Tip of a lit coffin nail
touching locks crash landing
anchors thrown at sea.
One feather plucked
off the weight of wings
dangling dead on your back.
Quill of its own epitaph.
Plunge to the sun
in your tears in the sand
turning mirror into mud
into fluttering eyes
of crowds: the same
star above the cigarette butt.
I absolutely love Taleb.
The following might appear too long and too technical (each fragment is skippable) but Doctor Professor Billionaire The Nassim Taleb, Superhero Rock Star Messiah, has already called bullshit on all false and useless knowledge and left us with only the issues worthy of our most urgent consideration. Daniel Kahneman considers him among the world’s top intellectuals and he is currently “the hottest thinker in the world”, serving as Intellectual Advisor for the British Prime Minister.
[Breaking news! On June 28, 2010, only yesterday while I was writing this, Taleb for the first time praised a criticism of his work, The Blank Swan by Elie Ayache, that used—SURPRISE!!!— WITTGENSTEIN’S meta-analysis. Taleb personally wrote a positive review and rated the book 5 stars. More on that below.]
[A]
I hated him for associating Wittgenstein with professional philosophers who puzzle over pointless problems such as the druggies at an NYU colloquium debating about Martians controlling your will without you knowing it, with Wittgenstein’s name dropped here and there, making you feel dumb and shit. After finishing The Black Swan I realized that Taleb didn’t dismiss Wittgenstein himself but hastily generalized that mentioning Wittgenstein is a signifier of such professional philosophers. Wittgenstein would’ve agreed with Taleb for he said it himself, “If one tried to advance theses in philosophy, it would never be possible to debate them, because everyone would agree to them.”
[B]
Taleb was being deliberately controversial with his “offensive opinions” for he was aware of the utility of word-of-mouth contagion, as he would later mention further into the book as a means of “maximizing the serendipity around you”.
[C]
The Black Swan has been frank about being a “brand name” of repackaged ideas, comparing itself with The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin: the facts presented were not necessarily original, but the scientific association of natural selection goes to Darwin for simply connecting the dots, deriving the consequences and importance of the ideas.
The big ideas behind The Black Swan are the following:
The Popperian Falsification and the Scientific Skepticism of David Hume
Neuroeconomics or the Empirical Psychology of Heuristics and Biases in Judgment Under Uncertainty by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky
Fractal Models of Financial Markets by Benoit Mandelbrot
Cumulative Advantage, Self-fulfilling Prophecy and Role Model by Robert K. Merton (Applied to Network Theory)
Chaos Theory, The Three-Body Problem and Epistemic Human Ignorance by Henri Poincare
[D]
Other than Mandelbrot’s application of fractals in finance, these ideas, both classic and modern, are nothing new to me and to neuroscientists and to other network scientists working on complex dynamic/adaptive systems.
[E]
The problem is, the majority of academia and almost all people with authority — the so-called “experts” — are still unaware of these! They cling to long falsified knowledge and their dogmatic thinking perseveres throughout government and corporate executives and college professors and curricula by social inertia — that, and that people are afraid to question authority.
[F]
What separates Taleb from the “enlightened ones” is his aggressive activism that lets him bash the highest authority of any given domain such as presidents, lawmakers, bankers, philosophers, scientists, mathematicians, professors, economists and Nobel laureates, proving them wrong face-to-face in mass media.
[G]
He is the living application and proof of his beliefs, and his courage to insult authority, for as long as he has damning evidence, empowers the small fries who have been silenced for so long. For the first time in years it’s exciting to watch the news again. You can easily imagine Taleb suddenly popping out of nowhere, calling bullshit on forecasts and predictions by governments and corporations and other institutions.
[H]
What I loved the most among Taleb’s entertaining narratives was on “How to Spot a Phony”:
If you hear an “expert” bring up Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle to explain unpredictability, he is a phony. The quantum indeterminacy of subatomic particles average out in classical objects through the Law of Large Numbers, which isn’t even near the complexity of predicting how a butterfly flapping its wings in New Delhi can create a hurricane in New Orleans, even within a deterministic universe.
