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Saturday, August 23, 2008

How can a white rabbit cloak a black swan?

I really hope this guy is legit because, if he’s not he’s a genius and, I’ve just spent the last day and a half figuring out the above statement?

Here’s what I found a on Wikipedia about the black swan :

In Nassim Nicholas Taleb's definition, a black swan is a large-impact, hard-to-predict, and rare event beyond the realm of normal expectations. Taleb regards many scientific discoveries as black swans—"undirected" and unpredicted. He gives the September 11, 2001 attacks as an example of a Black Swan event.

The term black swan comes from the ancient Western conception that 'All swans are white'. In that context, a black swan was a metaphor for something that could not exist. The 17th Century discovery of black swans in Australia metamorphosed the term to connote that the perceived impossibility actually came to pass.
Taleb notes that John Stuart Mill first used the black swan narrative to discuss falsification.

Before Taleb, those who dealt with the notion of improbable, like Hume, Mill and Popper, focused on the problem of induction in logic, specifically that of drawing general conclusions from specific observations. Taleb's Black Swan has a central and unique attribute: the high impact. His claim is that almost all consequential events in history come from the unexpected—while humans convince themselves that these events are explainable in hindsight.

One problem, labeled the Ludic fallacy by Taleb, is the belief that the unstructured randomness found in life resembles the structured randomness found in games. This stems from the assumption that the unexpected can be predicted by extrapolating from variations in statistics based on past observations, especially when these statistics are assumed to represent samples from a bell curve. Taleb notes that other functions are often more descriptive, such as the fractal, power law, or scalable distributions; awareness of these might help to temper expectations. Beyond this, he emphasizes that many events are simply without precedent, undercutting the basis of this sort of reasoning altogether. Taleb also argues for the use of counterfactual reasoning when considering risk.

Here’s what I found on Wikipedia about the white rabbit:

“Rabbit rabbit white rabbit” is a common superstition, held particularly among children. The most common modern version states that a person should say “rabbit, rabbit, white rabbit” upon waking on the first day of each new month, and on doing so will receive good luck for the remainder of that month.

The exact origin of the superstition is certainly unknown, though it has appeared in print at least as early as 1420 in England, where it is most commonly said to have originated, though some reports place its origins even earlier, into the 1200s. Today it has spread to most of the English-speaking countries of the world, although like all folklore, determining its exact area of distribution is difficult. This superstition is related to the broader belief in the rabbit or hare being a “lucky” animal, as exhibited in the practice of carrying a rabbit's foot for luck.
Some have also believed it is representing a jumping into the future and moving ahead with life and happiness.

So I did a little digging on jumping into the future and white rabbits, and came up with this, a book called ‘Theory of Nothing’ by Russell Standish. The book talks about multiple universes (Multiverse) and how they exist in reality. A lot of what he talks about is influenced by a man called Max Tegmark. Now this is where it gets interesting! Max Tegmark came up with the theory of the multiverse, which has a problem called the White Rabbit Paradox.

So where does this leave the statement: How can a white rabbit cloak a black swan?

Well a rough translation would be: How can multiple universes cover a rare event beyond the realm of normal expectations? Are Dharma using the looking glass to view all possible out comes and choosing the ones that suite best? To add weight to the argument here’s a translation of the Latin phrases in the e-mails

An argument to show that the result of a proposed measure will prove inconvenient or unsuited to circumstances.~ ab inconvenienti~ Choosing a different timeline having a detrimental effect ,but will be for a greater good

Through Adversity to the Stars ~Per Aspera Ad Astrum~ The multiverse, choosing the right one even though it might not seem like it at the time

"From what comes before ~ Since the beginning of time" ~Ab Aeterno, Aeterno Ab~ They‘ve been trying to do this since the beginning of time? Richard Alpert

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