The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

Once again, I am not dismissing the idea of risk taking, having been involved in it myself. I am only critical of the encouragement of uninformed risk taking. The überpsychologist Danny Kahneman has given us evidence that we generally take risks not out of bravado but out of ignorance and blindness to probability! The next few chapters will show in more depth how we tend to dismiss outliers and adverse outcomes when projecting the future. But I insist on the following: that we got here by accident does not mean that we should continue to take the same risks. We are mature enough a race to realize this point, enjoy our blessings, and try to preserve, by becoming more conservative, what we got by luck. We have been playing Russian roulette; now let’s stop and get a real job.

I have two further points to make on this subject. First, justification of overoptimism on grounds that “it brought us here” arises from a far more serious mistake about human nature: the belief that we are built to understand nature and our own nature and that our decisions are, and have been, the result of our own choices. I beg to disagree. So many instincts drive us.

Second, a little more worrisome than the first point: evolutionary fitness is something that is continuously touted and aggrandized by the crowd who takes it as gospel. The more unfamiliar someone is with the wild Black Swan-generating randomness, the more he or she believes in the optimal working of evolution. Silent evidence is not present in their theories. Evolution is a series of flukes, some good, many bad. You only see the good. But, in the short term, it is not obvious which traits are really good for you, particularly if you are in the Black Swan-generating environment of Extremistan. This is like looking at rich gamblers coming out of the casino and claiming that a taste for gambling is good for the species because gambling makes you rich! Risk taking made many species head for extinction!

This idea that we are here, that this is the best of all possible worlds, and that evolution did a great job seems rather bogus in the light of the silent-evidence effect. The fools, the Casanovas, and the blind risk takers are often the ones who win in the short term. Worse, in a Black Swan environment, where one single but rare event can come shake up a species after a very long run of “fitness,” the foolish risk takers can also win in the long term! I will revisit this idea in Part Three, where I show how Extremistan worsens the silent-evidence effect.

But there is another manifestation that merits a mention.

I AM A BLACK SWAN: THE ANTHROPIC BIAS

I want to stay closer to earth and avoid bringing higher-up metaphysical or cosmological arguments into this discussion—there are so many significant dangers to worry about down here on planet earth and it would be a good idea to postpone the metaphysical philosophizing for later. But it would be useful to take a peek (not more) at what is called the anthropic cosmological argument, as it points out the gravity of our misunderstanding of historical stability.

A recent wave of philosophers and physicists (and people combining the two categories) has been examining the self-sampling assumption, which is a generalization of the principle of the Casanova bias to our own existence.

Consider our own fates. Some people reason that the odds of any of us being in existence are so low that our being here cannot be attributed to an accident of fate. Think of the odds of the parameters being exactly where they need to be to induce our existence (any deviation from the optimal calibration would have made our world explode, collapse, or simply not come into existence). It is often said that the world seems to have been built to the specifications that would make our existence possible. According to such an argument, it could not come from luck.

However, our presence in the sample completely vitiates the computation of the odds. Again, the story of Casanova can make the point quite simple—much simpler than in its usual formulation. Think again of all the possible worlds as little Casanovas following their own fates. The one who is still kicking (by accident) will feel that, given that he cannot be so lucky, there had to be some transcendental force guiding him and supervising his destiny: “Hey, otherwise the odds would be too low to get here just by luck.” For someone who observes all adventurers, the odds of finding a Casanova are not low at all: there so many adventurers, and someone is bound to win the lottery ticket.