Category Archives: Book Thoughts

The Only Reliable Confirmation

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Back before Christmas I wrote about confirmation bias, the concept that people tend to look for evidence to support their beliefs instead of evidence to disprove them. I discovered it in the book The Black Swan where it was presented in a negative light, something which hindered people from arriving at truth.

And to some degree I believe it is that. I brought up the examples of Global Warming, evolution, and someone trying to sell a machine that was said to detect and cure ills via quantum mechanics and cell phones, all of which rely on confirmation bias for their “proof.”

We also see it in matters of faith.  Members of cults who see events working out to their liking claim that God is behind them, thereby endorsing their beliefs. Muslims are sure that God is working in their attacks upon the Jews and no doubt there are many other religions who look at external events and see the hand of their deity at work. Indeed, the whole point of sacrificing to various gods was to bring about a desired outcome; if the outcome occurred, the sacrifice was good enough, if it didn’t, the sacrifice was lacking. And, of course,Christians use confirmation bias, too, as I illustrated from the example of the young man who derived confirmation of his belief in God’s guidance from a series of numbers on a boxcar.

But just because events seem to confirm a belief does that make it so? Are we to abandon confirmation in external events in our faith lives? Or should we go about looking only for things that might disprove our faith as the author of  The Black Swan seems to advise?

Looking for things that sow doubt does not line up with what the word of God has to say, and in the end, that is the key. The only thing, the only real source of confirmation is the word of God, never experience or external events. I’m not saying that God doesn’t use external events to guide us, only that all experience must be filtered through the standard of God’s word. If it doesn’t line up with what scripture teaches, it’s not valid.

Of course, if you don’t know what Scripture teaches, you’re going to have a hard time discerning what’s valid and what isn’t. We live in a world of lies administrated by the father of lies, Satan himself. He is a master of deception and we are charged with acquainting ourselves with his schemes (2 Co 2:11). We have a sin nature that deceives us constantly. We are human, with limitations to our senses. We don’t always perceive what’s actually going on.

I remember one time my family and I passed a vehicle at the side of the road. A woman was standing near it. After we had passed it we got into conversation and discovered that each of the adults in our car — me, Stu, my mother and my sister — had a different memory of what we had seen. Some thought the vehicle was a pickup truck, others an SUV. Some thought it was perpendicular to the road we traveled on, others thought it was parallel. We even disagreed on what the woman was wearing: what it black shorts and white top, or white top and black shorts? Or was it not even black and white but colors?

I no longer recall what the actual case was, but it would have been a sorry display had we four been called upon to testify before a court of law! Though perhaps if it had been a more important incident we would have paid better attention and remembered more. The point is, our memories aren’t always accurate. Especially if emotion is involved. Which feeds into another principle delineated in The Black Swan — that experiments have shown that each time we recall a particular event from our past we change it slightly, until years later it’s not at all like what it was originally.

All of which goes back to the fact that it’s the word of God that must be the standard for discernment not someone’s experience. Experience can support the word, but if there’s a conflict, experience has to go. And if the word of God is to be our standard, well, that makes one more reason why we must know it backwards and forwards and be we are handling it accurately.

We Live in Extremistan

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About a month ago, I mentioned Black Swan author Nassim Taleb’s designation of what amount to two types of randomness, Mediocristan and Extremistan. Here is a chart Taleb provided comparing the two:

Mediocristan Extremistan
Mild randomness Wild randomness
Typical member is mediocre There is no typical
Winners get small piece of total pie Winner-take-all
General Utopian-type Equality Extreme inequality
Impervious to Black Swan Vulnerable to Black Swan
Corresponds to physical qualities and restrained by them Corresponds to numbers, like wealth; no restraints
Total not affected by a single instance Total determined by small number of extreme events
Tyranny of the collective Tyranny of the accidental
History crawls History makes jumps

Mediocristan is where we must endure the tyranny of the collective, the routine, the obvious and the predicted; Extremistan is where we are subjected to the tyranny of the singular, the accidental, the unseen and the unpredicted. “

In some strange way I keep seeing Mediocristan as representative of man’s viewpoint, man’s ways, man’s attempt to control his world, and Extremistan as God’s ways, at least as they are perceived by man.  At one point Taleb says that our problems in general are that we believe we live in Mediocristan but we really live in Extremistan. That statement in particular resonated for me.

