Those whose words and deeds fly in the face of the ambient reality call to my mind a scene near the end of the 1986 movie Ruthless People (embedded at the bottom of this post).
Ambient reality? One way of conceiving of the present networked information age is to draw an analogy between 'reality' and matter. Units of information are analogized to particles of matter. (This analogy lives in the classical mechanical realm; this is not a quantum theory of Ruthless People, so think of bits and collections of bits (not qubits) as the information particles in the analogy).
Particles of matter may be found in different states (e.g., gas, liquid, solid), depending on the physical context. From Wikipedia:
There is a classic general science description of each of the phases: A solid is a material that maintains its shape and its volume; a liquid maintains its volume but takes on the shape of its container; A gas takes on both the shape and volume of its container.
The collection of particles in a gas has "an indefinite, unstable shape.... In a gas, the particles are far apart from each other, and they can move around quickly."
Absent any means to record and correlate units of information, the units remain in rapid motion relative to each other, and far apart, like molecules in a gas. As the ability to store, retrieve, and relate information increases, the behavior of the particles relative to each other "settles down" -- becomes more coherent -- more like a liquid. The particles are still free to move about the volume, and slide easily past each other; and their overall shape still conforms to the container (shape of container being part of the analog of 'context,' which can be manipulated (reshaped) through rhetorical framing of information).
But in the "liquid" state, particles of information form discrete surfaces; and the distance between particles is less than in a "gas." As liquids tend toward solids, up a scale of viscosity, so too does commonly perceptible reality become more "viscous" in this analogy, with advancements in information technology. From Wikipedia:
Viscosity is a measure of the resistance of a fluid to being deformed by either shear stress or extensional stress. It is commonly perceived as "thickness", or resistance to flow. Viscosity describes a fluid's internal resistance to flow and may be thought of as a measure of fluid friction. Thus, water is "thin", having a lower viscosity, while vegetable oil is "thick" having a higher viscosity.
In the present networked information society, the collecting, cataloging, and sharing of evidence is vastly more efficient (and egalitarian) than ever before in human history.
We are seeing the emergence of filtering, accreditation, and synthesis mechanisms as part of network behavior. These rely on clustering of communities of interest and association ... but offer tremendous redundancy of paths for expression and accreditation. These practices leave no single point of failure for discourse: no single point where observations can be squelched or attention commanded – by fiat or with the application of money. Because of these emerging systems, the networked information economy is solving the information overload and discourse fragmentation concerns without introducing the distortions of the mass-media model. Peer production ... is providing some of the most important functionalities of the media. These efforts provide a watchdog, a source of salient observations regarding matters of public concern, and a platform for discussing the alternatives open to a polity. [Benkler, The Wealth of Networks271-72; see also Jack Balkin, "What I Learned about Blogging in a Year" (Balkinization 1.23.2004 )].
While there is enormous diversity on the Internet, there are also mechanisms and practices that generate a common set of themes, concerns, and public knowledge around which a public sphere can emerge. Any given site is likely to be within a very small number of clicks away from a site that is visible from a very large number of other sites, and these form a backbone of common materials, observations, and concerns. ... Users self-organize to filter the universe of information that is generated in the network. This self-organization includes a number of highly salient sites that provide a core of common social and cultural experiences and knowledge that can provide the basis for a common public sphere, rather than a fragmented one. [Benkler, The Wealth of Networks256; see also Of Strategies and Substrates].
So the ambient reality in the present networked information age is increasingly 'viscous.' Reality is still vulnerable to rhetorical framing, but not nearly as much as it was just a very few years ago. It is now practical for individuals to record, retrieve and relate information rapidly enough to feed back into the equation. Rhetoricians and all other actors may increasingly be held to account.
Which brings me back to the Ruthless People clip. Judge Reinhold's character (in the clown outfit) has kidnapped Danny DeVito's character's wife, hoping to gain a huge ransom. The scene depicts the handoff of the ransom money. Both parties are well aware that the handoff is being observed by scores of armed police. That is the ambient reality in the scene.
As Reinhold's character prepares to leave with the suitcase full of money, a third party (played by Bill Pullman) enters the scene and attempts a holdup. Only Pullman's character is totally unaware of the ambient reality that the plaza is ringed by police. As summed up by one police lieutenant (@ the 1:10 mark), "this could very well be the stupidest person on the face of the Earth."
