Jun

19

Encouraging Accidents

Filed Under Books, Complexity, Markets | 

Nassim Nicholas Taleb (author of the excellent Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets, and more recently The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, which I’ve not read yet) discusses what he is optimistic about: The Birth of Stochastic Science. He laments the fact that too many people are unwilling to accept the notion of unplanned order in human endeavors. However, in a tinkering-oriented culture, uncoordinated and chaotic experimentation will generate more and more useful accidents.

In Our Brave New World Gave, Kaletsky, and Gave describe the rise of “platform companies” that specialize in design while outsource manufacturing. Taleb comments on this phenomenon as well:

… globalization allowed the U.S. to specialize in the creative aspect of things, the risk-taking production of concepts and ideas, that is, the scalable and fat-tailed part of the products, and, increasingly, by exporting jobs, separate the less scalable and more linear components and assign them to someone in more mathematical and “cultural” states happy to be paid by the hour and work on other people’s ideas.

The interesting part of Taleb’s argument is this brief piece is not that, for example, designing iPods has higher margins and less volitility than building them, but that it is in the creative work that people are likely to accidentally encounter good new ideas.

(Article found by way of not particularly positive review over at Mahalnobis.)

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