Sunday, July 27, 2008 Estremera: Deep thoughts at dawn By Stella A. Estremera Spider's Web
YOU know you're grasping at the last vestige of sanity when you're down to trying to conk yourself to sleep at 4 a.m. with Nassim Nicholas Taleb's "The Black Swan." You just have to "google" Nassim Nicholas Taleb to understand why, or if you've already read his book, then I know you will agree with me.
Taleb's Black Swan theory is not something you will normally ponder on at bedtime. But it was past my bedtime and I have already read what I normally would have read, one old romance book, one new book ("Our Iceberg is Melting" by John Kotter, complete with cute drawings of penguins), which I have just bought along with Taleb's earlier that day. But there I was, still trying to grab sleep while my brains pranced and danced, refusing to quiet down. That's what I get for drinking strong coffee when my adrenaline was already high the whole day.
By 5:30 a.m., into the second chapter of the book (the book's fun to read, but makes for very slow reading), I had to close my eyes, never mind if the brain cells still danced and pranced, and that's because my eyes were already strained and bloodshot. Apparently the eyestrain worked, the next thing I knew it was already 9 a.m., just an hour off my regular wake-up time. (For how can you argue with your body clock?)
Whatever that sleep was, I woke up still chomping on Taleb and his black swan; how people, us and everyone else -- from world leaders to your neighborhood barangay tanod -- only acknowledge the black swan phenomenon only after it has occurred. Much like 2001's 9/11 and the fiery end of the twin towers.
"History and societies do not crawl. They make jumps. They go from fracture to fracture, with a few vibrations in between. Yet we (and historians) like to believe in the predictable, small incremental progression," Taleb wrote.
Earlier on in the introduction, Taleb pointed out that the human mind does not learn rules, just facts.
"We do not spontaneously learn that we don't learn that we don't learn," he wrote. Now try to read that over and over again and feel the vertigo... The human mind it seems is so engrossed in specifics, in facts, it cannot appreciate the generalities from where the black swans emerge.
That's Taleb for you, and more. You have to chew on the fable of the penguins too in "Our Iceberg is Melting". While waiting in line is "Freakonomics: a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything" by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner.
These three were the reasons why I had to dig deep into my bank account a week before payday.
While our mouth froth whenever somebody says something bad about our city, we have to admit one big handicap -- the chances of getting newly-released good reads in our teeny-weeny bookstores that are stacked halfway with romance novels. Yes, there are gems in second-hand books (which are equally stacked with romance novels), but you'd need the whole afternoon to look for them because they're not even properly classified, and the attendants do not know what they have there. Our real bookstores, on the other hand, stock up on the latest NCLEX books, and the big hits the likes of cheesy Paolo Coelho. But deviate a bit, then you just have to wait a lifetime.
And thus, I keep in my memory a short list of books that are my must-haves. I search for them in every bookstore I see and when push comes to shove, I give up a few pizza dinners to order online, in dollars. Early Thursday evening after indulging myself on yet another pizza binge, I had some time to spare and that saw my feet walking toward National Bookstore where I came face to face with three of my shortlisted five books. Worse, one of those in the shortlist came in both paperback and hardbound, with more than P500 difference between the two. It was fast moving toward the end of the month, and so the paycheck of the weeks before was also petering out. But here were the three books, taunting me, plus the fact that given the choice, I always go for the hardbound. It's a fetish I can't stop.
There I was, adrenaline up so high because I found and bought new books, my wallet down to the last P500 bill and a few loose change enough to bring me home on a trisiboat consoling my poor thin wallet with the thought that I had a pizza all to myself.
And yes, new insights from Taleb and Kotter. What's a couple of thousands of pesos and a night of no sleep when there's so much knowledge waiting to keep the brain cells happy, anyway? Tomorrow, a few more hours of sleep will have to be put on hold because there's a fun dive scheduled. And I say, so what?
We work to have the means to enjoy life, and I say books and diving are just two of those life's enjoyment that deserves being grabbed at. I'll sleep tomorrow, to allow my brain cells to chomp further on Taleb. After that, Freakonomics and more dives. (saestremera@yahoo.com.)
