Having spent the weekend drinking thinking on our motto of Magis vinum, magis verum ("More wine, more truth"), the faculty have moved on to the hot tub faculty lounge for their usual team-building exercise where the underwear goes flying. The staff did overhear bits and pieces of their slurred murmurings, so we have some inkling of what wines truths they've been sampling.
More below the fold....
Usually we begin Meta-Monday by thanking last week's guest diarists, but we had no guest diarists last week. And we've none on the schedule this week either. If you'd like to host Morning Feature tomorrow or Wednesday - or next week - please volunteer in a comment below.
For the rest of the week, it seems the faculty are still muttering about Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers, set in the larger context of a phrase that popped up repeatedly en route to the hot tub faculty lounge. No, it wasn't "Are those real?" (And yes, apparently they are.) Instead it was "What are the odds?"
Either the faculty are pondering a trip to a casino, or they're pondering the narrative fallacy again. That fallacy proposes that because we're a storytelling species - we construct, remember, and share experience in terms of stories - we're prone to create stories that are too complete and too sensible for the messy, stochastic goo of actual events. In the words of Nassim Nicholas Taleb, we're often "fooled by randomness."
Gladwell implies that we tend to select facts that reflect attractive and/or familiar narrative forms, such as success arising from individual talent and hard work. We often downplay or ignore facts that run counter to those attractive, familiar narratives, such as events or influences over which we have little or no control. Yet those events and influences often dominate our opportunity windows: the frame of events within which talent and hard work can yield success.
Personal success is often less a matter of talent and hard work than of having been in the right place at the right time ... starting with when, where, and into what culture and family you were born. It's often said that "Luck is the intersection of preparation and opportunity," and that is true. It's also true that trusting Fate to distribute opportunity - as conservatism favors - wastes a lot of human potential.
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Happy Monday!