You'll make no mistake in imagining those who are ignorant (or incredulous) of the ongoing phase transition wrought by the networked information society to be like Pullman's character in this clip:
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& in case that scene gets taken down, here is a stand in:
p.s. Rheology is the study of viscosity and related aspects of the mechanical behavior of materials.
Siddhartha: "... teachings are of no use to me; they have no hardness, no softness, no colours, no corners, no smell, no taste — they have nothing but words...."
tb: How do you feel about rich media, my friend? Teachings can now be made more tangible -- the words can acquire some hardness, some softness, some colors, some corners in the new substrate. Your description of words (and teachings) is like to a diffuse vapor, imperceptible for more than a few fleeting moments after emission. But now the world features an information substrate that is rendering reality more viscous. Structures can be built and made to persist and proliferate.
Siddhartha: "Knowledge can be communicated, but not wisdom. One can find it, be fortified by it, do wonders through it, but one cannot communicate and teach it. I suspected this when I was still a youth and it was this that drove me away from teachers."
tb: Maybe not; but one can self-exemplify wisdom. Rich media bolsters the effectiveness and extends the reach of self-exemplified wisdom. [a humble example; another] And, Siddhartha, I think I can further phase-transition your enlightened ferryman mind with just a little discourse on network theory and related perspectives. Like a cooking show, where the host can take the finished cake out of the oven right away, allow me to jump to the network-perspicacious hypersegments of the 4D Siddharthapillar.
Siddhartha: Wow! It sure is nice to have a robust theoretical apparatus on which to hang all my hitherto incommunicable wisdom. You have succeeded in communicating much wisdom to me, thereby self-exemplifying your point that it is possible. I might quibble -- in an attempt to save the purity of my 'can't communicate wisdom' wisdom I was trying to impart to Govinda -- that you too are like all teachers in that you have also only shown me knowledge; that my network perspicacity has sprung from the depths of my own soul, as ever.
But I am not so small-minded: You have demonstrated a material shift in the quality of reality, and my former view has given way. Perhaps you have only shown me knowledge, but the new substrate has changed the ratio of knowledge-exposure to wisdom-emergence profoundly. Quibbles about what is being communicated (knowledge vs. wisdom) melt away.
tb: Thank you, my friend. You told Govinda that you do not attach great importance to thoughts; that you attach more importance to things. Do you still feel that way, Siddhartha?
Siddhartha: Yes, but thoughts are now more thing-like, in this new substrate. Thoughts and words and images are now instantiated physically and interconnected as never before.
[Siddhartha bent down, lifted a stone from the ground and held it in his hand.]
Siddhartha: Previously I would have said, "This stone is a stone; it is also animal, God and Buddha. I do not respect and love it because it was one thing and will become something else, but because it has already long been everything and always is everything. I love it just because it is a stone, because today and now it appears to me a stone. I see value and meaning in each one of its fine markings and cavities, in the yellow, in the grey, in the hardness and the sound of it when I knock it, in the dryness or dampness of its surface."
I do not feel otherwise now, but I wish to point out that my respect and love for artifacts like microchips surpasses my respect and love for stones by some orders of magnitude.
[Siddhartha opened his coarse hempen knapsack and drew forth a 4GB micro-SD chip.]
On this tiny flake of matter is encoded vast stores of interconnected knowledge. I have seen electron micrographs displaying its intricate patterns, and with your help I have come to understand the physics of its function.
Without diminishing the beauty of the stone, I perceive a higher order of value and meaning in the microscopic markings and cavities of the microchip, as compared to the chaotic markings and cavities of the stone I hold in my other hand.
And when I put the micro-SD chip into my web-enabled handheld over in my third hand, it becomes physically connected to far-reaching networks of people and information, and wondrous new meta-things emerge and self-organize. Thoughts, knowledge and information are made tangible and communicable and accessible, acquiring a utility far surpassing the humble stone in the hierarchy of things in the thingosphere.
Learn up on Asperger's, seeking clues to what an Aspie worldview might be like; seek out some of the readily available Aspie testimony too -- i.e., try to break out of the neurotyp 'syndrome' mentality, and dig the multidimensional phase space of human cognition -- array, if you will, all human intelligence on this multidimensional hyperboard, yours included.