We think we can know, we think we can plan and predict and circumvent disaster. We think everything will continue as it has been. We think we have control of things. When we don’t. And it won’t. And we can’t.

 It’s an illusion. A deception.

Mediocristan is that which puts forth the idea that we are all the same, all equal, should all be treated alike.  That all will be routine, ordered, safe, controlled. It’s a place where there can’t be fear because there’s nothing to fear. It’s the world without God. The world wrestled under control of men, to be good and fair and equal. If you just do x and y, z will happen. Simple. It all depends on you. Safe.

Extremistan is what challenges us with our inadequacy. The fact that we don’t have omniscience, nor omnipotence. That we don’t know everything. That, in fact, we don’t even know half as much as we think we do because most of the knowledge we do have is flawed. (Did you see that it’s okay to drink coffee, now? It prevents diabetes and isn’t so hard on the heart after all. Apparently) It reminds us that even though we’ve spent 1000 days walking without incident along a certain path, the next day an airplane can fall out of the sky on you.

We don’t like to contemplate Extremistan because it’s scary and unpredictable so we pretend it’s not so.

Walk by Faith, not Sight

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Continuing my thoughts stimulated by Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s The Black Swan  on the validity of human-acquired wisdom, information, predictions, etc. 

In Chapter 5, entitled “Confirmation Shmonfirmation” Taleb observes, “…a series of corroborative facts is not necessarily evidence [of something]. Seeing white swans does not confirm the nonexistence of black swans…” However, seeing a single black swan will  prove that not all swans are white. In the same way finding a malignant tumor proves you have cancer, whereas not finding one doesn’t prove you don’t. [As the doctor said recently to my mother, the cancer cells migrated from the first location to the second and logic says they took up residence elsewhere besides in her leg bone. Hence they opt for another round of chemotherapy. How can we know that the chemo is needed, that it will kill the cells we are hoping it will? We can’t.]

Taleb calls this “negative empiricism” and contends that negative instances (like cancer, like a black swan) can bring us closer to the truth than verifying instances. “It is misleading,” says he, “to build a general rule from observed facts. Contrary to conventional wisdom, our body of knowledge does not increase from a series of confirmatory observations.”

That’s one of those sentences that makes you stop and ponder. It seems that the more we see of something, the more certain we can be of the truth, but the reality is, we just don’t have a large enough sample size. Or, put another way, we simply don’t know the big picture.

This recalls to mind God’s command that His children live by faith in His word and character and not by what they see. Sight would involve confirmatory observations, and we crave confirmation of the things that we believe. Yet as we grow God increasingly asks us to put that desire for confirmation aside.  Noah had never seen rain, had not one convert in his 120 years of preaching to the antedeluvian world, yet he kept on.

Abraham spent his entire life waiting for a city without foundations and is still waiting. Moses spent his adult life traveling toward the promised land and never got to enter it. The church has waited 2000 years for the return of our Lord with no confirmatory evidence for the most part. (Though lately that’s been less true than in the past!)

And then there was Job, who was actually being shown off by God to Satan and the world. “Have you noticed my servant Job?” he asked of Satan. “There is none like him in all the world.’

Job was a mature believer with whom God was well pleased. And what did He do with His mature believer, one who had been faithful for many long years? He drew Satan’s attention to him and allowed him to take all that he had without cause. And after Job lost all his children, all his livestock and houses and servants, and even his health, there wasn’t a lot of confirmatory evidence to bolster the notion that God loved him, and that He was a just God who had all under control.

Nevertheless, Job’s initial response was to affirm that very viewpoint: “The Lord gives, the Lord takes away, blessed be the name of the Lord.”

Even after his wife came advising him to curse God and die, he said, “Shall we indeed accept good from God and not accept adversity?” and did not sin with his lips. It was only when those three so-called friends arrived to sit with him silently for seven days before urging him to confess his sins because it had to be his fault that all this had befallen him — which was not at all the situation! — only then did he start to fail the test. Why? Because he had only the word of God to rest in and the lack of confirmatory evidence had gotten to him, especially when the “friends” used that very lack against him.

