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Next Entry ON DANGERS OF BEING AN INSECT WITH WINGS AND A MYSTERIOUS INSTANCE OF MAS S MAILING Have you ever wondered why various winged insects (such as moths or noctu rnal butterflies) tend to behave as if they are attracted to artificial light sources? It turns out that this behavioral anomaly is largely well understood by b iologists (although there is still scientific debate about details going on). It turns out that flying insects have built-in navigational system s based on the notion of light sources (eg, stars and the moon) being far, far away -- an infinity away, as far as each insect is concerned. I f such an insect needs to fly in a certain direction in the face of adve rsities such as winds and obstacles, all it needs to do is to strive to maintain a constant angle to one of such convenient light sources. With the entrance of human-made light sources into the scene the situatio n for winged bugs changed dramatically. As each burning lamp or candle w ithin a moth's view is clearly not an infinity away but only maybe some minutes or seconds of flight away, by maintaining a constant angle the m oth will spiral towards the light source until it bumps into it, with al l of the above-mentioned unpleasant consequences. It can be said that th e notion of non-infinity, or finality of distance (to the light source) wreaks havoc with the sophisticated navigational system perfected over h undreds of millions of years and leads many a moth to their untimely dem ise. For the purposes of this essay, I would like to slightly transcend the co nventional terminology and propose that the moths are driven by, and fal l victims of, an ideology of infinity, through which they view the world . After all, what is an ideology if not a way of looking at things, a wo rd view (Weltanschauung) which serves the purpose of mapping the incredi bly complex multi-dimensional reality into something more simple and man ageable, at the expense of completeness. Any ideology purports to descri be the world through a precanned systems of patterns and regularities. W ithout it, the vast randomness surrounding creatures and societies would remain, well, a vast randomness. Living creatures tend to fool themselv es that by forcing complexity of reality into simplicity of ideologies t hey gain some control over the infinity of Tainterian challenges the Uni verse is presenting them with. Living creatures are, in fact, being fool ed by randomness (for more treatment of this topic please see "Fooled by Randomness" by Nassim Taleb). Note that any ideology presupposes a fair amount of rigidity and inflexi bility and is linked to the conditions under which the past generations of carriers of the ideology, and the ideology itself, have evolved. With out being rigid and past-oriented, there is really no ideology, as it wo uld probably morph into something far less binding, such as tradition. T he English language, for example, is nuanced enough to differentiate bet ween, say, a religious ideology, and a religios tradition. The former pr esupposes projection of the the world view and the mode of behavior from the past into the future, in a fairly rigid way. The latter acknowledge s the conditions under which the entity has evolved, but leaves enough f lexibility to not to presuppose any fixed mode of behavior for the futur e Thus, for the purposes of this essay, we can say that the moths are affli cted by ideology, and a fairly rigid one. I wonder what a moth could tell about its experience as it diligently fol lowed the signals coming from its infinity-based navigational system pro cessed by ideological centers in its brain. Moth's main indicator of dir ection, as we know, is the angle that it is able to maintain to the lamp . So, as it sufficiently approaches the lamp, it starts to decend down t o it in a sort of a "mortal spiral". However, as it circles closer and c loser, it will have to resist ever-increasing centrifugal forces, which must appear to the moth as an external force (such as the wind) attempti ng to blow it off-course and prevent it from maintaining the right angle . The moth's answer to this circumstance is quite logical, from its ideo logy's perspective: to overcome the adversal force it needs to redouble its efforts, increase its wing power, flap its wings ever more frantical ly and do its best to maintain the sacred angle until the burning sensat ion felt during the impact with the lamp's glass does not evoke some oth er kind of response. The lengths to which I am going to describe the trials and tribulations o f lowly insects in a blog mostly dedicated to the members of a different biological class may be surprising to some readers. Ok, it's true that insects, to borrow a ph rase from the famous biologist Richard Dawkins, the author of The Sefish Gene, are "highly tuned pieces of survival machinery", and it is also i ndisputable that over their hundreds of millions of years of history on this planet they have seen many different creatures (some of whom may ha ve initially shown a lot of promise) come and go. But don't we have a ke y advantage over them that we are basically, much, much smarter, and are capable of learning? We invented indu strial agriculture, representative government, professional boxing, tele marketing and credit derivatives. They just keep on flapping their wings as they did a hundred million years ago. Yes, all of this is true, but I believe that we have lessons to learn fro m the butterflies (that would only be fitting for creatures professing t o be capable of learning). One of the lessons is that if we interpret reality through some sort of a n ideological lense, then our adaptations to reality are only as good as that lense. Jim Kunstler often talks about the psychology of the previous investment -- the phenomena preventing living organisms (no t just people) to assess the value of objects independently from the org anisms' own history with these objects, including the amount of pain and suffering -- literally and figuratively -- that the organisms incurred to acquire the objects in question. From this immediately follows that o ur value system is highly, to use a mathematical term, path-dependent, a nd that decisions made at points of bifurcation (the forks on the road) get immediately elevated to the status of "it was the right thing to do" . Well, then, the corollary of the above blather is that the conditions of the past form the lenses through which we view the future. The key diffe rence between us and earlier generations is that the finality of our "di stance to the lamp" is getting harder and harder to ignore. If you are a moth and the lamp is a mile away, then your navigational error compared to the lamp being a light year away maybe small enough to ignore. How close do you need to get to the lamp before you say to yourself: "I am very greatful to the moth Gods who equipped me with a navigational system which reliably allowed me to travel thus f ar. But I am even more greatful that they created me with the courage an d the wisdom to recognize that this navigational system is no longer ade quate for my current location in space and time. Thus, I hereby announce my plan to stop relying on that system and commence a transitional peri od during which I will mobilize myself to create a more fitting one"? Yo u can see that the term "creeping normalcy" and the Aesopean tale about a frog who failed to recognize the gradual temperature increase of water in the pot and who found itself cooked maybe relevant here. Make no mistake -- the modern financial theory, and mathematics it is expressed in, is supremely beautiful, elegant and rem ains one of the crown achievments of human intellect; it the assertions or assumptions that it adequately describes reality that we live in that I consider dangerous in their cluelessness. It has to be further differentiated, however, between the dynamics in the markets of abstract financial products and the markets of commodities a vailable in finite quantities, such as petroleum. Devastating blows have been dealt to the Efficient Markets Hypothesis as it applies even to highly abstract financial...
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