[I]
I love how Taleb claimed Henri Poincare as his favorite philosopher, the father of chaos theory, and how Poincare did not mind Einstein stealing his special theory of relativity like how Poincare did not bother correcting typos and grammatical errors in his text, even after spotting them, since he found doing so a gross misuse of his time.
[J]
However, I am suspicious of the implicit intentions behind his actions. It is one thing to warn the American Empire of its volatility and fragility, and another to catalyze its destruction by giving “extremists” ideas. As Zbigniew Brzezinski warned, “The population of much of the developing world is politically stirring and in many places seething with unrest… It is acutely conscious of social injustice to an unprecedented degree… and this is creating a community of shared perceptions and envy that can be galvanized and channeled by demagogic political or religious passions. These energies transcend sovereign borders and pose a challenge both to existing states as well as to the existing global hierarchy, on top of which America still perches.”
[K]
It is one thing to advance scientific knowledge by subjecting it to rigorous skepticism, and another to provoke herds of sophists and nihilists and idiots to call bullshit on everyone and everything and destroying all faith and respect for humanity and authority in favor of unnecessary skepticism that is often abused and misused with wrong evidence of falsification.
[L]
Taleb is trying to win the sympathies of outliers, injecting his own ideologies and justifying them as Darwinian. For example, Taleb attacks Christianity and its concept of monogamy as “unnatural”, that all other religions and civilizations prior to Christianity were polygamous so “the alpha males can secure wombs without sexually-deprived men at the bottom starting revolutions for a chance to mate.”
That is Dr. Taleb: fallible and noncommittal even in love.
[M]
I personally have no problems with Christianity and monogamy being dissolved and becoming out of style. I mean, in my experience growing up in a predominantly Christian country, nobody behaves like a True Christian anymore anyway! Christianity and its claims to moral righteousness and political correctness can burn in Hell for all I care, God, damn!
But there still are a rare few among Christians who truly believe that the pain of jealousy caused by promiscuity should not be ignored. Hardening society to tolerate promiscuity, more specifically, to preserve the hierarchy of “alpha males” and propagate the treatment of women as mere concubines using institutionalized religion, is bullshit.
[N]
I still have faith in the positive pragmatism of induction.
I am strongly against unnecessary scientific skepticism.
I believe that communities built upon trust are only unstable if threatened by communities built upon distrust.
All knowledge requires a leap of faith. To live is to believe.
I’d rather be a child feeling secure in a world supervised by corruptible adults than witness my daughter being raped by a gang of savage children in the free world of anarchy.
I believe in committment and in the honor and dignity of killing yourself in shame upon failure.
[O]
It is one thing to theorize possible ways to commit crimes as proof of concept, as speculation, or as fiction, and another to act them out or to publish them.
[P]
Nassim Taleb is Two-Face on toilet paper: The toothpaste Joker and the Dark Knight, on each side.
More here: http://pablobanila.tumblr.com/post/734361931/
[Q]
Amidst Taleb’s genuinely terrifying implications, he gives the most convincing words of comfort:
“I have said that nobody is safe in Extremistan [the real world]. This has a converse: nobody is threatened with complete extinction either. Our current environment allows the little guy to bide his time in the antechamber of success—as long as there is life, there is hope.”
[Raven-Feathered Ugly Duckling]
At first, Taleb’s achievements and grand ambitions made me feel insecure and frustrated with myself. Years before The Black Swan I’ve already immersed myself with the same core knowledge and successfully applied it within a target demographic. Backed by evidence of working empirical methods I was ready to take on the world—but here comes Taleb with his vast majestic wings already flying above my head. It was the same ambition but beyond my imagination.
I felt defeated.
And then, for the first time, I felt I found a father figure. Throughout the book, uncharacteristic of his brazen ways, he showed deep respect for Mandelbrot who is about thirty years his senior. Mandelbrot is Taleb’s father figure. Taleb is already 50 years old, and I still have about thirty years to become him.
This “father figure” or “role model” charisma of Taleb is one of his implicit intentions. Also the fact that Taleb’s personal history is most bizarre adds to his deliberately mysterious charm.
