Mutiplicity
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A talk inspired by Italo Calvino's Six Memos for the Next Millennium given in Bologna in honour of Alessandro Liberati.
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Mutiplicity
- 1. Multiplicity Richard Smith Friend of Alessandro Italianophile Former editor, BMJ
- 5. Cochrane Colloquium, Rome, 1999
- 10. Czeslaw Milosz, John Donne, W H Auden, Robert Frost
- 11. Marina Basmanova
- 12. • Your voice, your body, your name mean nothing to me now. No one destroyed them. It's just that, in order to forget one life, a person needs to live at least one other life. And I have served that portion.
- 13. Brodsky • Are you an American or a Russian? • I am Jewish – a Russian poet and an English essayist
- 18. A great tool for those who love multiplicity created by multiplicity
- 19. A great tool for those who love multiplicity created by multiplicity
- 22. Pietro Aretino • “Journalist cum press baron, master of aphorism and hyperbole; pornographer, flatterer and blackmailer; playwright, satirist, versifier, bisexual libertine, connoisseur of art; self-styled political seer, 'fifth evangelist,' 'censor of the world', as well as its 'secretary' (meaning depository of its secrets); 'one whose letters are answered even by emperors and kings.'” • Who can match that today?
- 25. Francis Galton • Francis Galton (16 February 1822 – 17 January 1911), cousin of Charles Darwin, was an English Victorian polymath, anthropologist, eugenicist, tropical explorer, geographer, inventor, meteorologist, proto-geneticist, psychometrician, and statistician.
- 26. Francis Galton • In 1906 Galton visited a livestock fair and stumbled upon an contest. • An ox was on display, and the villagers were invited to guess the animal's weight after it was slaughtered and dressed.
- 27. Francis Galton • Galton disliked the idea of democracy and wanted to use the competition to show the problems of allowing large groups of people to vote on a topic.
- 28. Francis Galton • 787 people guessed the weight of the ox, some were experts, farmers and butchers, others knew little about livestock. Some guessed very high, others very low, many guessed fairly sensibly. • Galton collected the guesses after the competition was over
- 29. Francis Galton • The average guess was 1,197 pounds • The correct weight was 1,198 pounds
- 30. Wisdom of Crowds • What Dalton discovered was that in actuality crowds of people can make surprisingly good decisions IN THE AGGREGATE, even if they have imperfect information.
- 31. A crucial lesson for me
- 32. And so to the start of my talk
- 41. Another of the fruits of multiplicity (Un altro dei frutti della molteplicità)
- 45. Italo Calvino: the theme of my lecture • “The contemporary novel is an encyclopaedia, a method of knowledge, and above all a connection between the events, the people, and the things of the world.”
- 50. • “Unforeseen catastrophes are never the consequence ..... of a cause singular; but they are rather like a whirlpool ... towards which a whole multitude of converging causes have contributed.” • “Replace cause with causes.”
- 52. .
- 55. "To know is to insert something into what is real, and hence to distort reality" "To know is to insert something into what is real, and hence to distort reality"
- 57. Two polarities • Exactitude: mathematics, pure spirit, the military mentality • Soul: irrationality, humanity, chaos
- 59. System one
- 60. System 2 • 27 x 93
- 62. Ten defects in our thinking • 1. Availability bias: giving to much weight to information most available • 2. Hindsight bias • 3. The problem of induction: building general rules with too little information • 4. The fallacy of conjunction: overstimating that 7 events with 90% probability will all occur and underestimating that one will occur • 5. Confirmation bias: seeing confirming but not falsifying evidence
- 63. Ten defects in our thinking • 6. Contamination effects: irrelevant but proximate information overinfluences us • 7. Affect heuristic: preconceived value judgements interfere with cost benefit analyses • 8. Scope neglect: prevents us proportionately adjusting what we would be willing to sacrifice to avoid harms of different order of magnitude • 9. Overconfidence in calibration • 10. Bystander apathy
- 64. Italo Calvino • “Over ambitious projects may be objectionable in many fields but not in literature. Literature remains alive only if we set ourselves goals far beyond all hope of achievement.” • Cochrane?
- 65. Comorbidity: US data 65
- 68. Conclusions
- 69. There is power in the many
- 70. Everything is connected to everything
- 71. Last thoughts
- 73. An opposite view • NietzscheQuotes @ • When a hundred men stand together, each of them loses his mind and gets another one