JOHN HORGAN & GEORGE JOHNSON

[ Fri. Sep. 19. 2008 ]

JOHNSON: To get back to Taleb again, obviously, this piece on Edge is really food for thought. He mentioned Manderbrot sets and fractals and power laws where you have a rare number of extreme events and a lot of smaller less extreme events but his point underling this is that he didn't believe for a moment that these mathematical models actually explained reality or financial market place reality in any case but they are ways to think about it, ways to get a handle on it, but basically, it's too complex for us to understand.

I found that very rereshing since the thing that strikes me sometimes about the universe when we get to the ultimate questions is that we have these wonderful tools that are very helpful but you can't mistake the map for the reality—that old saw—the map for the territory.

HORGAN: We're all bozos on this bus....

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