Our Lord also did not seem to be in the Father’s plan when He was tried, convicted and marched up to the hill of Golgotha to be crucified. There His enemies mocked Him, demanding, once again, confirmatory evidence: “Why don’t you come down from there if you’re the son of God? Where is He? Why doesn’t He deliver you if you’re really who you say you are??”

Of course the evidence did arrive eventually, but it’s in those dark hours that we most want it and don’t have it and the fact that we don’t is by God’s design.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb is a philosopher, concerned with human viewpoint, and the limitations of man’s perceptions. He doesn’t touch at all on divine viewpoint — at least not directly, but what I like is how he highlights many of the tendencies we have as humans that make having faith in someone we’ve never seen, having faith in the words of men long dead, as all the while the exact opposite is apparently staring us in the face and “everyone” is telling us how things “really” are, and they aren’t like how the Bible says.

 It also shows the myriad ways in which the cosmic system deceives. With such tendencies in us, it’s not all that hard. Especially when you combine it with our lack of brainpower to process all the details that surround us and our resulting need to summarize. And then there is our almost hard-wired inclination to make stories out of everything, regardless of the amount of actual facts we have. But those are subjects for future posts.

Confirmation Bias

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Confirmation bias is when you search for confirmation of something you believe. Finding it then bolsters your belief. In The Black Swan, author Nassim Nicholas Taleb recounts a psychological experiment in which subjects were given the number seqence 2, 4, 6, and asked to guess the rule generating them by producing other three-number sequences that followed the same rule. The experimenter would answer “yes” or “no” in response to each sequence and from that the subjects would formulate their rule.

In this case the rule was “numbers in ascending order,” a simple rule which few of the subjects discovered.  To do so, they would have had to offer a number series in descending order (to which the experimenter would have said “no”). Being focused on trying to confirm whatever rule they had come up with, the subjects never thought to try to disprove it and thus never asked the right questions…

This practice of seeking evidence that disproves one’s theory is called skeptical empiricism, and is one Taleb advocates as a means of increasing one’s objectivity in perceiving reality.  However, it is so much against our nature that it requires a fair degree of concentrative energy. Our habit, our nature is to go for confirmation rather than falsification. Given man’s fallen state I can readily attribute this to the pride of the flesh, delighting in the cleverness of its own ideas and not at all pleased at the idea of being wrong

“The way of a fool is right in his own eyes…”  Pro 12:15

“He who corrects a scoffer gets insult for himself.” Pro 9:7

“Do you see a man wise in his own eyes? There is more hope for a fool than for him.”  Pro 26:12

Taleb says you can find confirmation for just about anything you want to believe. Confirmation in circumstances, confirmation in “references,” confirmation in events. Confirmation from other people.

The day before I read this section of the book, I was talking with someone who was advocating a health product whose method of operation and results I found difficult to believe. When I expressed my skepticism the person offered several incidents of the personal testimony sort as “proof” the product was legitimate and worked as advertised. As soon as I read about confirmation bias, I realized I’d just seen it in action.

In Frank Peretti’s semi-autobiographical novel, The Visitation, there is an incident where the protagonist was certain that God wanted him to go to the Billy Graham headquarters in Minnesota and offer his services. He was totally unqualified and really had no “services” to offer (except perhaps janitorial), nevertheless he was convinced it was God’s will and direction that he do this. He found confirmation on the side of a boxcar in a train he happened to pass as he started out on his bus trip to Minnesota. There on the side of the car was a number that just happened to be the same as the street number of the Billy Graham offices. Proof, he exulted, that he was indeed following God’s lead.

 Unfortunately when he arrived at the headquarters he was turned away without appeal… Which left him confused. Had God not been leading him after all? I’d say no. It was merely confirmation bias at work.

