Is Donald Trump a black swan?

Nassim Nicholas Taleb wrote "The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable" in 2007.  Is Donald Trump such a black swan and for whom?  Is he an unexpected creation of the Koch brothers?  Has the intransigence of Congressional Republicans created an opening for the likes of Donald Trump?

Maybe, just maybe, the Democrats can seize this opportunity to increase governance in this country that works for the people, not the corporations or the billionaires. 

Lies, damn lies, and headlines

Jana Peterson, editor of the Duluth Budgeteer, wrote a refreshing editorial in this week's issue, "No tolerance for lying". Her editorial addresses the people who expect her to publish their letters even when they make statements that are not true. The best part of it was quoting a note she has hanging over her desk:

"Giving lies equal access to truth is not balanced journalism."

I sent her the following email. Since I haven't posted anything for a few days and it took me some time to write, I decided I may as well make it a blog entry. Drat, there goes having hundreds of readers over having a dozen or so readers. Ah, but my blog entry will be available to all for years; my published letter will only be freely available to all for a week.

Good morning,

Thank you for your editorial “No tolerance for lying”.

I am really disheartened by the number of people who get coverage for their distortions of facts or even creation of falsehoods. I’m even more disheartened that a once honorable party has been all but taken over by such people.

Unfortunately, “lying”, or more appropriately distortion, is practiced by many who have more honorable motives. You yourself did it with “Working to ensure our children are insured”. Yes, too many vulnerable people do not have sufficient resources to pay for health care. But, how many of them currently need health care? By stressing the former, we make the problem more acute than it actually is. Of course, the cases of immense health care expenses are relatively few, but who’s counting when one of them is you (thanks to Bob Gibson’s “Ski Songs”). Kidding aside, shouldn’t we spend more resources addressing the problems of the few rather than a more expensive “one size fits all” approach?

“Lying” also takes the form of the “narrative fallacy”, the connection of facts when no meaningful connection may exist. For example, “Investors drove down stocks today on the latest oil prices”. One, did all investors drive down prices. Two, aren’t those who react daily to “market conditions” traders rather than investors. Three, weren’t there many, many more factors involved in stock price fluctuations than oil prices. Four, did all stock prices drop or only slightly more than fifty percent. Or maybe a majority of stock prices rose, but those that dropped were greater in sum than those that gained. In other words, a simple headline hides important information, which is another form of lying.

An even worse “narrative fallacy” is ascribing the votes of some to all voters. For example, “Massachusetts voters reject Obama health plan”. For more on this, see “The Party of One has capitulated?”,

http://magree.blogspot.com/2010/02/party-of-one-has-capitulated.html

I got the term “narrative fallacy” from “The Black Swan” by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. I think it is a must read for all those who wish to think more deeply about the whole process of thinking. It is available at the Duluth Public Library. I bought my copy at Northern Lights Books, and I hope to read it more times than I read “Lord of the Rings” (3).

If you think this rant is suitable for publication, I plan to tie your hands. After I click on send, I will post this to my blog, see below. I think the title will be “Lies, damn lies, and headlines”.

Keep writing. You have some of the attitudes that will make you a “skeptical empiricist”, another term used heavily by Taleb.

Black swans and other unexpected events

I've been reading "The Black Swan" by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, a very interesting book on how often the "highly improbable" occurs. I hope to write more about what I've read, but I just had my own "Black Swan" that was unexpected in both a good and a bad sense.

I was typing "Has spring sprung in Duluth?" when my computer suddenly quit! I hadn't plugged it in after returning from the cabin and it I had rebooted it a couple of hours ago. Oh, great! There goes all that I had typed!

I plugged the computer in and rebooted. It said it had 27% charge; that shouldn't have caused it to quit. With heart in mouth, I restarted TextEdit, the program I use to write the drafts for this blog. I selected the file for this month's blog expecting to see nothing since yesterday.

Surprise! Somehow the last character I had typed was still there! Is this a White Swan?

Hidden Evidence

After all that chipping in "Has spring sprung in Duluth?" I sat on the steps of our cabin to rest. For some reason I raised my hand and saw its shadow to the northwest. To the northwest! It's four o'clock in the afternoon. The shadow should be to the northeast. The sun must have gone backward or I slept overnight on the steps.

Well, some important evidence was hidden from me. I had a billed cap on and a tree was between me and the sun. The explanation was that the sun was reflected off a window behind me and cast the shadow in the "wrong" place.

Unfortunately, too many of us take little bits of evidence like this to prove outlandish ideas. Democrats, Republicans, Tea Partiers, progressives, atheists, religious people, business people, laborers, just about everybody including you and me.

This is what Nassim Nicholas Taleb calls hidden evidence in "The Black Swan. One example is the story about the people who prayed and were saved from a shipwreck. The people who prayed and drowned were ignored as well as those who didn't pray and were saved from the shipwreck.