To Nassim Nicholas Taleb : Letters : Longplayer

longplayer.org/letters/to-nassim-nicholas-taleb

To Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Brian Eno

Dear Nassim,

We’re all used to the idea that actions and thoughts take on different values when we expand
the ‘picture’ within which we frame them. We realise that something which makes sense in a
local frame may make less sense in a broader frame: dumping your waste in the river is fine
as long as you don’t think too much about the people downriver. When you do, you might
decide to stop dumping. Government ought to be the process by which such overlapping
‘bigger picture’ considerations are negotiated: good government should make empathy
practical.

Indeed our geographical ‘circle of empathy’ grows decade on decade: a hundred years ago it
would have been impossible to imagine millions of people raising hundreds of millions of
pounds for tsunami victims on the other side of the world – people they didn’t know and
would almost certainly never meet. In terms of geography, we inhabit a much bigger picture
than we used to, and we sense our interconnectedness within it.

In terms of time, however, the picture seems to be narrowing. Public attention is increasingly
focused on very near futures: businesses live in terror of the bottom line and the quarterly
results, while politicians quake at tomorrow’s opinion polls and formulate policy in terms of
them. We’ve heard tales of farmers planting olive trees or vineyards for their grandchildren to
harvest, or of foresters cultivating groves of oaks to replace a chapel roof hundreds of years
in the future, but by and large, we don’t do that anymore. We have less active engagement
with our future than our ancestors did.

This diminishing future horizon is mirrored by an equally shrinking backwards view. We find
ourselves left with prejudices and opinions that were hastily and emotionally formed at the
time and not revisited and re-evaluated, drowned under a relentless stream of new stories
and panics. We seem to be so thoroughly submerged by new impressions that we don’t have
time to digest our own history.

To illustrate this, think about nuclear power. Start with FUKUSHIMA, that dread word. As a
result of over-excited media reporting (‘great story!’ I heard one journalist say) that single
word has probably condemned nuclear power for another generation, when in fact the
accident produced no radiation-related deaths (and it’s doubtful that it will produce a
discernable statistical blip in cancers in the future). In a conspiracy which seems almost

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dishonest, most Green groups failed to acknowledge this – it was too good as propaganda
for them to let the facts get in the way – and of course the press never returned to the
subject with any correctional follow-up. It became one of those little nuggets of received, and
totally incorrect, wisdom: Nuclear=Fukushima=Catastrophe.

That received non-wisdom has persuaded Green Germany to begin decommissioning its
nuclear reactors – which means more coal-fired plants. Japan too will probably turn back to
coal. Coal is – even Greenpeace would agree – the worst option, though they’d claim that
the gap can be filled by renewables. It can’t, not now and probably not for decades. In the
meantime – and it may be a long, mean time – we’ll use coal. It’s cheap and very, very dirty.

So the real catastrophe of Fukushima is in the future, waiting for us in the form of vastly
increased atmospheric CO2. An emotional over-reaction to a media storm has produced a
thoroughly bad decision with longterm global consequences. It’s a classic ‘how not to’
scenario. Is this how our future is going to be – lurching from one panic to another in a daze
of ‘just coping’ and without the benefit of any long-picture wisdom within which to frame our
actions? What would help us break out of that trap?

Those olive farmers and church builders mentioned above had something we don’t: a sense
that the future would quite likely be similar to the present. We, on the other hand, can be
sure this won’t be the case. So the question is really this: how can we even think about
designing for a future that we can’t imagine?

Where we have seriously addressed the long term at all, our efforts so far have tended
towards ‘robust’ solutions: if we can’t predict the future we’ll defend against it by building
super-robust structures. An example of this philosophy would be the now-abandoned
megaproject for the storage of America’s nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain. It was designed
to resist anything the Universe could conceivably throw at it (or rather anything its designers
could conceive, which is quite different). It had no adaptive capacity: it was a fortress,
hardened, inert, requiring constant upkeep. But as you point out, ‘robust’ is not actually the
opposite of fragile, but a point on the spectrum between ‘fragile’ and ‘anti-fragile’. The project
was abandoned for political reasons and the problem of waste storage is still regarded as
unsolved.

In the meantime, however, the waste is being stored: in huge drums beside the plants
themselves. It’s intended as a temporary measure, but it might turn out to be a better one
anyway. I think it offers a hint to the solution. Like this, the material is easily accessible
should any better storage or recycling ideas appear in the next several millennia (quite likely,
I should have thought…there must be Golden Swans as well as Black ones). It leaves open
the possibility of easily adopting better solutions as they appear, and, because it is widely
distributed rather than concentrated, it can be seen as dozens of separate experiments in
waste storage being conducted simultaneously. Some of them will be better than others:

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evolution will take place. In that sense it seems to me a more antifragile solution. In a
changing landscape what is needed is evolvability – the possibility of running a number of
solutions at the same time and letting the better ones win out.

But there is a huge psychological appetite for robust solutions: it’s very natural to think that
the best way to defend any system is by hardening it so it becomes unassailable. That looks
like a good strategy partly because it entails more quantifiable activity on our part – and we
tend to trust things if we think we’ve designed them (rather than if they’ve evolved by some
process we don’t quite understand) and if we can attach lots of numbers to them. The
problem is that ‘robust’ only works if the threats to the system are predictable – if you know
what to harden against. The fact is, we don’t – and the hardening process itself reduces
evolvability.

The nuclear issue – which I’ve used as an example in this letter – is only one of many I could
have chosen. The fact is, we’re facing a lot of complex and interrelated problems which
demand that we take positions now. To some extent, that position is going to have to be ‘let’s
improvise’ because there’s a distinct limit to how well we can make predictions. The de facto
nuclear storage arrangements currently in use in America are examples of ‘let’s improvise’
and in this case seem to be a not-too-bad arrangement. But ‘let’s improvise’ has its
limitations: in fact it’s sort of what got us where we are now, in a place that’s both wondrous
and problematic. We might need some other intellectual weapons in our arsenals, no matter
how good we become at jamming.

Best Wishes

Brian

More about Longplayer

Overview of Longplayer

Longplayer is a one thousand year long musical composition. It began playing at midnight on
the 31st of December 1999, and will continue to play without repetition until the last moment
of 2999, at which point it will complete its cycle and begin again. Conceived and composed
by Jem Finer, it was originally produced as an Artangel commission, and is now in the care
of the Longplayer Trust.

Conceptual Background
While Longplayer is most often described as a 1000 year long musical composition, the
preoccupations that led to its conception were not of a musical nature; they concerned time,
as it is experienced and as it is understood from the perspectives of philosophy, physics and
cosmology. At extremes of scale, time has always appeared to me as baffling, both in the

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transience of its passing on quantum mechanical levels and in the unfathomable expanses of
geological and cosmological time, in which a human lifetime is reduced to no more than a
blip.

How does Longplayer work?

The composition of Longplayer results from the application of simple and precise rules to six
short pieces of music. Six sections from these pieces – one from each – are playing
simultaneously at all times. Longplayer chooses and combines these sections in such a way
that no combination is repeated until exactly one thousand years has passed.

About Longplayer's Survival

From its initial conception, a central part of the Longplayer project has been about
considering strategies for the future. How does one keep a piece of music playing across
generations? How does one prepare for its technological adaptability, knowing how few
technologies have remained viable over the last millenium? How does one legislate for its
upkeep? And how can one communicate that responsibility to those who might be looking
after it some 950 years after its original custodians have perished?

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