Transcript
Maps and Miracles
Patrick
So Rory, I really toyed with where to start in this conversation, and I figured a neat place would be this idea that a spreadsheet leaves no room for miracles, and that the problem with logic is that it kills off magic. I'd love you to expand on those two great ideas because in my world of finance, we use a lot of spreadsheets.
Rory
I think that actually goes wider in a way, which is that most people want maps of the world. In fact, we need them because patently, simple human perception and decision making in evolutionary terms, in practical terms, requires that we develop these kinds of schemas because patently, we have to go from data to decision. And the amount of information we have, very large parts of which may be entirely irrelevant by the way, mean that we have to produce this kind of reduced map by which we operate. And I think the problem is that the maps we like to use are always kind of deterministic and they're kind of Newtonian, if you like, whereas reality is neither, it's both probabilistic and it's highly complex.