Нассим Талеб - The Black Swan. The Impact of the Highly Improbable

Some people naïvely believe that the process of unfairness started with the gramophone, according to the logic that I just presented. I disagree. I am convinced that the process started much, much earlier, with our DNA, which stores information about our selves and allows us to repeat our performance without our being there by spreading our genes down the generations. Evolution is scalable: the DNA that wins (whether by luck or survival advantage) will reproduce itself, like a bestselling book or a successful record, and become pervasive. Other DNA will vanish. Just consider the difference between us humans (excluding financial economists and businessmen) and other living beings on our planet.

Furthermore, I believe that the big transition in social life came not with the gramophone, but when someone had the great but unjust idea to invent the alphabet, thus allowing us to store information and reproduce it. It accelerated further when another inventor had the even more dangerous and iniquitous notion of starting a printing press, thus promoting texts across boundaries and triggering what ultimately grew into a winner-take-all ecology. Now, what was so unjust about the spread of books? The alphabet allowed stories and ideas to be replicated with high fidelity and without limit, without any additional expenditure of energy on the author’s part for the subsequent performances. He didn’t even have to be alive for them—death is often a good career move for an author. This implies that those who, for some reason, start getting some attention can quickly reach more minds than others and displace the competitors from the bookshelves. In the days of bards and troubadours, everyone had an audience. A storyteller, like a baker or a coppersmith, had a market, and the assurance that none from far away could dislodge him from his territory. Today, a few take almost everything; the rest, next to nothing.

By the same mechanism, the advent of the cinema displaced neighborhood actors, putting the small guys out of business. But there is a difference. In pursuits that have a technical component, like being a pianist or a brain surgeon, talent is easy to ascertain, with subjective opinion playing a relatively small part. The inequity comes when someone perceived as being marginally better gets the whole pie.

In the arts—say the cinema—things are far more vicious. What we call “talent” generally comes from success, rather than its opposite. A great deal of empiricism has been done on the subject, most notably by Art De Vany, an insightful and original thinker who singlemindedly studied wild uncertainty in the movies. He showed that, sadly, much of what we ascribe to skills is an after-the-fact attribution. The movie makes the actor, he claims—and a large dose of nonlinear luck makes the movie.

The success of movies depends severely on contagions. Such contagions do not just apply to the movies: they seem to affect a wide range of cultural products. It is hard for us to accept that people do not fall in love with works of art only for their own sake, but also in order to feel that they belong to a community. By imitating, we get closer to others—that is, other imitators. It fights solitude.

This discussion shows the difficulty in predicting outcomes in an environment of concentrated success. So for now let us note that the division between professions can be used to understand the division between types of random variables. Let us go further into the issue of knowledge, of inference about the unknown and the properties of the known.

SCALABILITY AND GLOBALIZATION

Whenever you hear a snotty (and frustrated) European middlebrow presenting his stereotypes about Americans, he will often describe them as “uncultured,” “unintellectual,” and “poor in math” because, unlike his peers, Americans are not into equation drills and the constructions middlebrows call “high culture”—like knowledge of Goethe’s inspirational (and central) trip to Italy, or familiarity with the Delft school of painting. Yet the person making these statements is likely to be addicted to his iPod, wear blue jeans, and use Microsoft Word to jot down his “cultural” statements on his PC, with some Google searches here and there interrupting his composition. Well, it so happens that America is currently far, far more creative than these nations of museumgoers and equation solvers. It is also far more tolerant of bottom-up tinkering and undirected trial and error. And globalization has allowed the United States to specialize in the creative aspect of things, the production of concepts and ideas, that is, the scalable part of the products, and, increasingly, by exporting jobs, separate the less scalable components and assign them to those happy to be paid by the hour. There is more money in designing a shoe than in actually making it: Nike, Dell, and Boeing can get paid for just thinking, organizing, and leveraging their know-how and ideas while subcontracted factories in developing countries do the grunt work and engineers in cultured and mathematical states do the noncreative technical grind. The American economy has leveraged itself heavily on the idea generation, which explains why losing manufacturing jobs can be coupled with a rising standard of living. Clearly the drawback of a world economy where the payoff goes to ideas is higher inequality among the idea generators together with a greater role for both opportunity and luck—but I will leave the socioeconomic discussion for Part Three and focus here on knowledge.

TRAVELS INSIDE MEDIOCRISTAN

This scalable/nonscalable distinction allows us to make a clear-cut differentiation between two varieties of uncertainties, two types of randomness.

Let’s play the following thought experiment. Assume that you round up a thousand people randomly selected from the general population and have them stand next to one another in a stadium. You can even include Frenchmen (but please, not too many out of consideration for the others in the group), Mafia members, non-Mafia members, and vegetarians.

Imagine the heaviest person you can think of and add him to that sample. Assuming he weighs three times the average, between four hundred and five hundred pounds, he will rarely represent more than a very small fraction of the weight of the entire population (in this case, about a half of a percent).

You can get even more aggressive. If you picked the heaviest biologically possible human on the planet (who yet can still be called a human), he would not represent more than, say, 0.6 percent of the total, a very negligible increase. And if you had ten thousand persons, his contribution would be vanishingly small.

In the utopian province of Mediocristan, particular events don’t contribute much individually—only collectively. I can state the supreme law of Mediocristan as follows: When your sample is large, no single instance will significantly change the aggregate or the total . The largest observation will remain impressive, but eventually insignificant, to the sum.

I’ll borrow another example from my friend Bruce Goldberg: your caloric consumption. Look at how much you consume per year—if you are classified as human, close to eight hundred thousand calories. No single day, not even Thanksgiving at your great-aunt’s, will represent a large share of that. Even if you tried to kill yourself by eating, that day’s calories would not seriously affect your yearly consumption.

Now, if I told you that it is possible to run into someone who weighs several thousand tons, or stands several hundred miles tall, you would be perfectly justified in having my frontal lobe examined, or in suggesting that I switch to science-fiction writing. But you cannot so easily rule out extreme variations with a different brand of quantities, to which we turn next.