Complicating this tendency to want to confirm one’s theory or belief rather than to disprove it is the tendency to focus on the incidents that do confirm, while blotting out those that do not. Taleb calls this the silent evidence. You hear of the 10 people who were cured of cancer using this innovative technique, not the 1100 who died using it. You hear of the 100 writers who succeeded using such and so marketing technique, not the thousands who did not.

Sometimes, scientists just throw out the experiments that don’t confirm their theories while trying to force the ones with promise to do so… The recent CRU emails give some examples of this, and I distinctly recall an article I read a few years ago by Richard Lewontin, maybe, about exactly this. We are aghast at the practice, yet if we’re honest I think most of us will find we do the same thing, if on a lesser scale perhaps.

I’ll use an example that I’m familiar with. Let’s say I fear that deep down I believe that I’m not really a very good writer (my theory). I can get twenty very positive comments on my writing, from people I know and respect and yet, it’s the one negative comment, often from a total stranger, that I recall most vividly. Why? Because it’s corroborating my “I can’t write” theory. That’s also why the negative comments are the ones that tend to surface when I’m struggling to write the next book, corroborating my resurrected fear that I really can’t write after all. “See? Not only am I having trouble with the work in progress but some reviewer on Amazon confirmed that I really am just an imposter.”

Thankfully God’s growing me out of this ridiculous scenario, and this whole idea of confirmation bias is a very helpful concept in doing so. It also answers questions I’ve had about doctrinal or faith-based differences between believers. But more on that tomorrow.

Thanksgiving Turkey

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One of Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s earliest points in The Black Swan regarding the difficulties of prediction resides with the Thanksgiving turkey. Though Taleb is specifically addressing the inadequacy of using the present and even the past to predict the future, his discourse stimulated lots of branching thoughts for me that had little to do with his original point…

First though, Taleb’s point: For the first 1000 days of a hypothetical Thanksgiving turkey’s life, he is protected, cared for, fed, and treated kindly. Looking at days 1 – 1000 of his life, neither the turkey nor an uninformed observer would have reason to think his life would not continue as it has. But then on day one thousand and one (which this year would be November 26) something utterly unexpected and disastrous befalls the turkey. He experiences a very negative Black Swan event.

Thus Taleb illustrates the fallacy of relying on past observed data to make accurate future predictions, a practice that people seem to do all the time, particularly, says he, in economics, where they add insult to injury by making their faulty predictions with great authority and conviction. Just one among many flaws of the cosmic or worldly what of thinking, and a valid point… but not where the turkey illustration led me.

Let’s go back to the farmer who, of course, knows what he has planned. It’s the turkey who’s out of the loop. The comparison of the turkey’s relationship with the farmer and ours with God is unavoidable. You might argue that God would never do such a nasty thing as the farmer did to the turkey — raising us up and caring for us just to eat us! Well, of course He’s not going to eat us, but there are similarities nevertheless.

The farmer has plans and purposes that go far beyond the turkey’s simple life and understanding. He is raising the turkey to feed his family, to provide for their sustenance, nourishment, pleasure and blessing. The Thanksgiving turkey has become an icon of God’s blessing Americans in the warmth and closeness of family, and in celebration of the struggles, faith, needs and provisions for the people that began this great nation. And the freedom we still enjoy.

The turkey has to die, has to be consumed for the farmer’s (father’s?) purpose to be fulfulled. So it is with our Lord, the Father’s beloved Son, and so it will be for us as believers, followers who walk after the pattern established by the Son. There must be death for life to follow.

He who seeks to save his life will lose it; the one who loses his life will find it.

The farmer allows the turkey to continue in ignorance of his plans, first because the bird would be unable to understand his attempts to communicate them (even if the farmer came into the pen everyday and chased the turkey around with an axe, he’d only scare the creature not convey any sense of purpose), and second, even if he could, such plans would only frighten and distress the creature, producing a skinny bird and an unsatisfactory Thanksgiving meal.

Most of God’s people are in an uncannily parallel situation to the turkey. If they knew all the trials that were going to come their way, they would only live in fear and distress and probably go insane from the pressure, not fulfilling His plan at all. Therefore, most are left in the pen, relying on the notion that since yesterday passed without disaster, tomorrow will as well.