You are on the same hyperboard, is the point, with the 'Aspies.' You must relax your conception of yourself as 'normal' or 'typical' and see yourself on the same 'spectrum' as all other humans, Aspies included. The Aspie/Autism 'spectrum' encompasses a multitude of cognitive attributes, each one represented by its own orthogonal dimension in the phase space of human cognition. A 'diagnosis' of 'Aspie' means that the clinician has located the subject in a subset hypervolume within that phase space.
The boundary of the hypervolume enclosing 'Aspies' is not well defined, and differs along with the tastes of different practitioners, I imagine (I only imagine, because I am only roughly familiar with a/A spectrum clinical practice; but measurement of cognitive attributes has some serious error bars attached, I further imagine, yielding up ye fuzzy boundary).
Anyway, the point, for neurotyps, is that you almost certainly share some of the attributes that contribute to the 'Aspie' score. They are not binary "on" or "off" attributes, but each one varying along a subspectrum (not necessarily one-dimensional either). You might even register 'Strong Aspie' (or whatever they call it) on some of these attributes, but not very many; and you may register 'Mild Aspie' on a number of them, but not enough to approach the score thresholds of the 'Aspie' diagnosis.
The armchair scientist in me wants to venture that for every individual clinically diagnosed 'Aspie' there are some large multiple of other individuals who would also be diagnosed 'Aspie' if measured. And there is an even larger multiple of individuals who would not be diagnosed, but who inhabit neighborhoods of the phase space of human cognition overlapping the Aspie environs (and Autie environs too).
don't fight it
This is where the 'relax your conception of yourself as normal' thing comes in: it's not that you're 'normal' and Aspies are 'abnormal' or 'mentally ill.' I am hopeful that you will come to understand that overlapping the Aspie environs is nothing to be afraid or ashamed of. Some of the attributes in question are things like meticulousness and industry and transcendent musical brilliance -- got a problem with any of that? So you can imagine that you only overlap in those kinds of attributes if you like. But you can see yourself arrayed on this same hyperboard -- in the same phase space of human cognition. Do you see how you can overlap in a subset of these dimensions?
OK, that's progress. Now: please do not suspect that I am attempting to gain a foothold from which to argue that all of the rest of the Aspie bag must be allowed into polite neurotypical company. I am not arguing that point one way or the other.
Recall that episode of Bewitched where some old Aunt put a spell on Samantha, compelling her to append a rhyme to the tail of every utterance. E.g., "Give it to me ... fiddle dee dee." I know a person who exhibits a similar compulsion in that he cannot miss an opportunity to issue forth puns, and apparently has no filter; it is hard to discern any limit in the extent to which he will reach in order to interject something 'witty' into a dialogue. He believes that this is good, first-class wit; whereas I perceive it to be a degenerate form of wit. We are on either side of one or more A/a attribute borderlines on the pun thing. I am not arguing that anybody needs to put up with this sort of thing.
And coming back to my point, dear Neurotyp, consider the merits of rigorous dialectic habits in this networked information age. This new world characterized by self-organizing interlocutors communicating via interactive multimedia (aka 'rich media'). Iterating out a wikiworld of connected understanding.
Now my point is that the bag of tricks necessary to navigate (and co-create) this world, includes several items from the Aspie bag that -- check out my Aspie aspect -- have been being thrown out with the bathwater in many communities.
So for example, computer programmers to this day are castigated as 'nerds' or 'geeks' etc. by the neurotypicool set. But in the information age, algorithmic sensibilities are necessary! A facility with logical structures, with mathematics more generally -- with complex adaptive systems and network theory and fractal geometry -- these are increasingly necessary literacies. If neurotyps would only relax their aversion to these 'geeky' neighorhoods, they would be doing themselves a favor. In my experience, it is often not lack of interest that keeps their minds closed, but rather fear of having this interest found out by other neurotypicools and being branded 'nerd' or whatever. That's a sorry anti-intellectual memetrap indeed.
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Anyway: all that by way of suggesting to you, dear reader who may be a neurotyp interested in Aspergers, that it would be salutary if you made an earnest attempt to see the world a little bit through clear Aspie eyes.
On the Merits
Neurotyps complain about aspie's inability to 'empathize' among other deficits (from the neurotypical perspective).
But at bottom, what the complaint is often about ... is aspie's unwillingness (or inability) to cave on the merits.
For example:
Neurotyp complains that aspie does not see things from her perspective enough (or at all).
But if her perspective, in a given case, is that she should get her way despite the merits of the situation, then all aspie has done is fail to cave on the merits.
