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 Forum index » Meta » General META Discussion
Taleb & Chaos in Art
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FLmutant
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 		Taleb & Chaos in Art
So, in another thread about Chaotic Fiction, I started blabbering about Taleb and whether or not his philosophy of statistics theories about "narrative fallacies" had anything in them that shed light on our batting around the CF label.

Found one interesting as-yet-unpublished article by Taleb that gets closer than any in turning that concept into language that non-math people can follow.

The Roots of Unfairness: the Black Swan in Arts and Literature
http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/ARTE.pdf

A couple of interesting tidbits:

Quote:
There is a remarkable regularity to these ubiquitous Black Swan dynamics. They are visible across disciplines and human activities. They pervasive in biology (paricularly molecular biology), economics, sociology, linguistics, networks, the stock market, showing similar attributes. Literally anything that contains luck will be subjected to it. The spread of ideas and religions, the success of innovations, and historical events also follow these dynamics.


Quote:

We will next turn to what scientists call "scaling laws" –words that are not yet present in the literary vocabulary; but their aesthetics are well known under its visual side-effects manifestation: "fractals". In fact people in the arts are extremely familiar with them – Mandelbrot's fractals is only one example. Matters that were a few years ago bundled in the category called "chaos theory"also qualify. I will next try to make the connection between them clearer.

By some remarkable feat of unity of science, these scaling laws seem to work ubiquitously, from fractal geometry, to biology, to geophysics, to the spread of ideas, to the distribution of wealth, to artistic success. Someone entranced by the aesthetics of the Mandelbrot set would be using the same mathematical framework as the one for these pockets of concentrated successes. Note that, in spite of Mandelbrot's efforts, these have not been acknowledged by the finance establishment. Scaling laws for instance have never been accepted by the finance and economics establishment –mostly because they disturb Wall Street.

[...]

The modern formulation is now called the Pareto-Lévy-Mandelbrot processes, providing their own class of statistical modeling. Consider wealth in America. The number of people with assets worth more than $2 million will be around a quarter of those with more than one million. Likewise the number of persons with wealth in excess of $20 million will be approximately the same in relation to those with more than $10 million. This relation is called a scaling law because as it is retained at all levels, no matter how large the number becomes (say two billion in relation to one billion). Now think of waves of one meter tall in relation to waves of 2 meters tall. The same law applies. To see how things can be held to be "self-similar" at all scales, consider the coast of England. I looks the same whether seen from an airplane or using a magnifying glass.

Consider, in contrast, the well known "bell curve" that is the foundation of statistical method in the social sciences. Most observations hover around the mediocre, and deviations either way become increasingly rare, to the point of there being events of an impossible occurrence. The bell curve is not scaling in the sense that the ratios between higher numbers become increasingly small. Take the number of adults heavier than 300 lbs and those heavier than 150 lbs. The relation between the two numbers is not the same as the one prevailing between 600 and 300lbs. The latter will be considerable smaller. Take the ratio of those heavier than 1200 lbs over those heavier than 600 lbs. There will be no persons weighing over 1200 lbs.

[...]

Informational Cascades and Herding.

Economists12 and biologists13 have studied the process of imitation and thought contagions –the economists focusing on the pathologies of the process. An informational cascade is simply a process where a purely rational agent elects a particular choice ignoring his own private information (or judgment) to follow that of others. This leads to imitation chains, causing stock market bubbles or formation of massive cultural fads. These mechanisms can be applied to the emergence of ideas and religions, like, say the rapid emergence of Islam in the 7th Century. Clearly iy is efficient to do what others do instead of having to reinvent the wheel every time.

Biologists have taken a look at it from another standpoint, typically mate selection. Animals prefer to mate with those that are seen mating with others on grounds that "hey, she may know something". This is a potent informational transmission by watching other people.

Networks and Cascades in Natural Science

Surprisingly, a fact that shows the unity of science, there seem to be cascades without imitation in the so called unstructured, scale-free networks. The "Google effect" of rapid self-feeding dominance is echoed in power grids, leading to very rare, yet probable massive power failures14. The same extends to areas such as molecular biology where we see the same results as imitation –but without any shade of imitation. Synchronization15 effects have also been studied. These are ubiquitous: from random networks to neurobiology (the way neurons synchronize to fire in unison), crowd behavior, sleep patterns, the self-organizing behavior of species, and bird flocks.


In part, this article is trying to describe why some art is popular or becomes canon and why other art doesn't ... but it seems like these are some of the same questions hidden down inside of the CF idea.

PostPosted: Tue Aug 07, 2007 7:04 am
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konamouse
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PostPosted: Tue Aug 07, 2007 8:31 am
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FLmutant
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 		Kona, my head is exploding on this stuff too. I'm just following the trail and stumbling upon people who ARE really smart (like this Taleb cat.) I just see shiny pretty meta things and get excited. Twisted Evil

PostPosted: Tue Aug 07, 2007 9:28 am
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Rogi Ocnorb
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PostPosted: Tue Aug 07, 2007 1:34 pm
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European Chris
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 		Well most of that went over my head....

However a lot of art which is apparently random actually has a lot of basis in non-random variables.The most prominent example of this I can think is of Pollack's work whose paintings tend to follow quite strict fractal patterns which is, supposedly, why his paintings appeal to sort of people who like those things.

Which demonstrates that you can get non random outcomes from random events.
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PostPosted: Fri Aug 10, 2007 1:04 pm
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FLmutant
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 		Narrative, Science and Unpredictability
OMG! The thread lives! Smile

So in the process of reaching out to Anne Dalke, a narrative theorist who wrote an interesting review of Taleb's work from the narrative prospective, I actually have ended up in a fairly fascinating email exchange with her that has crossed from how chaotic fiction might just be reader response theory, to Anne dissecting her first exposure to Sean Stewart's writings, to a rolling conversation about the nature of genre and how genres formed.

She finally suggested the conversation would be interesting enough for some of her students that we should move it to the web, so our emails are now part of the comments of this thread:

http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/exchange/reflections/narrative

Please do feel free to jump in: I think Anne might have some really fascinating perspectives for us (since we are essentially doing what her research and theory deals with in the more abstract -- who defines a genre? who populates that genre?)

Brian

PostPosted: Sat Aug 25, 2007 8:07 am
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