Being a Whitewashed Filipino exmatriate is already cliche compared to growing up in a basement library reading books amidst the shock of bombshells in war-torn Lebanon.
[WITTGENSTEIN’S META-ANALYSIS OF TALEB]
The following is what Wittgenstein and Derrida would’ve written about Taleb had they been alive, which is the meta-contextual framework of Taleb’s own “language-game” — written by a trader. You can read Taleb’s positive review and praise of the book in here: http://amzn.to/9TJLxi
From The Blank Swan: The End of Probability by Elie Ayache:
“The writing process and the pricing process are two special kinds of processes that do not take place in possibility or in probability. They fall completely outside prediction. As processes, they keep re-creating themselves and differentiating themselves, yet they do not unfold in chronological time.
The medium of contingent claims — that which transmits them and translates them into prices — is something I call the _market_. This cannot be covered by probability theory or derivative valuation theory. The medium is of the nature of writing, and the trader of contingent claims is a writer and a creator. He doesn’t predict the market (or its generalization, which is history) or try to anticipate it. The market is his _work_, as when we say that the book is the work of the writer or the poem is the work of the poet.
Indeed, it is not in probability (or worse, by luck) that money shall be made in the market, but _outside_ probability, in a medium and continuum that I can find no better way to describe than to compare it with the medium of the creation of literary work.
My observation is that Unknown Unknowns are said to be _unpredictable_ only insofar as the framework and whole register of prediction is maintained. My criticism consists in suggesting that if Unknown Unknowns constantly evade prevision, then we should be able to define them and deal with them _completely and independently of prevision_. Why even keep the framework of prevision when we keep talking of something that constantly evades it?
It is not with prevision (either Known or Unknown) or prediction that we should deal with the Unknown Unknown or definite it, but with something else, which, in the course of my book, turns out to be _writing_ and whose quantitative avatar is the market. Writing is something we produce without previous knowledge or prevision or prediction. Writing is quicker than thought and vision. It is a material process, when vision and prevision are only conceptual. Writing transpierces the page it is marked on. It is real. It is a process that eventually transports us to the future, making us attain and fulfill our promises (think of the derivative payoff as a promise that the seller of the derivative has _written_ to the buyer), yet at no point is it based on prediction or forecast.
The market, whose other name is the ‘pricing process’, us such a process. Hence my idea is that the market (or writing) should be the way we deal with Unknown Unknowns, not the place where we complain helplessly against them (as Taleb does).”
The child suddenly feels a cold breeze and he feels good.
The breeze is gone.
A pointy red playing block slowly scrapes a wound on his left knee and it hurts and he cries.
The child angrily throws the playing block away.
The red playing block bounces off the wall and hits the child in the head by surprise.
The child in shock runs away in fear.
The child trips over a blue playing block and he falls into a window at the center of the floor.
The cold breeze is back and soothes the blood in his wound and the tears on his cheeks and the child has never felt so much better than ever before.
EOF
We are this child.
We know nothing yet but our body already knows something.
Our body teaches us when to feel good or bad for the first time.
You are the greatest philosopher in the world.
Your words teach about the world.
Your words make our body feel good or bad.
EOF
Chomsky, why dismiss Derrida?
Taleb, why dismiss Wittgenstein?
Why dismiss the entire “postmodern” literature of Derrida, Wittgenstein, Foucault, Freud, Lacan, etc., just because you accuse them of being “obscurantists” when you confessed yourselves that you refused to read them because you couldn’t understand them?
These “obscurantists”, the philosophers and the writers and the dreamers, are not “pseudointellectuals” who contribute nothing of value to the immediate problems of human life.
These “obscurantists” are in fact demonstrating the very use of language itself, which is communication.
By listening intently to what one has to say, by reading intimately, critically, feeling each word vibrate throughout the body, the philosophers and writers and dreamers are able to prove that language itself is useful!
They have a one-on-one dialogue, a soul-to-soul conversation with philosophers who listen, and in turn deserve to be listened to.
This language is the same language used by scientists to communicate the world!