Empathy does not involve necessarily caving on the merits just because neurotyps would prefer it.
If one's feelings won't be sufficiently soothed until one gets the thing one wants, one should take care to want things that, on the merits, one may legitimately expect to get.
And if called out on the merits ... then defend the merits.
Don't say, off-the-merits, that, e.g., aspie's tone of voice is now the problem (attempting to multiply any merit-based arguments of his by zero), or that aspie is too [nerdy / geeky/ type-A / erudite / pointy-headed, etc.], or whatever off-the-merits ploy.
sometimes I think it is a question of different perspectives on what "the merits" are. E.g., you may not want to make the 5-hour drive for the weekend because it has a low ratio [of enjoyment to hassle] ... those are the clear merits, but she doesn't care about that so much because she believes the value of being in some other place for 35 hours is worth the 10 hour driving investment.
If the merits cannot be defended, then:
It is not aspie's fault!
If the merits can be defended, but not real time, then neurotyps should take some time to think it through and then communicate in writing or something.
If neurotyps turn out to be wrong on the merits, they should admit it.
And if they are wrong a lot of the time, they should reflect on that and stop giving aspie so much trouble.
In any event, neurotyps should drop the idea that they are automatically right on the merits; or are entitled to some presumption of being right on the merits; or that they are entitled to summary judgment on the merits; or that the merits need not even be discussed.
To your point above: certainly it's a question of different perspectives on what "the merits" are.
But one should have the opportunity to advance arguments on the merits that will be entertained in good faith; conversely, one should have the obligation to hear the other persons well-reasoned arguments on the merits and entertain them in good faith.
Neither side should get to decide the issue based on unfounded ipse dixit or any other off-the-merits strategy.
Often a [neurotypical] interlocutor protests that s/he 'can't be expected to defend the merits,' or 'think through the issue a little more clearly' due to some information deficit or cognitive disadvantage relative to aspie. This is advanced in lieu of substantive response, in the expectation that it it can overcome the merits and win the argument. Now even if it were true (regarding information processing disadvantages relative to aspie), this would not be aspie's fault; and even if it were chargeable to aspie somehow, such a state of affairs would not impact the underlying merits at all.
1) i don't think you should lump all neurotypicals together in that regard
2) not all aspie's are of superior intelligence and that makes a big difference
1) I'm not;
2) I don't maintain that.
I mean: the subset of neurotypicals who do that; or better yet, people (without labeling them) who do that.
More Aspie Pearls
"Those with [Aspergers] will have problems with communication [and] in reading nonverbal signals, such as facial expressions and body language, and also being able to give the right responses when talking."
Let’s examine these communication problems from a different perspective. I think I am onto some neurotypical behaviors that might account for this type of communication breakdown.
Namely, the habit of saying something other than what is meant. If one party to a communication persistently utters words that do not match the meaning they hope to convey, why is the fault for the ensuing communication breakdown assigned to the person who is not in the habit of doing this (and who is, moreover, in the habit of seeking a clear, unambiguous understanding in every interaction, and being thwarted in that pursuit by the aforementioned word/meaning mismatch habit of the other person)?
In my experience, people often seem very uncomfortable (or even unable) to say what they mean directly. They may not say it directly for any number of reasons: because it does not sound so good out loud; because if the interlocutor picks up too readily on the actual meaning, it may produce an undesired response; because the speaker is not capable of articulating their meaning, or perhaps they are not clear on their meaning to begin with.
A frequently observed behavior is to pull utterances up short; that is, not finish sentences, expecting the interlocutor to clue in on the rest of what is meant (this is especially pernicious in those instances in which the speaker is not even capable of finishing the thought, and is just fishing for someone else to do the critical thinking for them).
A clear-headed communicator, faced with any of the above, is faced with a cloud of potential ambiguity. There is too much of a range in what is possibly meant. Now, it may be neurotypical for participants in conversations to ride through the information gaps, throwing lifelines to each other, guessing as to meanings. And it may even be that people can get very good at guessing meanings, and develop a willingness to play at communicating in that fashion.
But it is a reckless way to communicate, because it is so imprecise; whole worlds of ambiguity are opened up, and often on purpose. For example: let’s say Ann wants her co-worker Bob to take on a particular task. If Ann doesn’t come right out and say “I think you should do that task,” then whatever indirect thing she does say will create a palpable ambiguity, to be danced around, regarding who is to do the task in question. Bob may be well aware that Ann wants her to do the task, but let’s say he doesn’t want to do it. He may respond in like fashion, with some indirect way of attempting to keep the task off his plate. This is an inefficient way to make decisions and achieve the requisite clarity, and I suspect this kind of communication dynamic accounts for a lot of dropped balls.
