God knows everything, EXCEPT STATISTICS :

I'am pretty sure you are thinking that this guy is one cocky motherf***** . Well , I don't know about that ; but what I'm sure about is that god really doesn't know statistics just because it never needed to know statistics. Pause and ponder, why do we even need statistics in the first place? It's simple, because we are uncertain about the future and also unsure about situations and phenomenon around us that we don't understand (don't have complete information about) .  E.g, we don't know what will be the exact height of a particular boy born in India by the time he reaches the age of 28. So we need statistical measures of central tendency,  dispersion and  probability to give our best possible 'estimate' ( you can also call it 'guess' or 'prediction') about what the boy's height most likely will be by the time he reaches the age of 28. 

Now, try to take your feet into God's shoes for a second. It is omnipresent and omnipotent and thus one of it's many higher dimensional chores is to treat time like we treat distance. There is no constraint of time on god,  it can see well into the future and can very well see every past . What is the most obvious outcome of this? God is not uncertain about the future (or even the past) and god is also not unsure about situations and phenomenon around it ( have complete information).
God knows exactly each and every factor that will influence the price of a particular stock in the next minute , it knows what will be the price in the next minute, it knows who will buy how much amount of that stock in the next minute , it knows who will sell how much amount of that stock in that next minute and it also knows who will make how much money as a result of such transactions in the market in the next minute.
Now, you as a reader tell me why would god know statistics?

The whole point of my blabber over here about god and statistics is to make readers understand that
RANDOMNESS IS A SUCKER'S PROBLEM. A Sucker in my terms and in Nassim Taleb's terms is a person  who lacks knowledge (doesn't have complete information about what is going on around him/her). But that is just being human; every one of us lack complete knowledge about something or the other that is going on around us ( we're all turkeys and chickens with varying degrees of intensity (read my 1st blog" where the mind is without fear and the head is heald low") ).
Thus a Black Swan is also inherently a sucker's problem, it generates from humans lacking some knowledge about the world around them.
There wouldn't have been any Hiroshima Nagasaki bombing if the Japanese army didn't lack knowledge about America's further plans against them.

But,  mistake is 'human' and it's never possible for humans to have complete information about everything. We can probably reach close to knowing everything but still it won't ever be 'complete knowledge'(" Janar kono sesh nai, Janar Chesta Britha tai"). Afterall, we are not GODS.

Thus it's very important for us humans to understand that we can never forsee or predict Black Swans ( No matter how good out model is or how many phd holders are sitting on the chair), we just can't do it; because we will always lack complete information about exactly what will cause that event to occure.

If you're thinking that this blog is ending in a pessimistic tone then don't worry. In my upcoming blogs I'll start building on the fact that  what we (humans) can do to live with uncertainty and black swans but still carve out an optimal strategy to save ourselves from them and even better, use them to our advantage!

Popular posts from this blog

BURN FROM IT OR LEARN FROM IT (Chaos getting Sorted) :

Image
You go to school, you study, get good grades, you take an office job in a company and you settle. This is the narrative of life most of the households have. Basically; the narrative of playing it safe and looking forward to a day where  ultimately all problems of your life gets settled (once you get a good paying job basically). Little do we realize that 'settling' in a true sense is actually not part of the game. The more we have the goal in our minds to settle the harder it would be to actually be secured in life. Then what's the answer? The answer is that you should stop seeing randomness and Uncertainty as a bad thing. You see, it's all the perception of things in our mind that brings suffering. If you take non-seurity as a part and parcel of your life then it won't seem that bothersome.  Something even better starts to happen when you stop assuming seurity, you LEARN FROM YOUR MISTAKES AND IMPROVE! You see, when you see black swans and randomness in general as ...
Read more

In the land of the blind , the "less blind" is king:

Let's dive into two situations: A) You collected a random sample of 10 people from India and calculated the net worth of each individual. B) In this case you chose again 10 random men from India, but this time instead of calculating their net worth you calculated the height of each individual in feet. Now, buckelup your seat belts because we're going to do something interesting here. Let's pickup the tallest man in India ever(in records) and the wealthiest man in India ever(in records). Let's add the height of the tallest man to the sum total of all heights of the 10 randomly selected men in India. What do you think will happen? the height of the tallest man will form a very small percentage of the sum total of all heights of the 10 randomly selected men. But on the contrary if you add the net worth of the wealthiest man in the history of India, then that will form a huge percentage of the sum total of wealth of those 10 random men and most likely it will surpass the su...
Read more