Just because these “pseudointellectuals” are the only ones who understand each other doesn’t mean that they really have nothing to say and are just pretentious elitists. They are in fact the contrary!
While others ironically use language without being aware that the truth of whether we really understand each other requires a leap of faith, Derrida, Wittgenstein, Foucault, Freud, Lacan, Zizek, etc. demonstrate that communication is possible through compassion.
Anyway…
It’s awesome how The Nassim Taleb has been applying Stochastic Calculus and Fractal Geometry to the real-world currency of money.
I’m applying Stochastic Calculus and Fractal Geometry to the real-world currency of attention and communication. And that includes the real-world value of words written by Derrida, Wittgenstein, Foucault, Freud, Lacan, Zizek, Danielewski, and ordinary regular everyday bloggers like you and me.
Read this first:http://ocknarf.multiply.com/photos/album/68/Woe_Man-for-Others_Ateneo_Immersion_Scandal
I invited Miss Tracy Isabel Borres in Facebook, so I sent her this letter:
Pablo: The creator of Alf is a Man of Vision, with that Imagination to redefine Ugly.
Ioana: It’s not hard to imagine something ugly!
Pablo: But the UGLIEST?! You must be the Lord and Savior D;
I’m not rich yet, I’ve never been rich and lived most of my life in poverty. A part of my friends from elementary hailed from the slums in Katipunan — sons of UP employees enjoying their dependent benefits. My bestfriend’s family is one of the richest in Asia and occasionally came to school in a limousine.
I’ve always secretly admired how he can not be distinguished from my skwater friends (LOLOLLOLOL!!!) when we’re playing sipa and jolens and eating fishballs. We learned the baddEST Tagalog cuss words from him, words he assimilated from befriending their driver. During dismissal he’d leave the school amoy-araw and amoy-pawis with stains of libag all over his shirt as he enters another one of their luxury cars.
I’ve always found comfort in the fact that all the spoiled brats I have encountered in the Philippines can not even match my bestfriend’s wealth and power (his father, Rafael Morales, is the top corporate lawyer in Asia). It’s not that my bestfriend is the humblest, wealthiest egalitarian: He brandishes his superior intelligence like a crown as if he never needed money to be the coolest person in the world (: This is his only arrogance and mine d: Or perhaps his deviation from higher-upper class demeanor is another form of arrogance, stripping the right to superiority of sheltered hipsters who are rich but aren’t rich enough (:
I never hated conios. I loved it when I got to talk in English and felt like it was normal, without pretense, without minding my diction — indiscriminately choosing between the colloquial and the polysyllabic. Plus, of course, conios were always the Prettier people d:
What you, Miss Tracy Isabel Borres, have written, made me realize that extremely pampered individuals had always bored me with their impulsive shopping and monthly trips abroad consuming their blogs until NOW HAHAHA! YOU
YOU ARE PURE EVIL.
PURE EVIL.
It was a confession of hatred rattling from a skull like a caged animal.
The brutality was as sincere as the brutality of its sincerity.
It exhibited the ease of emotional expression provided by a well-established social hierarchy — a hierarchy, once demolished within your own code of values, will render you stale and lost.
I was much worse a racist than you are before I’ve gotten over my insecurities only last year. I have been relentlessly teased as an “Aeta” throughout my childhood for my complexion. I hated myself. I hated all the people who looked like me. When I left for the US I felt like Michael Jackson scrubbing away every trace of ethnicity from my body. I stopped talking in Tagalog and tried not to mingle with other Filipinos while in New York and Los Angeles:
“Again, originally for Stacey:
I don’t know if you know me and I know we’ve never talked before LOL but we are both strangers in strange lands. Yeah, “There’s a presence in what is missing.” ~Henry James. However, to me — yes, there is alienation, but I’ve always been antisocial LOL I’m bound to be alienated anywhere — to me, it’s more about the emergence of something you never knew you had before. Having been to California to New York and back in California, I’ve confirmed to myself a discovery of a part of me that had always been with me all along: my Filipino identity. Haha. You won’t know how much similar you are with the rest of your ethnic group until you see how much different other groups are from you, and it is really, really, really depressing LOLOLOLOL!!!!!!”~Pablo Banila
My first love, the love that I carried with me overseas and kept for years was for my Russian-Chinese high school classmate. The rarest beauty in the Philippines. Even ordinary mestizas could not turn me on D;
Well, see, my first love was never realized nor had any clear conclusion when it ended last year — that day my life was supposed to go with it. But I didn’t kill myself: I fell in love. I fell in love with a Filipina who looks like me.
