BFC Session-21 [Mar 13 2021]

We shall continue our conversations in the barefoot chat, this Saturday, 13th Mar 2021, from 3-4 pm at webinar

Please share the post widely among and invite your young friends and colleagues.

Previous Session Recordings

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Regarding what I had talked about, I would like everyone here to read the book “Antifragility” by Nicholas Nassim Taleb (He is a mathematical statistician) in order to get an accurate idea of what he is saying. The concepts he presents are very interesting. I will soon post some of the material from his book here but please read the book to get a good understanding of his ideas. (Atleast going over the first 8 chapters of the book should be enough)

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In this video, we continue the previous session’s chat on the dynamics between legal, ethical and political. We discuss centralised and decentralised ways of organising social order. In the next sessions, we will try to reflect on the possible local and cosmopolitan/ universal nature of such an order.

Here are a subset of the ideas that are presented in the book,
1.

He says that in complex systems, other than the logical apparatus (eg- the analytical part of our brain), other stressors also give information.
That is why there needs to be some (not a lot) randomness in the system to allow it to collect information through the stressors and evolve.

Here he talks about the stability induced by inhibiting randomness and depending only on the logical apparatus in the system (one example being centralizing socio-economic systems).
He says that there is less fluctuation in stability of the complex systems this way but the lack of information through the stressors catches up with the complex system and causes a sudden collapse.

3.

Here he talks about how Naive-intervention (which is almost always the case with intervention in the complex systems because well they are complex) actually hurts the system rather than doing any good.

There are many other ideas about complex systems that he talks about in the book. In my opinion the book is a must read! It provides us with a perspective that is never talked about since the people (especially policy makers) always naively-intervene and think that what they know is all there is.

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btw read this reply for an interesting read relevant to discussion here as well. Also see the corresponding recording!

-DP