Let’s inject Clare into the same discussion. Clare favors direct, unambiguous communications, bucking the conventional “dance around sensitive issues” pattern. So now Ann tries to float the task over to Clare’s plate, and Clare shares Bob’s desire not to have that task land on her plate.
So Clare comes out with a direct "I don't think it is appropriate for me to do that task; Ann, that's squarely in your area of responsibility; I think you should do it."
Ann gets bent out of shape, because Clare didn't play the neurotypical game of allowing the merits to be decided unfairly, with improperly supported arguments.
Now, for some (most?) Aspies, I think they genuinely lack insight into what is meant (if it is very different from what is said, especially).
I feel like i have no idea what other people are thinking or how they think....is that an aspie trait? can neurotyps tell better what people are thinking or do they just THINK they can tell what others are thinking?
Often they guess correctly but too often, they do not, but continue to act as if they have (and as if their mode of communication is 'normal' and clearer; more logical forms are abnormal).
I don't know so much about the run of aspies for whom neurotyp meanings are opaque. For me, it's not an inability, or a disability, in discerning meaning, but a kind of hyperability.
For example, I am very Bob-like, quick to clue in when someone else, e.g., is inappropriately trying to waft something over to my plate. I'm extremely, think-12-steps-ahead, quick to clue in and the next thing I do or say is a direct response to what is actually meant (within the limits of my putative hyperability to guess what that is). This often comes as a slap in my interlocutor's face because they may not even know that they mean that; i.e., they may not have gotten that far in the chain of reasoning to understand the logical implications of their utterance.
Or, they may know very well they mean that, but were trying to disguise it, and resent getting hit in the face with it.
Well, anyway, sticking with my solipsistic universe for a second ... I often can't pull out the meaning either; but more often, I can, but simply refuse to play the game of 'communicating' like that, because it's too frustrating and inefficient. And THAT is the kind of reaction that neurotypical writers of books on Asperger's syndrome depict as 'inappropriate communication sensibilities' and the like.
What I do is bottom-line the thing, way earlier than conventional people. I figure (not always correctly) that if I can't understand something, then it needs clarification. Even if I am wrong (and some huge % of others would not find any ambiguity), the thing still needs clarification if one of the parties to the conversation isn't getting the incoming communication (no matter whose fault that is).
It is this process of disambiguation that neurotyps often object to, and often apparently because of their own shortcomings in the articulation and critical thinking departments -- which shortcomings, paradoxically (in my experience anyway), are often advanced in lieu of substantive rejoinder (as discussed above: 'I can't be expected to think as fast as you; so I get to win the point notwithstanding the merits...').
Objecting to that kind of logic is some kind of sin against neurotyp nature, apparently.
What is Music? In every age a different answer has been found. Today music may be the art of organizing tones so that an aesthetic experience may result. It was once held to be sound related to number, and at another time the union of word and tone. Two thousand years after Plato, Johannes Kepler still adhered to Plato's idea that music was a force regulating the universe through the mathematical relationships inherent in musical intervals. For a man of the Enlightenment music was matter in motion, while a man of the nineteenth century would have described it as the language of the emotions, an irrational form of speech capable of expressing the inexpressible.
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There is another reason why music has been such an important aspect of human thought. For millenia music was held to be not only an art, but a science. Tradition ascribes to Pythagoras, a Greek thinker of the sixth century B.C., the discovery that the relationships of musical tones are measurable by specific mathematical proportions. Although the earliest makers of musical instruments, such as the person who bored holes in a wooden pipe to produce different tones, must have had some knowledge of these numerical relationships, it was not until the fifth or sixth century B.C. that they were formulated mathematically.
This discovery, that sound is subject to the rational laws of number, was one of the first intimations the Greeks had that nature is an orderly process. If the harmony which exists between tones is the product of mathematical proportions, could it be possible that other aspects of the world are regulated by the same numbers? May not the succession of the seasons, the ebb and flow of the tides, the balance and discords of the human spirit all be related through the same proportions? May not music be the foundation of the universe? As a result of such speculations music became the companion of arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy as a science that measures and explains the causes and relationships of the universe. In subsequent centuries the evolution of music as an art was continually to be influenced by the premises of music as a science. Even today the mathematical aspect of music is an important element in the theories of many composers. (see also math rock).
