As the base boldly lets you in to the First Room of your complex Johari House, you enter the common Arena, the dependable playing field of communication. Spontaneous understanding creates the flow of friendly communication. Then an energetic opponent confidently pushes you into the Second Room, which is filled with traps: the lights are out and you must feel your way through. Accepting your blind spots you reach for calm. Nothing is revealed, yet you find an exit, thus bravely leading both parties into the Maze. Equals again, cooperation is the key to survival here, the Third Room filled with so many black swans. There must be some way out of here, the nervous introvert muttered to the quiet religious peer. Walk placidly and we will enter my sensible domain, adapt in the face of uncertanity and you too will gain power and pride. The Fourth Room opens and chaos strikes panic into inflexible and letharic minds. Ingeniously relaxed, you are on home ground withdrawn into your own domain. Fearing revelation you hurry out of the Nohari House.

Nobody understands the unstated risks. Events are habitually compared to normality, as if normality was a known known, as if we could look up the definition and not be puzzled by the answer. The bell curve serves us well as long as we ignore kurtosis, the fat tails of the bell curve snake which is the tendency to extremes. Profit is built on risk, debt is built on risking more than you can afford. This is where the black swans come in, the events so unsuspected that they never entered consideration. Dark dreams won't let you see the accidents that are so self-evident after the fact. The world is full of bad drivers, but if you crash a school bus you shouldn't get a new one. What is your risk strategy? Is it a risky strategy? Did you insert randomness into your decision technique, or have you fallen into a moral hazard, you freeriding speculator. Let the tragic commons bear the brunt of your hunt for misguided incentives, while you accrue fragility until it's too big to fail.

The admission of complexity is the creation of chaos. The wise man calls simplicity evil as the universe hurls towards the Complex Singularity. Thus murder is evil, and it becomes possible to do the wrong thing for the right reasons. Noone has stepped forth with Occam's blade to counter-balance evolution. This is called cruel, the crux of all mad scientists and progedic leaders. Too bad he had to die for our dream to live. For our dream to come alive, everyone has to die. Judgement day comes hailed by no prophet. All prophets are false, all prophets are true and there is no reality but my reality. Stare into my eyes and know that I apologize for all truths and untruths, even though the fault that cannot be mine is mine, is yours. Jesus died, not for this. Are you God? Complete surprises with major impact are always rationalized after the fact.

Don't be a turkey, join us in turning black swans white. Open your atrophied third eye and step into the Fourth Quadrant. Wake up and step into the lucid dream, the most constructive illusion: reality itself, eye-to-eye and face to face. Play the optimal Prisoner in all encounters; trust is the ultimate signal of stability. We don't betray just because we are betrayed, retribution is served up at the wrong adress. Science is on shaky ground now, it can no longer demonstrate its own falsifiability. Quantum theory has refuted itself and we are still surprised that the duality of reality does not fit our approximations. No finite amount of observation could ever demonstrate falsehood, so step into infinity. This is the land of the fractal, the drip becomes a creek joins a river becomes a flood nurishes a tree that is the shelter of bugs eaten by birds hunted by predators taken by the flood and washed out to sea.

How do we convert debt into equity? We need trust, a way to move forward, but we cannot rely on bailouts. Throwing money at the problem won't make it go away, even though you have to spend money to make money. We have to draw a line somewhere; usually that line is a lie. You draw a line in the sand, why is the line here and not there? Someone drew the line, someone else would have drawn it differently, but there is a line. Did we find fossil rabbits in the Precambrian? Correlation does not imply causation, but rather it pokes a big taunting finger while gesticulating with its eyebrows. Ignorance is a survival strategy, a decision tree of minimizing regret retroactively. Positive knowledge is dangerous knowledge. Law is mathematics without the luxury of starting with a blank slate. Both are subject to our notions of perfection, and since they are human concepts they fall short of our idealistic values. Idealism is a productive delusion, pulling us towards a self-justifying ignorance.

Particle physics and the Theory of Relativity apply to human psychology where sociology and linguistics fails us. Every concept can be expressed in terms of energy, until you reduce thought into energy and collapse your theory with energy into thought. Everything is the Flux, striking sparks on the fizz like fireflies by a moonlit lake. Solipsism is a half-truth, how unfortunate that the other half is inexpressible in language. If there was a word to convey truths the word would eat itself. This is why we seek comfort in the physically definite despite ourselves, huddling up to our closest in the depths of the cold night. Black Monday came again proving that we are less than orangutangs, we have failed to learn from our own mistakes. Then again, it came again just to rub our noses in our past, present and future failures.

Let us return to risk strategies, in particular let us discuss the safety fallacy. Ever heard of risk compensation? A larger perceived risk produces more carefulness and alertness in the human mind. The inverse conclusion is the dangerous one - we had no idea, but apparently anti-lock brakes, helmets, seat belts and speed limits do not reduce the amout of accidents. Safer driving makes more dangerous drivers. The single accident reducing factor is increasing visible cost of accidents. We're all suffering an Outside Context Problem, and it's gone way beyond causing uncomfortable silences in conversations. Statistics tell no lies, they merely show you precisely what you were looking for. The lies lie in how you pose the question. Posing the right question you are no longer the impartial observer but become a part of the problem, party to the Heisenberg uncertanity of the solution.

Don't you worry about that, we'll ease the squeeze and keep the bastards honest.

Ignoramus et ignorabimus. Scio me nihil scire.

Have you ever lost on purpose? Life is too short to end the game early, when winning becomes the least attractive alternative. Sometimes there are more compelling reasons to loose, or at least give the opponent a chance to save face. Winning whatever it takes leads to disillusionment in the face of failure, but what does it matter in a friendly game? It's more exciting when you're neck-on-neck and can take your time. Every move counts, and the truest signal of fitniess is transmitted when it costs you something. Bad loosers can't afford to take the chance.

Have you ever gotten lost on purpose?

Referencess and thanks for an eye-opening experience to:

Nassim Nicholas Taleb's Black Swan, http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/, Loose Change, Hawkin's A Brief History of Time, Mandelbrot and Noam Chomsky, Zeitgeist http://www.zeitgeistmovie.com/ , Timothy Leary's Tibetan Book of The Dead, Bill Hicks' Life is a Ride, The Chaos Hypertextbook http://hypertextbook.com/chaos/, Ichi the Killer, Sasha Shulgin's PiHKAL and 2C-[BI], Laurie Hendren and all the good folks at SOCS McGill, The Weather Tomorrow, Heisenberg's Uncertanity, Touring's Universal Uncomputability and Godel's Incompleteness, Capra's Tao, The Principia Dischordia.