If someone tries to trick you with "Evidence-based analysis", show him this story of the turkey

 This Story of The Turkey

Consider the following story, borrows from Bertrand Russell and adapted by me

   A turkey is fed for 1000 days by a butcher and everyday confirms to the turkey and turkey’s business’s paid membership site or offline- paid subscription’s site and offline, the turkey’s risk management department in a company, and the turkey’s analytic department in a business, the turkey’s statistic department of a company - that the butcher loves the turkey with increase statiscal evidence. And every day bring more confidence to the statement. But until 1001 days there something in the US call thanks giving, it is never a good idea to be a turkey that day .there is going to be a big surprise event or black swan of disastrous consequence for the turkey in another word the Turkey becomes death meat. What about the Butcher?Well I will give the answer at the end of this episode

   This story proves in nutshell 3 things.

• We human are usually very good at managing the ordinary( in another words we human are very good at predicting the regular, the ordinary- or we human are very good at handling the small and excellent of being fool by the outlier, the rare, the exception) eg: HSBC in England last year 2015,lay off or redundant
• Randomness or uncertainty doesn’t look random, therefore don’t be fool by the historical trend. Employee, or even membership.
• The story illustrate the major problem of modernity couple with the rise of complexity: Eg: employee, indeed the turkey is mistaking absence of evidence (no harm) for evidence of absence. Here the turkey thought it is facing something predictable, when in reality it is facing something unpredictable than it thinks. “A mistake that prevail across board. Namely in consultancy circles, businesses circles, intellectuals circles, policy makers circles, individual lives circles and social science.

Well what is the big take away here? Remember I asked the question about the butcher. The answer is :It is not a black swan to the butcher and the whole idea or big take away of the turkey story is not to be a Turkey.

How? By avoiding be evidence base and seeking Negative information which reduces the space of what we do by knowledge of what does not work. We need to pay for negative results. Why quiet simply because in a world that is stable and doesn’t change, intelligence is about noticing things that are relevant (meaning detecting pattern)- whereas in a complex world- meaning uncertainty, the unknown, intelligence consists in ignoring things that are irrelevant (avoiding false pattern)

. Therefore you can easily discount anecdotes and stories and go to the core subject by making sound judgment.

Welcome to the world of uncertainty- we in optionality profits have  after all with the rise of complexity – we are more prone to errors ,and since we are in an environment where we can make mistake;we can also benefit from them.Jeff Bezos put it this way” "If someone tries to take all failure out of a process, innovation will cease..... Failure and invention are inseparable twins.” After all, man’s errors are his portals of discovery