The internet has made the world infinitely more complex. For most of us, the world is made larger because the internet has made it “flat”. Of the many challenges that we confront with the globalization and democratization of information, the greatest is information overload. Information overload not only can obscure fact from opinion, but it has the power to reduce independent thought.

When confronted with too much information, people start to switch off their brains. Some common ways to do this include running with the herd, placing unquestioning trust in authority, constructing abstract,simplifying models of the world, etc. These techniques are designed to make the world appear to be a safer, more predictable, more understandable place. Too much information appears to be have the same effect on human behavior as too little information.

Besides not making us smarter, the internet can dumb us down some as well. We are exposed to the greatest feedback loop in the history of the world. Feedback loops are not necessarily bad until they start leading to irrational behavior. In “Irrational Exuberance”, Robert Shiller describes how amplification mechanisms contribute to booms and busts. In “The Alchemy of Finance”, George Soros outlines his theory of reflexivity, where feedback interactions change objective reality so much, that it becomes no longer possible to distinguish the objective from the subjective.

When an esteemed economist like Robert Shiller describes some market situations as nothing more than a Ponzi scheme, then there must be times when investing in a market makes some-one the sucker.

“The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable” has a simple message. The world is not as ordered as we would like it to be. It is suffused with randomness. It is not possible to compute the probabilities of risk. Most if not all of our attempts for understanding order in chaos have led us astray. The only reasonable approach available to us is skeptical empiricism. Think Aristotle, not Plato.

Skeptical empiricism does not lend itself to amplification systems, information cascades and herd-like behavior. It also suggests that solely reading the Wikipedia page is probably not the ideal way to go about learning things. This must be true, if Jon Stewart from “The Daily Show” is parodying Wikipedia

For many of us, our observations derive from the internet. Hence, if we are to be skeptical empiricists, we need to get past this tyrannical information overload problem. The great thing about Topicmarks is that it allows us to compare many documents with the help of machines. In effect, machines help us to collect our empirical observations. And when we are exposed to many viewpoints, not a few, our capacity for critical thinking is tremendously increased. The Black Swan puts the onus on the individual. Topicmarks gives power to the individual.

We all are, as Taleb says, Black Swans. And thank you for reading my blog.