Wired recently published an opinion piece by Nassim N. Taleb, well known for writing books such as The Black Swan and Anti-Fragile.
I am not saying here that there is no information in big data. There is plenty of information. The problem — the central issue — is that the needle comes in an increasingly larger haystack.
It reminded me of a conversation I had with the best selling author and thinker, about a year ago. Having just published Anti-Fragile, Mr. Taleb and I ended up talking about data and it’s growing influence.
This being a rainy weekend, I ended up looking into my old notebooks and found some disjointed bits from that conversation. This particular one stood out, for no apparent reason — though at the time I must have thought these pronouncements were important, and thus needed to be scribbled down in my notebook. (I am not even sure if the quotes are complete, but for some odd reason I am overcome by a desire to share these with you.
Nassim N. Taleb: There is a secret relationship between humans and writing, the soothing effect of writing longhand. Between human hands and the book there’s a style; a rational empathy we cannot capture or your eyes can’t see.
Me: So, you slow down the time when you’re writing with ink? When you say “time” what do you mean by “time”?
NNT: No, I meant time as a history, a historical process. Time is volatility, the way I define it. Time is cleaner of fragilities.
What does fragilities mean in this context?
At my work we talk about this quite a lot. You have to get to that needle to understand the root cause of something happening and that happens from Deming’s process of asking 5 Why’s. Each “Why” peels back a layer of that data until you get down to the history of a granular entity before you can truly know what happened, so that you can understand what needs to change to affect the future activity of that entity.
it’s just like holding hands with someone in the hospital, human touch is what matters most in humanity and our relationship with everything, time even as a definer of this dimension becomes so irrelevant.
Elaine
Well said. I think sometimes we forget the importance of that touch.