Nice read John. I’m reading “The Black Swan” and quite liking the kind of discussions of the empiricist, Interesting guy. I stumbled on to your blog when searching for the phrase used by Taleb (Silent Evidence).

Now, where do I fit Silent Evidence into all this? See that’s the great thing about such great posts, they just sit there simmering, and grow into my own personal philosophy.

caio,

PS – Anybody that tells a room full of soldiers that its “Tuff, live with the armor you’ve got?” when talking about the lack of proper armor or flak vests that is now a part of today’s war, for one has ball. But B, should have thought talking philosophy in a US News conference was foolish. We are not in the top ten most educated societies for a reason. Maybe if he were the French Secretary of Defense he wouldn’t get as much bad press for using such a term?

Why, oh why, can’t the media just give us the news? I know in our modern world it’s unrealistic to expect unbiased reporting from news organizations owned by publicly traded corporations and solely supported by advertisements for other publicly traded corporations… but what can I say… I’m an idealist.

Sorry for the rant. We now return to our regularly scheduled conversation about “silent evidence” and the infamously “stolen” Grey’s Anatomy spec script.

sounds like the phenomenon was mis-titled. it’s not the fallacy of exclusion, it’s the fallacy of non-recognition of salient information.

there. that’s much better.

It’s based on the law of unintended consequences. The parable goes that a boy breaks the window of a shopkeeper. Observers, wanting to look on the bright side of life, posit that by paying the glazer to fix the window, that the community will benefit, because he’ll take the money he was paid and buy some bread, and the baker will buy something else, leading to many in the community benefitting from the breaking of the window. But what if the window hadn’t broken? The shopkeeper might buy a book or replace his old shoes, benefitting the community without the window having been broken.

The same reasoning is argued that war benefits an economy. But it’s a colossal waste of resources that could have been used to build roads, or schools or conduct R&D.

So, could you have been looking for the Law of Unintended Consequences?

The more appropriate approach is to pick the concept, apply it to the range of phenomena, and see if it leads to the outcome in question.

Silent evidence sounds a bit better, but never really hear it used much, and it is actually not that silent..