For the first time I felt that I was beautiful.
Of course I am omitting the details of why as of now I am tenfold the misery since my tragedy began.
Along with my ideals of beauty I’ve lost the feeling of being in love. My mind, liberated from Anglo-Saxon supremacy, no longer has the sense of the “ugly” that defines the beautiful. It felt like I can make myself believe that anything is beautiful or otherwise. Beauty was no longer a divination of emotions but the will of reason.
In other words, zero libido.
Your controversial account of your immersion experience reminded me of what I have lost. I’ve been searching for that feeling — searching in vain for I no longer knew what it was.
For one moment I felt myself in your place, in where I used to be. Remembering how I hated to see people who look like me for I hated myself and they reminded me of me, reminded me of that joke na may dalawang langaw na kumakain ng tae tapos yung isa umutot tapos nagalit yung isa. Yeah, “Why look down on someone when you aren’t any better?” Because I look down on myself.
Oh yeah, that, and that your experience was very similar to the two summer camps I attended back in high school. I accepted invitations to two “Youth Camps” thinking they were Fun Summer Camping stuff. The first camp was a Born Again Retreat. I was a hostile atheist back then, and my zealous cousin tricked me into coming. I had to sing hymns from my heart and pray with my head bowed down to the floor for one week, trying not to laugh while others do the same screaming in passionate cries of worship. It was the first time I respected Christianity.
On my second camp I earned a badge of honor for having survived the week-long ordeal: I got my Official Youth For Christ ID and membership.
I was a hostile atheist.
I rarely approach anyone and tell them directly that I found them hilarious. Normally I simply laugh at hilarious things, and make fun of things that aren’t funny. But your immersion experience a-la “Paris Hilton Visits the Philippines” was fucking hilarious LOLOLOLOL!!!!! Putang ina yung hindi mo alam kung madumi sila o hindi kasi maitim sila LOLOLOLOL!!!!
~Pablo Banila
is your fan d:
OH AND I ALMOST FORGOT TO ADD
THIS LITTLE STORY:
Emman: Kuha lang ako ng Ita balls.
Me: Anong Ita balls?
Emman: Yung nakakain.
Me: … anong itsura?
Emman: Ha? E ‘di nakaplastic.
Me: Parang Kulangot ng Igorot?
Emman: Ano? Anong pinagsasabi mo? Ita balls nga e nakapakete.
Me: Yung nasa loob ng maliliit na mga bao?
Emman: BOBO!!! EATABLES HINDI ITA BALLS!
Me: … ano?
~Pablo Banila
http://www.facebook.com/people/Tracy-Isabel-Borres/733497266
Hey there, can I come in?
I just need a place to stay,
I’m been door to door
My shoes are worn
And I’ll go away someday
And please don’t ask me who I am
Because that bitch is
a stranger to me
and she’s driving me insane
don’t ask me where I came from
because here is nowhere
and nowhere is gone
but I can’t seem to get out of it
don’t ask me since when it’s been
because now is yesterday
and yesterday is forever
and forever’s a very long time to track
Don’t ask me why I’m here
Because reason is thinking
And thinking is obsolete
Besides I’m not even sure if I still can.
And please don’t ask how it happened
Because at the 4 numbers of space and time
Events are hard to pin point
Don’t ask about my purpose either
Because I think I lost it
It’s not in my pocket
My bag has been stolen
And so has been my heart
Hey there, thanks anyway,
For hearing me out
And for your time,
Can you recommend
a nice place
Cause I need a place to stay
Deipotent Depth
Codename : Synthetic-Reality
Dimness lay in distress as incessant
solar beams slashed emptiness,
Endlessly it drowned amidst the
vibrations of motion and garbled ness,
Mystique it was that amongst the
authenticity of haste,
Eyes of yours contemplated
undisturbed as it rests,
The enigma is compelling :
what do you perceive?