But it is not God’s desire for us to be out of the loop like a Thanksgiving turkey, pecking and scratching and gobbling about our pens in ignorance until the big Black Swan blindsides us. No, He may not want us to know specifically what’s ahead, but  His word undeniably warns us there will be suffering, undeserved and deserved, in our futures . “Momentary light affliction is part of His plan for us. And if we learn His Word, make it part of our thinking, it will enable us to handle whatever suffering we have to face. The Black Swan event may be surprising, but not unexpected, and it will be something through which we can be assured we will see God’s hand and wisdom and grace.

His thoughts are not our thoughts; His ways are not our ways. We can’t know them apart from knowing His word, and I don’t mean a casual superficial knowledge, I mean really knowing it, digging deep, learning constantly from a prepared pastor. Such knowledge produces the capacity to receive greater knowledge, deeper knowledge, until we reach a point where it’s impossible for us to perceive the Black Swan’s that God places in our lives (has placed in eternity past, actually) as anything but positive and right.

Turkey image by freeimageslive.co.uk – valuestockphoto

Comfort in the Scalable

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From time to time our Pastor challenges us with the question of “How many people have you witnessed to today? How many people have you brought to Bible Class?” Because I’m usually at home, and have not had opportunity to go out into the world and witness to anyone, my answer is usually… no one. Plus I’m just not a naturally garrulous person so I tend not to speak to grocery store checkers, sales clerks, other exercisers at the Y, etc. Not surprisingly then, the challenge usually provokes a certain amount of guilt in me.

However, I’ve come to see, again, or perhaps with more clarity (or more belief that it’s true?) that talking to grocery store checkers is really not my calling. And surprisingly there were some principles in The Black Swan that helped solidify that.

At several points throughout the book author  Nassim Taleb mentioned the importance of having a lot of uninterrupted solitude, the kind “a nontransactional life” provides, in order to think. Thinking takes a lot of time and energy (as I’ve discovered for myself  recently after days filled with wall-to-wall activity left me devoid of energy and words). In any event, if you’re alone thinking, you aren’t out witnessing to people.

And that’s where learning the difference between the non-scalable work characteristic of Mediocristan vs the scalable work in Extremistan has changed my perspective. Though I may not be out there talking to a lot of folks personally (Mediocristan), my books (and even this blog) have the potential to reach far more people than I could physically interact with on a day-to-day basis.

I don’t keep track of lifetime copies sold, but at one point not long after Arena had been published I figured it had probably been read by a minimum of 30,000 people. Even if I was garrulous, outgoing and extroverted… and tirelessly active, I don’t think I could personally reach 30,000 people in a year. Certainly I couldn’t speak to those in China and Thailand, where readers have reported that my books have shown up.

Thanks to Taleb’s clarifications on this matter, I realize I no longer have cause to beat myself up over my not so social lifestyle and the not so many people I am able to witness to in person on a daily basis. Friends who have known me for some time might remember that I’ve come to this conclusion on a previous occasion and wonder why it seems more significant now. I don’t know, it just does. Maybe all I really needed was the reminder, and that coming from an unexpected source.

Of course, given that there is now no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus, I had no cause to beat myself up in the first place, but sometimes these doctrinal concepts need a little twist of perspective to make them real. Or at least, more so. (Our world is not at all hospitable to the notion that as believers in Christ we are already perfect and whole and blameless in His sight and can’t do one thing to make ourselves better than He’s already made us. But that’s a post for another day.)

Scalable or Non-scalable

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One of the concepts I was introduced to in Nicholas Taleb’s The Black Swan that I’ve found particularly apt as it applies to my life is the idea of professions being either “scalable” or “non-scalable.”

Non-scalable professions are defined as those with a built-in cap on how much one can earn in pursuing them. A dentist’s recompense is directly related to the number of people he can see in a day, and that number is limited. A watch repairman’s income is likewise related to the number of watches he can repair in a day. Both examples require the worker to be physically present to perform the services they provide. Obviously this category includes all “regular” jobs that pay hourly or salaried wages. When you agree to the hourly rate or the salary, you are in essence capping the amount of income you will receive. Revenue depends on your continuous efforts in the job. This kind of work is largely predictable and, according to Taleb, not Black- Swan driven. They belong to a place he calls “Mediocristan.”

