The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

Titanic: The quote is from Dave Ingram’s presentation at the Enterprise Risk Management Symposium in Chicago on May 2, 2005. For more on LTCM, see Lowenstein (2000), Dunbar (1999).

Hume’s exposition:hume (1748, 2000).

Sextus Empriricus: “It is easy, i think, to reject the method of induction (eiraytayx]). For since by way of it they want to make universals convincing on the basis of particulars, they will do this surveying all the particulars or some of them. But if some, the induction will be infirm, it being that some of the particulars omitted in the induction should be contrary to the universal; and if all, they will labor at an impossible task, since the particulars and infinite are indeterminate. Thus in either case it results, I think, that induction totters.” Outline of Pyrrhonism, Book II, p. 204.

Bayle: the Dictionnaire historique etcritique is long (twelve volumes, close to 6,000 pages) and heavy (40 pounds), yet it was an intellectual bestseller in its day, before being supplanted by the philosophes. It can be downloaded from the French Bibliothèque Nationale at www.bn.fr.

Hume’s inspiration from Bayle: see popkin (1951, 1955). any reading of Bishop Huet (further down) would reveal the similarities with Hume.

Pre-Bayle thinkers: Dissertationsur larecherchede la vérité, Simon Foucher, from around 1673. It is a delight to read. It makes the heuristics and biases tradition look like the continuation of the pre-Enlightenment prescientific revolution atmosphere.

Bishop Huet and the problem of induction: “things cannot be known with perfect certainty because their causes are infinite,” wrote Pierre-Daniel Huet in his Philosophical Treatise on the Weaknesses of the Human Mind. Huet, former bishop of Avranches, wrote this under the name Théocrite de Pluvignac, Seigneur de la Roche, Gentilhomme de Périgord. The chapter has another exact presentation of what became later known as “Hume’s problem.” That was in 1690, when the future David Home (later Hume) was minus twenty-two, so of no possible influence on Monseigneur Huet.

Brochard’s work: I first encountered the mention of Brochard’s work (1888) in Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo, in a comment where he also describes the skeptics as straight talkers. “An excellent study by Victor Brochard, Les sceptiques grecs, in which my Laertiana are also employed. The skeptics! the only honourable type among the two and five fold ambiguous philosopher crowd!” More trivia: Brochard taught Proust (see Kristeva, 1998).

Brochard seems to have understood Popper’s problem (a few decades before Popper’s birth). He presents the views of the negative empiricism of Menodotus of Nico-media in similar terms to what we would call today “Popperian” empiricism. I wonder if Popper knew anything about Menodotus. He does not seem to quote him anywhere. Brochard published his doctoral thesis, De l’erreur, in 1878 at the University of Paris, on the subject of error—wonderfully modern.

Epilogism: we know very little about Menodotus except for attacks on his beliefs by his detractor Galen in the extant Latin version of the Outline of Empiricism (Subfigura-tio empirica), hard to translate:

Memoriamet sensum etvocans epilogismum hoc tertium, multotiens autemet prкtermemoriam nihil aliud ponens quam epilogismum. (In addition to perception and recollection, the third method is epilogism sensum, as the practitioner has, besides memory, nothing other than epilogism senses; Perilli’s correction.

But there is hope. Perilli (2004) reports that, according to a letter by the translator Is-haq Bin Hunain, there may be a “transcription” of Menodotus’s work in Arabic somewhere for a scholar to find. Pascal:pascal too had an idea of the confirmation problem and the asymmetry of inference. In his preface to the Traité du vide, Pascal writes (and I translate):

In the judgment they made that nature did not tolerate a vacuum, they only meant nature in the state in which they knew it, since, so claim so in general, it would not be sufficient to witness it in a hundred different encounters, nor in a thousand, not in any other number no matter how large, since it would be a single case that would deny the general definition, and if one was contrary, a single one …