Random thoughts of existence
or is it what you misconceive?
It glimmers mesmerizingly
as if diamonds of dreams,
Oh! I’m really sorry I’ve gazed!
I hope you grasp what I mean.
Carnage
Codename : Synthetic-Reality
Murky bleakness fell lovingly amidst shimmering eyes of bitter hatred,
As veins labored beneath pores of skin’s clamminess,
Such imprisoned desire unleashed! by excruciating
tension,
Of which hurries abhorrence as it scorches shattered love,
The sudden adrenaline ,
too intricate to elucidate
Demanding gravity ,
Persuasive intensity ,
Blood drips to stain the floor,
conscience has lost and
commiserates no more
Sara Louise
Codename : Synthetic-Reality
Laying there altering dusk into darkness
Joyed by saltwaters surface to depths
But forever hungered by nothingness
Triggered by an echoing, gripping voice of death
As she feels a vague ripping sensation
Beyond falling fading losing all,
Ceaselessly minor never worth a mention
Whenever comes her sisters call
She dreamt of the day the day the day
When she’ll be anyplace but here
Of that she’d control her solitude and fly away
Unattached unshadowed be her sister dear
Dominating over this fragile existence
She’ll be inverted from such infuriating silence
Though meantime she came back to sense
Laying there altering dusk into darkness
Ode to discord
Codename : Synthetic-Reality
Shrewd was her face , bitter was her heart
Unhonoured’s what she portrays,
which sets her apart,
A sister was she, Of the god of war,
She stood uninvited, she was nothing more,
Her eyes implied loathing
Distortion and ugliness,
Her hair depicted battle,
There is nothing to suppress,
She was analogous to satan
She was enpugh to abhor,
She wakes up to realize, she was nothing more,
Dissonance was her priority
Forsaken blood and blood and skin
There’s almost void to remember
which was lying within
she rolled an apple one to express her dignity
it was what caused 10 years
of bloodshed and savagery
She as been these things,
she is a woman at core
Ask yourself is she truly nothing more?
I WAS BORN CAESAREAN MOTHERFUCKERS
HEY DOES YOUR DAD REALLY SEE ME?
HEY WHAT AM I POINTING AT?
“YOUR LEFT NIPPLE.”
LOL I’M ALSO YOUR DAD’S IMAGINARY BOYFRIEND!!!!!
~My Imaginary Girlfriends’ Imaginary Boyfriend (or How I am Such a Loser that My Imaginary Girlfriends are Also Losers Imagining Me, a Loser, as Their Boyfriend… Doesn’t that Make Everything Real?)
Whenever a friend of mine is suffering from severe depression, I just show him my third nipple.
Having balls is like being pregnant with twins: everybody wants to kick ‘em.
I don’t have nukes but I can grab your attention again and again and again and again bitch.
PABLO BANILA IS EMPEROR AND NEW NATIONAL HERO OF ELEVEN NEW COUNTRIES MOTHERFUCKERS
[CHINA] 我是出生剖腹產MOTHERFUCKERS 帕布魯棕色BANILA ： 皇帝和中國MOTHERFUCKERS的新的民族英雄
[JAPAN] 私は生まれる帝王切開MOTHERFUCKERSだった パブロBANILA: 日本MOTHERFUCKERSの皇帝そして新しい国民的英雄
[KOREA] 나는 선천적인 로마 황제 MOTHERFUCKERS이었다 PABLO BANILA: 한국 MOTHERFUCKERS의 황제 그리고 새로운 국가적 영웅
[PORTUGAL] EU ERA MOTHERFUCKERS CAESAREAN NASCIDO PABLO BANILA: IMPERADOR E HERÓI NACIONAL NOVO DE PORTUGAL MOTHERFUCKERS
Absurd Hedonistic Deconstruction
Vineural Forestfire
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