Now consider the opposite: a book filled with the repetition of the following sentence: “The chairman of [insert here your company name] is a lucky fellow who happened to be in the right place at the right time and claims credit for the company’s success, without making a single allowance for luck,” running ten times per page for 500 pages. The entire book can be accurately compressed, as I have just done, into 34 words (out of 100,000); you could reproduce it with total fidelity out of such a kernel. By finding the pattern, the logic of the series, you no longer need to memorize it all. You just store the pattern. And, as we can see here, a pattern is obviously more compact than raw information. You looked into the book and found a rule. It is along these lines that the great probabilist Andrey Nikolayevich Kolmogorov defined the degree of randomness; it is called “Kolmogorov complexity.” We, members of the human variety of primates, have a hunger for rules because we need to reduce the dimension of matters so they can get into our heads. Or, rather, sadly, so we can squeeze them into our heads. The more random information is, the greater the dimensionality, and thus the more difficult to summarize. The more you summarize, the more order you put in, the less randomness. Hence the same condition that makes us simplify pushes us to think that the world is less random than it actually is. And the Black Swan is what we leave out of simplification.
Taleb, Nassim. The Black Swan (pp. 68-69). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.
Hmm that is not nice for thinkers like me.
What about writing. In writing you're summarizing information and putting it into your own words. How to avoid simplifying/reducing it too much?
Is reduction bad for knowledge workers or not?
It might be bad for scientists, but it might be good for decision-makers and entrepreneurs. The latter can always "outsource" the management of details to the former, right?
Think about this problem.
Information that has a pattern or logic or in other words is organized and summarized is less costly for our brain. However, this process reduced the dimensionality and randomness of the information. This simplification pushes us to think that the world is less random than we think, which is where the black swan lives.