The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

Even in testing a hypothesis, we tend to look for instances where the hypothesis proved true. Of course we can easily find confirmation; all we have to do is look, or have a researcher do it for us. I can find confirmation for just about anything, the way a skilled London cabbie can find traffic to increase the fare, even on a holiday.

Some people go further and give me examples of events that we have been able to foresee with some success—indeed there are a few, like landing a man on the moon and the economic growth of the twenty-first century. One can find plenty of “counterevidence” to the points in this book, the best being that newspapers are excellent at predicting movie and theater schedules. Look, I predicted yesterday that the sun would rise today, and it did!

NEGATIVE EMPIRICISM

The good news is that there is a way around this naïve empiricism. I am saying that a series of corroborative facts is not necessarily evidence. Seeing white swans does not confirm the nonexistence of black swans. There is an exception, however: I know what statement is wrong, but not necessarily what statement is correct. If I see a black swan I can certify that all swans are not white! If I see someone kill, then I can be practically certain that he is a criminal. If I don’t see him kill, I cannot be certain that he is innocent. The same applies to cancer detection: the finding of a single malignant tumor proves that you have cancer, but the absence of such a finding cannot allow you to say with certainty that you are cancer-free.

We can get closer to the truth by negative instances, not by verification! It is misleading to build a general rule from observed facts. Contrary to conventional wisdom, our body of knowledge does not increase from a series of confirmatory observations, like the turkey’s. But there are some things I can remain skeptical about, and others I can safely consider certain. This makes the consequences of observations one-sided. It is not much more difficult than that.

This asymmetry is immensely practical. It tells us that we do not have to be complete skeptics, just semiskeptics. The subtlety of real life over the books is that, in your decision making, you need be interested only in one side of the story: if you seek certainty about whether the patient has cancer, not certainty about whether he is healthy, then you might be satisfied with negative inference, since it will supply you the certainty you seek. So we can learn a lot from data—but not as much as we expect. Sometimes a lot of data can be meaningless; at other times one single piece of information can be very meaningful. It is true that a thousand days cannot prove you right, but one day can prove you to be wrong.

The person who promoted this idea of one-sided semiskepticism is Sir Doktor Professor Karl Raimund Popper, who may be the only philosopher of science who is actually read and discussed by actors in the real world (though not as enthusiastically by professional philosophers). As I am writing these lines, a black-and-white picture of him is hanging on the wall of my study. It was a gift I got in Munich from the essayist Jochen Wegner, who, like me, considers Popper to be about all “we’ve got” among modern thinkers—well, almost. He writes to us, not to other philosophers. “We” are the empirical decision makers who hold that uncertainty is our discipline, and that understanding how to act under conditions of incomplete information is the highest and most urgent human pursuit.

Popper generated a large-scale theory around this asymmetry, based on a technique called “falsification” (to falsify is to prove wrong) meant to distinguish between science and nonscience, and people immediately started splitting hairs about its technicalities, even though it is not the most interesting, or the most original, of Popper’s ideas. This idea about the asymmetry of knowledge is so liked by practitioners, because it is obvious to them; it is the way they run their business. The philosopher maudit Charles Sanders Peirce, who, like an artist, got only posthumous respect, also came up with a version of this Black Swan solution when Popper was wearing diapers—some people even called it the Peirce-Popper approach. Popper’s far more powerful and original idea is the “open” society, one that relies on skepticism as a modus operandi, refusing and resisting definitive truths. He accused Plato of closing our minds, according to the arguments I described in the Prologue. But Popper’s biggest idea was his insight concerning the fundamental, severe, and incurable unpredictability of the world, and that I will leave for the chapter on prediction.[19]