zenpundit.com

Fast and furious as I have a lot on my plate today:

Wizards of Oz -“Complexity and Scale” and “Scale and (Over)Simplification”

Munzenberg -“Swarming on the ocean in the 15th and 16th century”

Glittering Eye – “Stop Digging”

Complexity and Social Networks Blog -“From the Bottom-up: Building the 21st Century CIA“

That’s it!

Shane Deichman reviews Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable and finds it wanting:

Perhaps it’s my naïveté (or perhaps that I’m a product of the California public school system), but I honestly don’t see our civilization marching toward “Extremistan”. Quite the opposite: While our awareness of remote events has increased, and our networks have grown exponentially, I believe that the diffuse topology of our networks actually dampens the impact of an extreme event. Consider the “Butterfly Effect”. Do you really think a butterfly flapping its wings in Jakarta is going to eventually cause a hurricane in New York City? Or do you think the minor perturbation is absorbed locally without cascading into some kind of resonance? Yes, there are examples that illustrate the dire consequences of unplanned resonance. Taleb (who waffles at the end of his book as half hyperskeptic, half intransigently certain) abandons the Gaussian bell curve, yet — with only a single mention of Albert-László Barabási — firmly embraces Power Law scale invariance as normative.Despite Taleb’s too-casual treatment of scale, I think he would agree with George E.P. Box’s statement (c. 1987) that “…[A]ll models are wrong, but some are useful.” Abandoning our dogmatic devotion to certainty is essential in any creative, innovative enterprise — and can reveal hidden opportunities, and hidden abilities.

Read the whole thing here.

Unlike most reviewers, Shane could go head-to-head with Taleb on things mathematical ( though you hardly need a math background to understand The Black Swan) and Shane is right that networks that are intrinsically and generally resilient are better suited to enduring unexpected, system perturbing, black swans.

Hope to have my review up Sunday evening.

SWJ Blog posts up on a very 4GW-van Creveldian shift at the DoD:

Last week, Air Force Brig. Gen. Robert H. Holmes, Central Command’s deputy director of operations, told reporters that an interagency task force on irregular warfare is about to be announced. He called it “our way at the combatant command to be able to focus all of the instruments of power in order to prosecute the irregular warfight in our region.”

But what does “irregular warfare” mean?

Essentially, it is an approach to future conflict that the United States has been carrying out ad hoc in Iraq and Afghanistan. Two years ago, Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England signed off on a Pentagon “working definition” that described it as “a form of warfare that has as its objective the credibility and/or legitimacy of the relevant political authority with the goal of undermining or supporting that authority.” …

Given the fluidity of the geopolitical situation and it’s own internal political divisions, American military doctrine will be better off if doctrinal definitions are “working” and lean toward the “open-ended”.

To Andrew Sullivan for the link yesterday. New traffic from a major blogger is always much appreciated!

For readers who are not aware, blogfriend Shlok Vaidya also publishes the excellent Naxalite Rage site dedicated to the analysis of that particular insurgency in India. Shloky has been getting well-deserved VIP attention of late – check out Naxalite Rage and find out why.