The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

I was constantly told by adults that the war, which ended up lasting close to seventeen years, was going to end in “only a matter of days.” They seemed quite confident in their forecasts of duration, as can be evidenced by the number of people who sat waiting in hotel rooms and other temporary quarters in Cyprus, Greece, France, and elsewhere for the war to finish. One uncle kept telling me how, some thirty years earlier, when the rich Palestinians fled to Lebanon, they considered it a very temporary solution (most of those still alive are still there, six decades later). Yet when I asked him if it was going to be the same with our conflict, he replied, “No, of course not. This place is different; it has always been different.” Somehow what he detected in others did not seem to apply to him.

This duration blindness in the middle-aged exile is quite a widespread disease. Later, when I decided to avoid the exile’s obsession with his roots (exiles’ roots penetrate their personalities a bit too deeply), I studied exile literature precisely to avoid the traps of a consuming and obsessive nostalgia. These exiles seemed to have become prisoners of their memory of idyllic origin—they sat together with other prisoners of the past and spoke about the old country, and ate their traditional food while some of their folk music played in the background. They continuously ran counterfactuals in their minds, generating alternative scenarios that could have happened and prevented these historical ruptures, such as “if the Shah had not named this incompetent man as prime minister, we would still be there.” It was as if the historical rupture had a specific cause, and that the catastrophe could have been averted by removing that specific cause. So I pumped every displaced person I could find for information on their behavior during exile. Almost all act in the same way.

One hears endless stories of Cuban refugees with suitcases still half packed who came to Miami in the 1960s for “a matter of a few days” after the installation of the Castro regime. And of Iranian refugees in Paris and London who fled the Islamic Republic in 1978 thinking that their absence would be a brief vacation. A few are still waiting, more than a quarter century later, for the return. Many Russians who left in 1917, such as the writer Vladimir Nabokov, settled in Berlin, perhaps to be close enough for a quick return. Nabokov himself lived all his life in temporary housing, in both indigence and luxury, ending his days at the Montreux Palace hotel on Lake Geneva.

There was, of course, some wishful thinking in all of these forecasting errors, the blindness of hope, but there was a knowledge problem as well. The dynamics of the Lebanese conflict had been patently unpredictable, yet people’s reasoning as they examined the events showed a constant: almost all those who cared seemed convinced that they understood what was going on. Every single day brought occurrences that lay completely outside their forecast, but they could not figure out that they had not forecast them. Much of what took place would have been deemed completely crazy with respect to the past. Yet it did not seem that crazy after the events. This retrospective plausibility causes a discounting of the rarity and conceivability of the event. I later saw the exact same illusion of understanding in business success and the financial markets.

History Does Not Crawl, It Jumps

Later, upon replaying the wartime events in my memory as I formulated my ideas on the perception of random events, I developed the governing impression that our minds are wonderful explanation machines, capable of making sense out of almost anything, capable of mounting explanations for all manner of phenomena, and generally incapable of accepting the idea of unpredictability. These events were unexplainable, but intelligent people thought they were capable of providing convincing explanations for them—after the fact. Furthermore, the more intelligent the person, the better sounding the explanation. What’s more worrisome is that all these beliefs and accounts appeared to be logically coherent and devoid of inconsistencies.