Transcript:

Hello, I’m David Breeden, I’m the Senior Minister at First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis, a historically Humanist congregation. This is summer Coffee and Wisdom when we are live at 9:00 a.m. Central Time on Tuesdays and Thursdays and other times on our many different platforms. This week and next week, I want to be thinking about what I’m calling Yes way, No way. But that is words and methods and ideas. We’ve talked extensively on Coffee and Wisdom about the connection between words and ideas and how much those two are connected and disconnected, and how we don’t always or actually even understand the connection between those two, and then methods, that is, how we put things into practice. Some of you have probably read Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Black Swan. It was a New York Times best seller. It’s not an easy book to read, but it is a brilliant book. And the blurb says this: “A black swan is a highly improbable event with three principal characteristics. It is unpredictable. It carries a massive impact, and after the fact, we concoct an explanation that makes it appear less random and more predictable than it was.” Now, of course, you can go through history and look at example after example of that. Ten years from now, we will all be reading books that will explain how everyone should have seen the CoVID virus coming, but of course we didn’t. Well, things look a lot more predictable after, in that rearview mirror, that 20/20 vision of the past. And that’s one of the things that Taleb wants to talk to us about and explain: highly improbable events. His current book is Skin in the Game, Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life. Again, looking at that idea that what we really don’t maybe understand as much as we think we do. I mentioned on Tuesday that he practices stoicism and he says, “a Stoic is “a Buddhist with attitude.” Currently, if you want to look online, you can find his work at Fooledbyrandomness.com. These are his kind of contemporary current workings that haven’t yet made it into books, but certainly will eventually, I assume, as he works out ideas. And this is from “How to Be Rational About Rationality” by Taleb, who is a mathematical statistician and risk management theoretician. The mathematical statistician part is what makes him seem so amazing to those of us who don’t understand mathematics, that in our daily lives we think things are probably more pattern-oriented than they actually are. He says this: “There is a difference between beliefs that are decorative and a different sort of beliefs, those that map to action. There is …no difference between them in words.” And this is again, what I want to really look at closely. “…no difference between them in words, except that the true difference reveals itself in risk taking, having something at stake, something one could lose in case one is wrong. And the lesson, by rephrasing the principle:” is this: “How much you truly ‘believe’ in something can only be manifested through what you are willing to risk for it.” So this is how he’s going to define the idea of belief. Obviously, we can say we believe in gravity, but we’re not risking a whole lot when we say that. How much you truly believe in something can only be manifested through what you are willing to risk for it, manifested made real in life itself. Well, the Stoics long ago knew that this was an issue for human beings. The current Neostoicism movement is full of things like Stoic exercises. 7 Stoic Exercises You Can Do Today. Twenty Four Stoic Spiritual Exercises, How to Become a Better Human Being, Day After Day. The Daily Stoic, 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance and the Art of Living. And,