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

Once again, I warn the reader that I am not focusing on dopamine as the reason for our overinterpreting; rather, my point is that there is a physical and neural correlate to such operation and that our minds are largely victims of our physical embodiment. Our minds are like inmates, captive to our biology, unless we manage a cunning escape. It is the lack of our control of such inferences that I am stressing. Tomorrow, someone may discover another chemical or organic basis for our perception of patterns, or counter what I said about the left-brain interpreter by showing the role of a more complex structure; but it would not negate the idea that perception of causation has a biological foundation.

Andrey Nikolayevich’s Rule

There is another, even deeper reason for our inclination to narrate, and it is not psychological. It has to do with the effect of order on information storage and retrieval in any system, and it’s worth explaining here because of what I consider the central problems of probability and information theory.

The first problem is that information is costly to obtain .

The second problem is that information is also costly to store —like real estate in New York. The more orderly, less random, patterned, and narratized a series of words or symbols, the easier it is to store that series in one’s mind or jot it down in a book so your grandchildren can read it someday.

Finally, information is costly to manipulate and retrieve.

With so many brain cells—one hundred billion (and counting)—the attic is quite large, so the difficulties probably do not arise from storage-capacity limitations, but may be just indexing problems. Your conscious, or working, memory, the one you are using to read these lines and make sense of their meaning, is considerably smaller than the attic. Consider that your working memory has difficulty holding a mere phone number longer than seven digits. Change metaphors slightly and imagine that your consciousness is a desk in the Library of Congress: no matter how many books the library holds, and makes available for retrieval, the size of your desk sets some processing limitations. Compression is vital to the performance of conscious work.

Consider a collection of words glued together to constitute a 500-page book. If the words are purely random, picked up from the dictionary in a totally unpredictable way, you will not be able to summarize, transfer, or reduce the dimensions of that book without losing something significant from it. You need 100,000 words to carry the exact message of a random 100,000 words with you on your next trip to Siberia. Now consider the opposite: a book filled with the repetition of the following sentence: “The chairman of [insert here your company name] is a lucky fellow who happened to be in the right place at the right time and claims credit for the company’s success, without making a single allowance for luck,” running ten times per page for 500 pages. The entire book can be accurately compressed, as I have just done, into 34 words (out of 100,000); you could reproduce it with total fidelity out of such a kernel. By finding the pattern, the logic of the series, you no longer need to memorize it all. You just store the pattern. And, as we can see here, a pattern is obviously more compact than raw information. You looked into the book and found a rule . It is along these lines that the great probabilist Andrey Nikolayevich Kolmogorov defined the degree of randomness; it is called “Kolmogorov complexity.”

We, members of the human variety of primates, have a hunger for rules because we need to reduce the dimension of matters so they can get into our heads. Or, rather, sadly, so we can squeeze them into our heads. The more random information is, the greater the dimensionality, and thus the more difficult to summarize. The more you summarize, the more order you put in, the less randomness. Hence the same condition that makes us simplify pushes us to think that the world is less random than it actually is .

And the Black Swan is what we leave out of simplification.

Both the artistic and scientific enterprises are the product of our need to reduce dimensions and inflict some order on things. Think of the world around you, laden with trillions of details. Try to describe it and you will find yourself tempted to weave a thread into what you are saying. A novel, a story, a myth, or a tale, all have the same function: they spare us from the complexity of the world and shield us from its randomness. Myths impart order to the disorder of human perception and the perceived “chaos of human experience.” *

Indeed, many severe psychological disorders accompany the feeling of loss of control of—being able to “make sense” of—one’s environment.

Platonicity affects us here once again. The very same desire for order, interestingly, applies to scientific pursuits—it is just that, unlike art, the (stated) purpose of science is to get to the truth, not to give you a feeling of organization or make you feel better. We tend to use knowledge as therapy.

A Better Way to Die

To view the potency of narrative, consider the following statement: “The king died and the queen died.” Compare it to “The king died, and then the queen died of grief.” This exercise, presented by the novelist E. M. Forster, shows the distinction between mere succession of information and a plot. But notice the hitch here: although we added information to the second statement, we effectively reduced the dimension of the total. The second sentence is, in a way, much lighter to carry and easier to remember; we now have one single piece of information in place of two. As we can remember it with less effort, we can also sell it to others, that is, market it better as a packaged idea. This, in a nutshell, is the definition and function of a narrative .

To see how the narrative can lead to a mistake in the assessment of the odds, do the following experiment. Give someone a well-written detective story—say, an Agatha Christie novel with a handful of characters who can all be plausibly deemed guilty. Now question your subject about the probabilities of each character’s being the murderer. Unless she writes down the percentages to keep an exact tally of them, they should add up to well over 100 percent (even well over 200 percent for a good novel). The better the detective writer, the higher that number.

REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS NOT QUITE PAST

Our tendency to perceive—to impose —narrativity and causality are symptoms of the same disease—dimension reduction. Moreover, like causality, narrativity has a chronological dimension and leads to the perception of the flow of time. Causality makes time flow in a single direction, and so does narrativity.

But memory and the arrow of time can get mixed up. Narrativity can viciously affect the remembrance of past events as follows: we will tend to more easily remember those facts from our past that fit a narrative, while we tend to neglect others that do not appear to play a causal role in that narrative. Consider that we recall events in our memory all the while knowing the answer of what happened subsequently. It is literally impossible to ignore posterior information when solving a problem. This simple inability to remember not the true sequence of events but a reconstructed one will make history appear in hindsight to be far more explainable than it actually was—or is.

Conventional wisdom holds that memory is like a serial recording device like a computer diskette. In reality, memory is dynamic—not static—like a paper on which new texts (or new versions of the same text) will be continuously recorded, thanks to the power of posterior information. (In a remarkable insight, the nineteenth-century Parisian poet Charles Baudelaire compared our memory to a palimpsest, a type of parchment on which old texts can be erased and new ones written over them.) Memory is more of a self-serving dynamic revision machine: you remember the last time you remembered the event and, without realizing it, change the story at every subsequent remembrance .