Scalable professions, on the other hand, are those which have no such cap, where you do the same amount of work for one person as you do for one million. Like, say, writing a novel. (grin) Other professions in this category would be entrepreneurial activities, scientific research, venture capitalists, stock traders, etc. The quality of your decisions is more important then the continuity of your efforts. These sorts of professions belong in the land of “Extremistan.”

“A scalable profession,” says Taleb, “is good only if you succeed.”

“They are competitive, produce monstrous inequities and are far more random, with huge disparities between efforts and rewards — a few can take a large share of the pie, leaving others out entirely, through no fault of their own.”

Furthermore, scalable professions, such as book writing or movie making are vulnerable to what Taleb calls “contagion” which is a fancy word meaning everyone is  jumping on the bandwagon because everyone else is doing it. Everyone is reading it, seeing it, so I want to, too. Maybe out of curiosity, maybe so I can know what they’re talking about and give my opinion, maybe, as Taleb suggests, because I feel like I belong to something, since it’s by imitating, (so he says) that we get closer to others.

The contagion concept is only an entertaining side issue, though. I’m more interested in the “monstrous inequities,” which  Taleb says is largely a result of our globalization and ability to record, print, communicate, mass produce and market certain products. He used the following thought experiments regarding two different types of randomness to make his point.

Take a thousand, randomly selected people and add in someone who weighs three times the average. He will account only for about a half a percent of the weight of the entire population. Even if you took the heaviest biologically possible person, he would still only represent a tiny fraction of the whole. That’s a non-scalable comparison. In Mediocristan, “when your sample is large, no single instance will significantly change the aggregate or total.” In other words, “particular events don’t contribute much individually — only collectively.”

In contrast, consider the net worth of the thousand people just weighed. Add to them the net worth of Bill Gates (approx $80 billion according to Taleb at the time of writing). Of the combined wealth of the thousand and one in our sample, Gates’s fortune represents 99.9% of it.

That’s a huge — extreme — difference!

Taleb also used the illustration of book sales, so of  course I couldn’t leave that out. This time you randomly select 1000 authors. If you add in J.K. Rowling, who at the time of writing had sold several hundred million Harry Potter books, her record buries that of the other thousand authors who collectively have a few hundred thousand readers at most. This is Extremistan.

This same extreme discrepancy can also be found in academic citations, media references, income, elections, etc. Taleb calls them “social matters” because they are man-generated and informational, rather than things dependent on the limitations of the physical.

“In Extremistan, the inequalities are such that one single observation can disproportionately impact the aggregate, or the total.”

Which is probably why a lot of people think that writers in general make a lot of money!

Top Down Planning vs Tinkering

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Okay, last post I got so carried away with one direction that Black Swan author Nassim Taleb took me with his recommendation that we adjust to the existence of Black Swan events rather than try to predict them, that I never got around to relaying how he suggested we do this adjusting.

He’s big on “anti-knowledge,” that is, what we don’t know is actually more important than what we do know. Which is ironic given how much people value knowing stuff. (This fits into the spiritual life as well… what we don’t know about God is surely more important than what we do, since we’ll be learning about Him for the rest of eternity). So if focusing on what you don’t know is the key, how does he suggest we do this?

“Among many other benefits, you can set yourself up to collect serendipitous Black Swans (of the positive kind) by maximizing your exposure to them…[C]ontrary to social-science wisdom, almost no discovery, no technologies of note, came from design and planning — they were just Black Swans. The strategy for the discoverers and entrepreneurs is to rely less on top-down planning and focus on maximum tinkering and recognizing opportunities when they present themselves…”

Aha! Perfect justification for my lack of “top-down planning” when writing a book. It’s the random stuff, the stuff you can’t predict, the things your subconscious brings out that interest you that you had no idea were interesting that make the book itself interesting. At least I think so. And if you don’t know you think something is interesting, how are you going to plan it out? So this whole line of thinking, which I don’t feel like I’ve really set down clearly, lets me see more clearly why doing it the way I’ve been doing it isn’t such a bad thing after all.

