The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

Also, the technical baggage that comes with being a quant (a mixture of applied mathematics, engineering, and statistics), in addition to the immersion in practice, turned out to be very useful for someone wanting to be a philosopher.[10] First, when you spend a couple of decades doing mass-scale empirical work with data and taking risks based on such studies, you can easily spot elements in the texture of the world that the Platonified “thinker” is too brainwashed, or threatened, to see. Second, it allowed me to become formal and systematic in my thinking instead of wallowing in the anecdotal. Finally, both the philosophy of history and epistemology (the philosophy of knowledge) seemed inseparable from the empirical study of times series data, which is a succession of numbers in time, a sort of historical document containing numbers instead of words. And numbers are easy to process on computers. Studying historical data makes you conscious that history runs forward, not backward, and that it is messier than narrated accounts. Epistemology, the philosophy of history, and statistics aim at understanding truths, investigating the mechanisms that generate them, and separating regularity from the coincidental in historical matters. They all address the question of what one knows, except that they are all to be found in different buildings, so to speak.

The Four-Letter Word of Independence

That night, on October 19, 1987, I slept for twelve hours straight.

It was hard to tell my friends, all hurt in some manner by the crash, about this feeling of vindication. Bonuses at the time were a fraction of what they are today, but if my employer, First Boston, and the financial system survived until year-end, I would get the equivalent of a fellowship. This is sometimes called “f*** you money,” which, in spite of its coarseness, means that it allows you to act like a Victorian gentleman, free from slavery. It is a psychological buffer: the capital is not so large as to make you spoiled-rich, but large enough to give you the freedom to choose a new occupation without excessive consideration of the financial rewards. It shields you from prostituting your mind and frees you from outside authority—any outside authority. (Independence is person-specific: I have always been taken aback at the high number of people in whom an astonishingly high income led to additional sycophancy as they became more dependent on their clients and employers and more addicted to making even more money.) While not substantial by some standards, it literally cured me of all financial ambition—it made me feel ashamed whenever I diverted time away from study for the pursuit of material wealth. Note that the designation f*** you corresponds to the exhilarating ability to pronounce that compact phrase before hanging up the phone.

These were the days when it was extremely common for traders to break phones when they lost money. Some resorted to destroying chairs, tables, or whatever would make noise. Once, in the Chicago pits, another trader tried to strangle me and it took four security guards to drag him away. He was irate because I was standing in what he deemed his “territory.” Who would want to leave such an environment? Compare it to lunches in a drab university cafeteria with gentle-mannered professors discussing the latest departmental intrigue. So I stayed in the quant and trading businesses (I’m still there), but organized myself to do minimal but intense (and entertaining) work, focus only on the most technical aspects, never attend business “meetings,” avoid the company of “achievers” and people in suits who don’t read books, and take a sabbatical year for every three on average to fill up gaps in my scientific and philosophical culture. To slowly distill my single idea, I wanted to become a flâneur, a professional meditator, sit in cafés, lounge, unglued to desks and organization structures, sleep as long as I needed, read voraciously, and not owe any explanation to anybody. I wanted to be left alone in order to build, small steps at a time, an entire system of thought based on my Black Swan idea.

Limousine Philosopher

The war in Lebanon and the crash of 1987 seemed identical phenomena. It became obvious to me that nearly everyone had a mental blindspot in acknowledging the role of such events: it was as if they were not able to see these mammoths, or that they rapidly forgot about them. The answer was looking straight at me: it was a psychological, perhaps even biological, blindness; the problem lay not in the nature of events, but in the way we perceived them.