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[E]ven in the prehistory of Greece music was pre-eminent among the arts. In the earliest Hellenic times before the establishment of laws, it was the poet-musician who preserved and guided the traditions of his people through a recitation of the deeds of the heroes of his race. For the early Greeks music was not simply tone as such. It was a composite art: word and music united in the utterances of the bards. The poet, composer, and singer were one, the lawgiver who guided his primitive political society through the examples of proper action recited in his songs. Through the force of his thought, ennobled by musical expression, the musician could move his audience to emotions and actions. This power of music was felt to be of divine origin, and it was said to have come into the possession of mortals as a gift of the gods who had invented musical instruments.
Poetry and music were the transmitters and the mainstay of culture. The first form of education was "musical," by which the Greeks meant an indoctrination into the arts of music and poetry as well as the assimilation of the examples and laws furnished by poetry. Music was considered to be necessary for the preservation of the community and it was inextricably interwoven with the life of the state. All public occasions were graced by music, often performed by the populace. Contests were established in which both singers and instrumentalists participated to win public acclaim. ...
War & Peace Modern Library, Constance Garnett trans.
Part 2, ch. XXI, p. 177-78
Prince Bagration thanked the several commanding officers, and inquired into details of the battle and of the losses. The general, whose regiment had been inspected at Braunau, submitted to the prince that as soon as the engagement began, he had fallen back from the copse, mustered the men who were cutting the wood, and letting them pass him, had made a bayonet charge with two battalions and repulsed the French.
“As soon as I saw, your excellancy, that the first battalion was thrown into confusion, I stood in the road and thought, 'I'll let them get through and then open fire on them'; and that is what I did.”
The general had so longed to do this, he had so regretted not having succeeded in doing it, that it seemed to him now that this was just what had happened. Indeed might it not actually have been so? Who could make out in such confusion what did and what did not happen?
“And by the way I ought to note, your excellency,” he continued, recalling Dolohov's conversation with Kutuzov and his own late interview with the degraded officer, “that the private Dolohov, degraded to the ranks, took a French officer prisoner before my eyes and particularly distinguished himself.”
“I saw here, your excellency, the attack of the Pavlograd hussars,” Zherkov put in, looking uneasily about him. He had not seen the hussars at all that day, but had only heard about them from an infantry officer. “They broke up two squares, your excellency.”
When Zherkov began to speak, several officers smiled, as they always did, expecting a joke from him. But as they perceived that what he was saying all redounded to the glory of our arms and of the day, they resumed a serious expression, although many were very well aware that what Zherkov was saying was a lie utterly without foundation. Prince Bagration turned to the old colonel.
“I thank you all, gentlemen; all branches of the service behaved heroically – infantry, cavalry, and artillery. How did two cannons come to be abandoned in the centre?” he inquired, looking about for some one. (Prince Bagration did not ask about the cannons of the left flank; he knew that all of them had been abandoned at the very beginning of the action.) “I think it was you I sent,” he added, addressing the staff-officer.
“One had been disabled,” answered the staff-officer, “but the other, I can't explain; I was there all the while myself, giving instructions, and I had scarcely left there.... It was pretty hot, it's true,” he added modestly.
Some one said that Captain Tushin was close by here in the village, and that he had already been sent for.
“Oh, but you went there,” said Prince Bagration, addressing Prince Andrey.
“To be sure, we rode there almost together,” said the staff-officer, smiling affably to [Andrey].
“I had not the pleasure of seeing you,” said Prince Andrey, coldly and abruptly. Every one was silent.
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Part 10, ch. 1, pp. 637-38
[Tolstoy surveys various current 19th Century historical narratives about Napoleon's war on Russia.]
... [A]ll these hints at foreseeing what actually did happen on the French as well as on the Russian side are only conspicuous now because the event justified them. If the event had not come to pass, these hints would have been forgotten, as thousands and millions of suggestions and suppositions are now forgotten that were in current at the period, but have been shown by time to be unfounded and so have been consigned to oblivion. There are always so many presuppositions as to the cause of every event that, however the matter ends, there are always people who will say: “I said at the time that it would be so”: quite oblivious of the fact that among the numerous suppositions they made there were others too suggesting just the opposite course of events.
