The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

Many people labor in life under the impression that they are doing something right, yet they may not show solid results for a long time. They need a capacity for continuously adjourned gratification to survive a steady diet of peer cruelty without becoming demoralized. They look like idiots to their cousins, they look like idiots to their peers, they need courage to continue. No confirmation comes to them, no validation, no fawning students, no Nobel, no Shnobel. “How was your year?” brings them a small but containable spasm of pain deep inside, since almost all of their years will seem wasted to someone looking at their life from the outside. Then bang, the lumpy event comes that brings the grand vindication. Or it may never come.

Believe me, it is tough to deal with the social consequences of the appearance of continuous failure. We are social animals; hell is other people.

Where the Relevant Is the Sensational

Our intuitions are not cut out for nonlinearities. Consider our life in a primitive environment where process and result are closely connected. You are thirsty; drinking brings you adequate satisfaction. Or even in a not-so-primitive environment, when you engage in building, say, a bridge or a stone house, more work will lead to more apparent results, so your mood is propped up by visible continuous feedback.

In a primitive environment, the relevant is the sensational. This applies to our knowledge. When we try to collect information about the world around us, we tend to be guided by our biology, and our attention flows effortlessly toward the sensational—not the relevant so much as the sensational. Somehow the guidance system has gone wrong in the process of our coevolution with our habitat—it was transplanted into a world in which the relevant is often boring, nonsensational.

Furthermore, we think that if, say, two variables are causally linked, then a steady input in one variable should always yield a result in the other one. Our emotional apparatus is designed for linear causality. For instance, if you study every day, you expect to learn something in proportion to your studies. If you feel that you are not going anywhere, your emotions will cause you to become demoralized. But modern reality rarely gives us the privilege of a satisfying, linear, positive progression: you may think about a problem for a year and learn nothing; then, unless you are disheartened by the emptiness of the results and give up, something will come to you in a flash.

Researchers spent some time dealing with this notion of gratification; neurology has been enlightening us about the tension between the notions of immediate rewards and delayed ones. Would you like a massage today, or two next week? Well, the news is that the logical part of our mind, that “higher” one, which distinguishes us from animals, can override our animal instinct, which asks for immediate rewards. So we are a little better than animals, after all—but perhaps not by much. And not all of the time.

Nonlinearities

The situation can get a little more tragic—the world is more nonlinear than we think, and than scientists would like to think.

With linearities, relationships between variables are clear, crisp, and constant, therefore Platonically easy to grasp in a single sentence, such as “A 10 percent increase in money in the bank corresponds to a 10 percent increase in interest income and a 5 percent increase in obsequiousness on the part of the personal banker.” If you have more money in the bank, you get more interest. Nonlinear relationships can vary; perhaps the best way to describe them is to say that they cannot be expressed verbally in a way that does justice to them. Take the relationship between pleasure and drinking water. If you are in a state of painful thirst, then a bottle of water increases your well-being significantly. More water means more pleasure. But what if I gave you a cistern of water? Clearly your well-being becomes rapidly insensitive to further quantities. As a matter of fact, if I gave you the choice between a bottle or a cistern you would prefer the bottle—so your enjoyment declines with additional quantities.

These nonlinear relationships are ubiquitous in life. Linear relationships are truly the exception; we only focus on them in classrooms and textbooks because they are easier to understand. Yesterday afternoon I tried to take a fresh look around me to catalog what I could see during my day that was linear. I could not find anything, no more than someone hunting for squares or triangles could find them in the rain forest—or, as we will see in Part Three, any more than someone looking for bell-shape randomness finding it in socioeconomic phenomena.

You play tennis every day with no improvement, then suddenly you start beating the pro.