The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

Apply this reasoning to the following question: Why didn’t the bubonic plague kill more people? People will supply quantities of cosmetic explanations involving theories about the intensity of the plague and “scientific models” of epidemics. Now, try the weakened causality argument that I have just emphasized in this chapter: had the bubonic plague killed more people, the observers (us) would not be here to observe. So it may not necessarily be the property of diseases to spare us humans. Whenever your survival is in play, don’t immediately look for causes and effects. The main identifiable reason for our survival of such diseases might simply be inaccessible to us: we are here since, Casanova-style, the “rosy” scenario played out, and if it seems too hard to understand it is because we are too brainwashed by notions of causality and we think that it is smarter to say because than to accept randomness.

My biggest problem with the educational system lies precisely in that it forces students to squeeze explanations out of subject matters and shames them for withholding judgment, for uttering the “I don’t know.” Why did the Cold War end? Why did the Persians lose the battle of Salamis? Why did Hannibal get his behind kicked? Why did Casanova bounce back from hardship? In each of these examples, we are taking a condition, survival, and looking for the explanations, instead of flipping the argument on its head and stating that conditional on such survival, one cannot read that much into the process, and should learn instead to invoke some measure of randomness (randomness is what we don’t know; to invoke randomness is to plead ignorance). It is not just your college professor who gives you bad habits. I showed in Chapter 6 how newspapers need to stuff their texts with causal links to make you enjoy the narratives. But have the integrity to deliver your “because” very sparingly; try to limit it to situations where the “because” is derived from experiments, not backward-looking history.

Note here that I am not saying causes do not exist; do not use this argument to avoid trying to learn from history. All I am saying is that it is not so simple; be suspicious of the “because” and handle it with care—particularly in situations where you suspect silent evidence.

We have seen several varieties of the silent evidence that cause deformations in our perception of empirical reality, making it appear more explainable (and more stable) than it actually is. In addition to the confirmation error and the narrative fallacy, the manifestations of silent evidence further distort the role and importance of Black Swans. In fact, they cause a gross overestimation at times (say, with literary success), and underestimation at others (the stability of history; the stability of our human species).

I said earlier that our perceptual system may not react to what does not lie in front of our eyes, or what does not arouse our emotional attention. We are made to be superficial, to heed what we see and not heed what does not vividly come to mind. We wage a double war against silent evidence. The unconscious part of our inferential mechanism (and there is one) will ignore the cemetery, even if we are intellectually aware of the need to take it into account. Out of sight, out of mind: we harbor a natural, even physical, scorn of the abstract.

This will be further illustrated in the next chapter.

Chapter Nine: THE LUDIC FALLACY, OR THE UNCERTAINTY OF THE NERD

Lunch at Lake Como (west)—The military as philosophers—Plato’s randomness

FAT TONY

“Fat Tony” is one of Nero’s friends who irritates Yevgenia Krasnova beyond measure. We should perhaps more thoughtfully style him “Horizontally-challenged Tony,” since he is not as objectively overweight as his nickname indicates; it is just that his body shape makes whatever he wears seem ill-fitted. He wears only tailored suits, many of them cut for him in Rome, but they look as if he bought them from a Web catalog. He has thick hands, hairy fingers, wears a gold wrist chain, and reeks of licorice candies that he devours in industrial quantities as a substitute for an old smoking habit. He doesn’t usually mind people calling him Fat Tony, but he much prefers to be called just Tony. Nero calls him, more politely, “Brooklyn Tony,” because of his accent and his Brooklyn way of thinking, though Tony is one of the prosperous Brooklyn people who moved to New Jersey twenty years ago.