The next morning we proceeded by order of Colonel James Grant, to burn down the Indians' cabins. Some of our men seemed to enjoy this cruel work, laughing very heartily at the curling flames, as they mounted loud crackling over the tops of the huts. But to me it appeared a shocking sight. Poor creatures! thought I, we surely need not grudge you such miserable habitations. But, when we came, according to orders, to cut down the fields of corn, I could scarcely refrain from tears. For who could see the stalks that stood so stately with broad green leaves and gaily tasseled shocks, filled with sweet milky fluid and flour, the staff of life; who, I say, without grief, could see these sacred plants sinking under our swords with all their precious load, to wither and rot untasted in their mourning fields.suggests to me that he was a sensitive and compassionate man, but still a man that did his duty. He is most famous for his leadership in the American Revolutionary War. Following the Waxhaw Massacre , his band of about fifty irregulars was the only force opposing the British in South Carolina. He earned his nickname, The Swamp Fox, by outfoxing Col. Banastre Tarleton and his British forces. His tactics are predecessors of modern guerrilla warfare. In short, he was able to accomplish a great deal with very little. In short, he used intelligence to succeed. I cannot make claims that I am following in his footsteps (I failed my military physical for acne scars on my chest and back), I can certainly take inspiration from his success.
There is also a cautionary note that I associate with Francis Marion. While we Americans, and even Mel Gibson, regard Marion as hero, he was clearly viewed as a terrorist by the British. The historian Christopher Hibbert described him as a racist and rapist for his treatment of the Cherokee. There is evidence that both views are correct. One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter.
Francis Marion was also alive during the Age of Enlightenment. His lifetime (1732-1795) overlaps the lives of the skeptic David Hume (1711-1776), the Reverend Thomas Bayes (1702-1761), and the French aristocrat Pierre-Simon, marquis de Laplace (1749-1827). As Nassim Nicholas Taleb notes in The Black Swan, Hume was an influential empiricist for the English-speaking world. For all of the reasons Taleb outlines, we need empiricism and some of the intellectual humility of a real skeptic, to counter the hubris of modern economists.
Taleb speaks a great deal about The Problem of Silent Evidence. In a nutshell, if we try to understand the unusual, we try to look for characteristics that we feel were a cause of the event. For example, we have all been taught that World War I was caused by 'entangling alliances' between the major powers and the 'powderkeg' in the Balkans. But, identifying characteristics that were true before WWI is not the same as identifying causes. To have a useful knowledge, we need to be able to predict, not create an after-the-fact narrative. There were many times in history where there were alliances and many places where angry young men plotted to be revolutionaries. Does the presence of these conditions have any predictive value? That is what we need to know if we want to plan.
It seems to me that some of Taleb's criticism of classical statistical analysis can be addressed by using Bayesian methods. This is the tie to the Reverend Bayes and Laplace, they founded what we now called Bayesian statistics. Over the last twenty years, Bayesian methods have been rapidly evolving. In particular, Bayes theorem provides a mathematical framework to discuss Taleb's Problem of Silent Evidence. Of course, a framework is not a 'solution' and this only addresses one of Taleb's issues. More to come ...
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