Worship the anomaly

From Eluminatus

In an early 2006 lecture on "The Future of Computer Science Theory", John Hopcroft (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_E._Hopcroft) pointed out that an emerging trend for dealing with high-dimensional problems is to project onto a lower number of dimensions and then clean up outliers and other errors.

How does this look from the standpoint (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standpoint_theory) of the outlier -- or, more generally, the anomaly?

It looks like you don't exist -- you're an "outlier" or "error".

Two years later, I was doing some political activism on Facebook, and repeatedly triggering their spam filters (http://www.talesfromthe.net/jon/?p=82). Discussion with their customer support folks confirmed that I was sending "too many links", and they reminded me that "these limits are not set to affect the normal user".

Definitions for anomaly (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anomaly) include

• something that deviates from the norm or from expectations
• something strange and difficult to identify or classify
• a deviation from the common rule
• an irregularity that is difficult to explain using existing rules or theory

Theories, societies, and people have a hard time dealing with anomalies, and so the natural tendency is to make them fit existing norms [or expectations -- or alternatively to try to make them disappear. In many cases it's the anomalies that are the most interesting: the data points that show the limitations of a current theory, the interdisciplinary works that combine different viewpoints, the people with radically different outlooks on the world.

Anomalies are frequently to be intersection points in the network-of-networks. And anomalies tend to attract or discover other anomalies; so they're frequently hubs and linked to other hubs. Scott Page (http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~spage/)'s book The Difference (http://press.princeton.edu/titles/8353.html) explores how groups with diverse cognitive "toolboxes" (techniques, perspectives and experiences) outperform individuals -- even experts. (A thread on Liminal States (http://www.talesfromthe.net/jon/?p=111) gives some examples.) Anomalies provide additional toolboxes to any group, and so as long as the group accepts them and everybody works to overcome communication gaps, contribute disproportionately to better results... and transformational change.

Don't fear the anomaly; worship it.

See also: Eris and the anomaly, The anomaly and the goddesses, What an anomaly