The reason I have had a hard time with Peters theory is it requires that there exists a black man who is comfortable with the oak beach, gilgo area, who in my opinion would have to be a resident of the island to be that comfortable. Well that island is super white, I mean mozzarella, wonder bread, whole milk, white rice... you get the point. So my thinking has always been that his profile is just about the last person that would be wandering in the brush in that area.
You're wrong, my profile doesn't require any Oak Beach resident at all. Since more than a year, I say over and over, if this SK would live in Oak Beach, he would be the first one not to keep the bodies on his property but also don't drive them far away. Which would be pretty impressive, since my files go back till about 2500 years b.C.
What however is a confort factor, I have seen in a lot of cases is water, nature, the sea itself. Environments with permanent low heterogeneous noise has some calming comfy effect on a lot of extreme psychopaths, it appears.
But then, this is all irrelevant since you belive still in the one killer theory, right?
So the other day I was creeping around Ocean Parkway, like I often do, and down at the service entrance to the JFK Wildlife Sanctuary (I have posted pics of this service rd) which is the location of some of the earliest remains, I see a park services employee driving the large tractor mower they use to mow the side of the parkway. He's pulling the tractor mower into the service road towards the utility/service buildings in there, and guess what? He was a certified black man! I was like NOOOOOO WAAAAAY!, You have to be kidding me! Then I laughed to myself. I in no way suspect this man but it was a reminder to me of just how faulty profiling can be, because for so long I stereotypically assumed that a black man simply wouldn't be in that area, and I WAS WRONG.
Well, it proves how wrong your profiling was, it doesn't say any about mine. So, feel free to declare your profile as wrong. But then, the place you looked at was a dump site for Manorville, not LISK. So, that would be anyway an entirely different discussion, because I think Manorville is a Caucasian, maybe even two of them?
The point of this post is that we should never be too sure of what we think we know. Even if every single serial killer in history always displayed traits x, y, and z, doesn't necessarily mean that this serial killer will display any those traits. He may very well be a black swan, and I am in no way referring to the color of one's skin or feathers, I am referring to the unpredictable nature of the world.
You forget one point. SKs kill people because they want, or more extreme, need something. This limits in a mathematical sense the range of unpredictability but makes it even more important to look for the details, because those details tell us, what a certain SK wants or needs. And this knowledge tells us, how he behaves and often, where he will be at a certain time. So, I can't tell you what his address is. But I'm pretty sure, he will add in the next seven weeks a body to his collection, whether we hear about it or not (probably LE will book her as just another hooker and there will be no media interest at all). And I dare to predict, till all is said and done, we will have another trophy garden in those islands.
I highly recommend the book "The Black Swan" to Peter and anyone else who is interested. At the risk of sounding contradictory I am a believer that amassing knowledge and furthering your education doesn't actually increase one's own intelligence (I'm defining intelligence simply to mean the rate at which one learns). But there exists heuristics that can improve one's intelligence, and this book helps to do that.
I admit, I have a little problem with Taleb. Too much amassed knowledge maybe. But he takes 9/11 as a Black Swan example because, so he says, nobody could have predicted, someone would hijack planes and fly them in a high rise.
Unfortunately, Taleb is wrong. This plot was already used in novels in the late 70s (I'm not sure, I think, Quinnel was the first one). I used a more moderate version of that plot in 2000 in "Fadenkreuz" in Germany and I still remember the editor telling me, that's a little worn out. He had seen this special method to hit a target at least every years once since the 1980s. Which is prove, a lot of people thought about the technical possibility and thus, it was no Black Swan because the element of surprise was replaced by the element of laziness to read, understand and act on that understanding.
I could bring up more examples, but this one is good enough to explain, why I have a problem with Talebs theories. Personally, I think surprise is something that most often happens to people who overlooked details. Which to some degree happens to all of us occasionally. But then, the key is not in raising the awareness for the possible surprise, but in raising the awareness for details.
I agree, as far as this intelligence theory goes. My IQ was in the same range in my childhood than it is today. Only I amassed knowledge over all those years and that gives my intelligence more possibilities to connect facts which were in my childhood unknown to me. So lets just say, I got the firepower and over the years the tools to use it.
Well, I said my two cents to the Black Swan theory per se. And that I'm not convinced doesn't mean everybody has to.
Peter
