In The Signal and the Noise, Nate Silver (statistician and forecaster), explores a fundamental problem in our data-saturated world: we’re overwhelmed with information, but struggle to discern what matters. We mistake noise (random fluctuations, distractions, false patterns) for signal (meaningful trends, real predictive insight). The more information we gather, the more confident we become — and yet, paradoxically, the less accurate our predictions. The tools of modern forecasting — whether in economics, politics, or climate — often create an illusion of control in domains inherently governed by uncertainty.
This is the illusion that Nassim Nicholas Taleb (former derivatives trader and philosopher of risk) devotes his work to dismantling. Taleb’s philosophy centers on a single, disruptive idea: the world is governed by randomness, far more than most people — and especially experts — are willing to admit. We tell ourselves stories to make sense of the past, believing that success follows effort, and patterns govern outcomes. But life, as Taleb insists, is shaped not only by what is probable, but by what is possible — and possibility is wild, uneven, and deeply unfair.
In Fooled by Randomness, Taleb observes how easily we mistake luck for skill, how readily we attribute causality where there is merely correlation, or — worse — coincidence. Success, particularly in domains governed by uncertainty, is often indistinguishable from chance. A trader wins big and assumes brilliance. A pundit gets one forecast right and declares prescience. In reality, both may be little more than noise — statistical flukes disguised as fate. We crave elegant narratives, but the real world doesn’t play by our rules. Reality is opaque, nonlinear, and — above all — indifferent to our expectations.
Taleb rails against what he calls the “naïve empiricist”: those who trust data blindly, without understanding its limitations. Most data hides the tail risks — the rare but catastrophic events that dominate history. He argues that much of what matters in life — revolutions, market crashes, pandemics, love, success — emerges from the extreme, not from the mean. This misunderstanding leads to disaster when “Black Swan” events strike — rare, unpredictable, but massively impactful. Because we don’t expect them, the Black Swans catch us off guard and do enormous damage. We build models, markets, and institutions as though tomorrow will behave like yesterday. Taleb warns that “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence,” and the cost of such blindness is ruin.
The antidote is not better prediction, but humility. Not resilience, but antifragility — systems that gain from disorder. Nature evolves through chaos: forests renew through fire, ideas through failure, species through mutation. Human systems should aspire to the same logic: societies, industries and businesses evolve by way of disruption. Taleb argues that we must embrace chaos instead of denying it, and seek antifragility in how we build, invest, govern, and live. Stop seeking perfect stability. Stop optimizing for calm. Instead, design for stress. Invite error. Thrive on volatility.
Silver’s and Taleb’s visions converge in their call for probabilistic thinking, a shared skepticism toward certainty, and respect for uncertainty not as a temporary inconvenience but as a permanent feature of the human condition. They reject the hubris of overfitted models and smooth narratives, and the seductions of overconfidence. What matters most, they argue, lies not in the mean, but in the tails — in the extreme, the unexpected, the outlier that rewrites the narrative.
To live wisely in such a world is not to impose order, but to let order emerge from chaos. Not to master uncertainty, but to dance with it.
generative art sketches written in python/py5 >> randomly spawns grid-aligned isometric cubes in a muted purple ASK color palette
refactored/adapted from ASK's original p5.js >> https://editor.p5js.org/asymptoticSystemKey/full/bWa1wvK3r
| version | behavior |
|---|---|
| v1 | fully random |
| v2 | cubes spawn within a radius centered around the mouse cursor |
# 1/ create + activate a fresh env // recommended
conda create -n py5env python=3.10 -y -c conda-forge
conda activate py5env
# 2/ make sure Java 17 is present // py5 needs it
conda install -c conda-forge openjdk=17 -y
# 3/ install py5 // pre‑release is where the cool features live
pip install --pre py5that’s it! run either sketch >>
python isometric_cubes_v1.py # full random
python isometric_cubes_v2.py # mouse‑centred
# click anywhere in the window >> PNG outputs saved to sibling folder
heads‑up: on the first launch, py5 will download the Processing 5 core // be patient, it’s automatic
if you’d rather stay in system Python, just be sure you have >>
- Python ≥ 3.8
- Java Runtime 17 // set
JAVA_HOMEor putjavaon your PATH
then >>
pip install --pre py5Apache 2.0 >> see the header in each .py file for details