Fractaled Love

Tonight during prayer, I think I had a bit of an epiphany.

But as a little background, I've read Nassim Nicholas Taleb's "Fooled by Randomness" and "Black Swan" which illuminated quite a bit for me. Too much to go into here, but part of his perspective is to suggest that the bell curve doesn't really exist. Rather, reality seems to follow more of a fractal-like appearance. For example, there is "rich and poor"...but wealth is relative. "Rich" is only rich if it's compared to "poor". Neither can be defined w/o a comparator. Once you're within the category of "rich", then people w/in the "rich" category differentiate themselves...and thus you have the "poor-rich" and the "rich-rich". Similarly, compare any poor American to true (global) poverty... and you have the "rich-poor" vs. "poor-poor". So in essence, the bell-curve is a narrative fallacy designed to allow us to wrap our minds around the distribution of reality. Unfortunately, it's flawed...because modern statistics (including the Bell Curve) *intentionally* ignores the outliers. And it is these outliers that have a very significant impact (skew) on reality. (But our software programs and formula work just fine as long as we through out part of the data-set, and transform our existing data-set to ensure that it meets the assumption of normal distributions! *smacks forehead*)

Again--the analogy of wealth is a good example. There's no way in heck that's a normal distribution. The vast majority of us have a net worth that's (relatively) a hill of beans compared to the hyper-wealthy. I'm not saying this as class welfare at all...but it's the truth. Look at the income tax statistics... The top 1% of Americans pay over 39% of all federal income taxes...

And what's the difference between two athletes...one a fraction better than the other? A professional contract resulting in millions. Or two authors, one fractionally better than the other? An oprah book deal...

So this gave me a whole new appreciation and application for fractals. Before, they were just pretty pictures. Now, it gave me a whole new way in which to perceive reality. Reality has a tendency to repeat itself, albeit on different levels...

So how does this apply to prayer life? Well--this fractal thinking helped me appreciate or visualize a little bit easier how God can get the job done. From creating life and matter out of nothing, to knowing the number of hair on my head or providing me w/ a random (consulting) check in the mail when facing a rash of unexpected bills (thus avoiding the dreaded withdrawal from savings--an act of shame in the Snyder home)...

The fractalization concept seems to work. Or--it seemed to give me a bit of peace with the narrative fallacy of understanding the nature of God at least one infinitesimal point more. Before, I didn't get how God could care about the personal issues of one whiny individual out of some 8 billion at one slice of time. (Which, by the way, I bet God works beyond time...so it's likely all people throughout time...) This is coming out wrong at this point... My only point is to suggest that fractalization of thought allows one to slice through any number of levels of macro and easily enter into the micro. And I just thought that was pretty neat...