I need to tinker, recognize the good bits when they come, and also, he says at some other point in the book, have plenty of down time to think and play and just be mindless if I need to.

Not that I’ve had any time to do anything remotely like tinkering when it comes to the next book, but when the current season of events in my life comes to a close and I get back to writing, I’ll be ready.

Adjusting to the Unpredictable

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One of the things that has so intrigued me about reading The Black Swan is that it seems like each new section brings up another thought-provoking idea that leaps off the page at me. Yes! I think. That IS how it is.

Or, No, wonder I was having problems with such and such. Or… Wow what a fantastic doctrinal analogy!

As I’m going back through earlier sections which I’ve already read, I’m finding nearly every page dog-eared. Just in the prologue, I came upon the notion that instead of trying to predict Black Swan events (seeing as they are, by definition, unpredictable) we should instead be seeking to adjust to their existence.

That thought alone triggered a rush of thoughts. How do you adjust to the unpredictable? You adjust to the Justice of God, to use a phrase often uttered by my pastor. You adjust to His justice first through salvation, and second through consistently being filled with the Spirit and growing in knowledge of His word. Because of Christ’s work on the cross, the Father’s justice has been satisfied and is therefore free to bless us when we believe in and appropriate that work for ourselves. He gives us His own righteousness and places us in union with His Beloved Son, and as a result we share everything His son has. (Meditate on that concept for a little bit!)

The more we learn, the more our thinking is changed to His, increasing our  capacity to receive the blessings He wants to give us. He is for us. He decreed everything that would ever happen to us, and it all fits into His purpose.

Whatever happens may not be predictable from my view, but to God, who is outside of time, it’s already happened. Just like the fact that from my side He’s conforming me to the image of His son even now, whereas from His I’m already conformed.

If you can really get your mind around those facts and live in them, there’s not much that can unsettle you. So then Black Swan’s don’t really matter. Because to God there are no Black Swans. What I love about this book is the crack it’s putting into the facade the world throws up — a facade that people know things, that things are getting better, that we have control, that there are experts and the rest of us better listen to them, that we can have security and safety and surety…

When really, who could have predicted 911? When the cold war ended, who could have predicted that the next big threat was going to be muslim extremists operating out of primitive villages in the Hindu Kush?

I couldn’t predict that when I took my mother to the dentist the other day to get her cleared before taking a drug her oncologist wants her to take, that they would going to find decay in one of her teeth and tell us she needs to have it pulled. My mother is nearly 82 and has excellent teeth. Only two tiny cavities and those having appeared only in the last few years. Yet here she is with decay hiding between two of her back teeth.

Nor could I have predicted I’d lock myself out of the house yesterday morning, but that happened too. Nor that today, when I was hanging out the laundry, a sock would drop and Quigley would pounce on it (he hasn’t done that in over a year I think) and I’d spend the next ten minutes chasing him to a standstill so I could get it back. Neither incident remotely measures up to the immensity of a Black Swan event, but in my life at least, they serve to illustrate that you really never know how things are going to come together to completely change the day. Or maybe the week, or month or even the rest of one’s life.

 

Quote: Predicting Poorly, Unawares

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The inability to predict outliers (events which lie outside the realm of regular expectations) implies the inability to predict the course of history, given the share of these events in the dynamics of events.

But we act as though we are able to predict historical events, or, even worse, as if we are able to change the course of history. We produce thirty year projections of social security deficits and oil prices without realizing that we cannot even predict these for next summer — our cumulative prediction errors for political and economic events are so monstrous that every time I look at the empirical record I have to pinch myself  to verify I am not dreaming. What is surprising is not the magnitude of our forecast errors, but our absence of awareness of it…

Our inability to predict in environments subjected to the Black Swan, coupled with a general lack of the awareness of this state of affairs, means that certain professionals, while believing they are experts, are in fact not. Based on their empirical record, they do not know more about their subject matter than the general population, but they are much better at narrating — or worse, at smoking you with complicated mathematical models. They are also more likely to wear a tie.

From the Prologue of  The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.