The above is the classic of Charles Joseph Minard (1781-1870), the French engineer, which shows the terrible fate of Napoleon's army in Russia. Described by E. J. Marey as seeming to defy the pen of the historian by its brutal eloquence, this combination of data map and time-series, drawn in 1869, portrays the devastating losses suffered in Napoleon's Russian campaign of 1812.
Beginning at the left on the Polish-Russian border near the Niemen river, the thick band shows the size of the army (422,000 men) as it invaded Russia in June 1812. The width of the band indicates the size of the army at each place on the map. In September, the army reached Moscow, which was by then sacked and deserted, with 100,000 men.
The path of Napoleon's retreat from Moscow is depicted by the darker, lower band, which is linked to a temperature scale and dates at the bottom of the chart. It was a bitterly cold winter, and many froze on the march out of Russia. As the graphic shows, the crossing of the Berezina River was a disaster, and the army finally struggled back into Poland with only 10,000 men remaining. Also shown are the movements of auxiliary troops, as they sought to protect the rear and the flank of the advancing army.
Minard's graphic tells a rich, coherent story with its multivariate data, far more enlightening than just a single number bouncing along over time. Six variables are plotted: the size of the army, its location on a two-dimensional surface, direction of the army's movement, and temperature on various dates during the retreat from Moscow. It may well be the best statistical graphic ever drawn.
History is opaque. You see what comes out, not the script that produces events, the generator of history. There is a fundamental incompleteness in your grasp of such events, since you do not see what' s inside the body, how the mechanisms work. What I call the generator of historical events is different from the events themselves ....
This disconnect is similar to the difference between the food you see on the table at the restaurant and the process you can observe in the kitchen.
The human mind suffers from three ailments as it comes into contact with history, what I call the triplet of opacity. They are:
the illusion of understanding, or how everyone thinks he knows what is going on in a world that is more complicated (or random) than they realize;
the retrospective distortion, or how we can assess matters only after the fact, as if they were in a rearview mirror (history seems clearer and more organized in history books than in empirical reality); and
the overvaluation of factual information and the handicap of authoritative and learned people, particularly when they create categories ...
Nobody Knows What's Going On
The first leg of the triplet is the pathology of thinking that the world in which we live is more understandable, more explainable, and therefore more predictable than it actually is.
I was constantly told by adults that the [Lebanese civil] war, which ended up lasting close to seventeen years, was going to end in “only a matter of days.” They seemed quite confident in their forecasts of duration, as can be evidenced by the number of people who sat waiting in hotel rooms and other temporary quarters in Cypress, Greece, France, and elsewhere for the war to finish.
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p. 251: The Ubiquity of the Gaussian
One of the problems I face in life is that whenever I tell people that the Gaussian bell curve is not ubiquitous in real life, only in the minds of statisticians, they require me to “prove it” -- which is easy to do, as we will see in the next two chapters, yet nobody has managed to prove the opposite. Whenever I suggest a process that is not Gaussian, I am asked to justify my suggestion and to, beyond the phenomena, “give them the theory behind it.”...
Theory shmeory! I have an epistemological problem with that, with the need to justify the world's failure to resemble an idealized model that someone blind to reality has managed to promote. ... This ubiquity of the Gaussian is not a property of the world, but a problem in our minds, stemming from the way we look at it....
I sometimes get a little emotional because I've spent a large part of my life thinking about this problem. Since I started thinking about it, and conducting a variety of thought experiments ... I have not for the life of me been able to find anyone around me in the business and statistical world who was intellectually consistent in that he both accepted the Black Swan and rejected the Gaussian and Gaussian tools. Many people accepted my Black Swan idea but could not take it to its logical conclusion, which is that you cannot use one single measure for randomness called a standard deviation (and call it “risk”); you cannot expect a simple answer to characterize uncertainty. To go the extra step requires courage, commitment, an ability to connect the dots, a desire to understand randomness fully. It also means not accepting other people's wisdom as gospel.
Then I started finding physicists who had rejected the Gaussian tools but fell for another sin: gullibility about precise predictive models.... I could not find anyone with depth and scientific technique who looked at the world of randomness and understood its nature, who looked at calculations as an aid, not a principal aim. It took me close to a decade and a half to find that thinker, the man who made many swans gray: Mandelbrot – the great Benoit Mandelbrot.
