Outliers




Normal                            -                      Divergent
Centre                              -                      Periphery




Dave Snowden: There’s a level of dissent you want to have permanently present within the organization. The thing [is] to measure the degree of inefficiency a system [needs] in order to be effective.

Jim Rutt: Do you have anything you can explicate on on how one would think about what’s the right amount of diversity? I suppose it’s situationally dependent.

Dave Snowden: That links in with apex predators. If you’ve got a stable ecosystem you don’t need so much diversity. If the system is suddenly destabilized you need to increase diversity very quickly.

[Jim Rutt & Dave Snowden]
'EP11 Dave Snowden and Systems Thinking', Jim Rutt Show




[...] the Eskimos have a word, kunlangeta, which means “his mind knows what to do but he does not do it.” This is an abstract term for the breaking of many rules when awareness of the rules is not in question.

It might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women - someone who does not pay attention to reprimands and who is always being brought to the elders for punishment. One Eskimo among the 499 on their island was called kunlangeta.

When asked what would have happened to such a person traditionally, an Eskimo said that probably “somebody would have pushed him off the ice when nobody else was looking”.

The Yorubas have a similarly abstract word, arankan, which means a person who always goes his own way regardless of others, who is uncooperative, full of malice, and bullheaded.

There are parallels between kunlangeta and arankan and our concept “psychopath” - someone who consistently violates the norms of society in multiple ways. Also some of the specific acts of wrongdoing which Eskimos and Yorubas recognise might in our society be called evidence of “personality disorders.” In Western psychiatry, this term refers to sexual deviations, excessive use of drugs or alcohol, and a variety of behaviours that primarily cause trouble for other people rather than for the doer.

It is of considerable interest that kunlangeta and arankan are not behaviours that the shamans and healers are believed to be able to cure or change. As a matter of fact, when I pressed this point with the Yoruba healers they specifically denied that these patterns are illness.

[Jane M. Murphy]
'Psychiatric Labeling in Cross-Cultural Perspective', Science, Vol 191, p. 1026





The idiot is a modern-day heretic.

Etymologically, heresy means 'choice'. Thus, the heretic is one who commands free choice: the courage to deviate from orthodoxy. As a heretic, the idiot represents a figure of resistance opposing the violence of consensus. The idiot preserves the magic of the outsider.

Today, in light of increasingly coercive conformism, it is more urgent than ever to heighten heretical consciousness.

[Byung-Chul Han]
Psychopolitics, p.83




(ii) Add noise to the training set. The effects of noise addition have been discussed, but it should be kept in mind that the addition of noise does not increase the information content of the input data, it just shakes it around a little bit. Adding noise may be helpful under circumstances where the amount of input vectors are limited, otherwise the next consideration is much more important.

(iii) Increase the range of input examples. Input vectors should be as representative as possible. Outliers should most definitely be included. They do not only have the same effect as the addition of noise, but also provide significant information that may enable the network better to partition the feature space.

[Paul Cilliers]
Complexity and Postmodernism, p.78




The chthonian triumphs in Medea, as in the later Bacchae. The two plays are symmetrical: citizenship is denied to a sexually ambiguous, magic-working alien, who vengefully debases and liquidates society’s arrogant hierarchs.

[Camille Paglia]
Sexual Personae, p.109




Any pursuit which requires developing implicit expertise and repeated practice will benefit from individual instruction.

The esoteric and well-grounded knowledge needed for creation can’t be achieved at industrial scales and tolerances. If you attempt to lop off one end of a bell curve, you’ll always lop off both. Bureaucratic evaluation of people at scale, no matter how much it is aimed at merit, ultimately always first tests to see if someone is an outlier. A mass system has no more place for outliers than an assembly line.

[...] The industrial mass society we built to sustain and utilize many of our technologies undermines the creation of new ones.

[Samo Burja]
'How Social Engineering Drives Technology', Palladium



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