appear at first glance. So why hold to a humanist, evolutionist belief system undergirding your worldview? This would seem to be in direct contradiction to that which you already know, namely, that there IS plenty of order, design, and structure even to that which appears random and structureless.
I just don't know how else to make this point any clearer. If anyone can enlighten me how one can believe that order, and in particular, the rigid structure of mathematics, can spring from orderless, non-mathematical, structureless chaos - and by this I mean true, pure chaos, not some Mandelbrotian deterministic chaos; in other words, a chaos completely devoid of any rules whatsoever - then I would love to dialog more with you! Because I'll be honest, by all manner of my own reasoning on this matter I see that such a state of existence, order arising from pure chaos, to be a completely untenable position to hold. Hence, this is the reason I find it hard to even believe the humanist, evolutionist position on life.