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

THE SHORTCUTS

Next I will go beyond narrative to discuss the more general attributes of thinking and reasoning behind our crippling shallowness. These defects in reasoning have been cataloged and investigated by a powerful research tradition represented by a school called the Society of Judgment and Decision Making (the only academic and professional society of which I am a member, and proudly so; its gatherings are the only ones where I do not have tension in my shoulders or anger fits). It is associated with the school of research started by Daniel Kahneman, Amos Tversky, and their friends, such as Robyn Dawes and Paul Slovic. It is mostly composed of empirical psychologists and cognitive scientists whose methodology hews strictly to running very precise, controlled experiments (physics-style) on humans and making catalogs of how people react, with minimal theorizing. They look for regularities. Note that empirical psychologists use the bell curve to gauge errors in their testing methods, but as we will see more technically in Chapter 15, this is one of the rare adequate applications of the bell curve in social science, owing to the nature of the experiments. We have seen such types of experiments earlier in this chapter with the flood in California, and with the identification of the confirmation bias in Chapter 5. These researchers have mapped our activities into (roughly) a dual mode of thinking, which they separate as “System 1” and “System 2,” or the experiential and the cogitative . The distinction is straightforward.

System 1 , the experiential one, is effortless, automatic, fast, opaque (we do not know that we are using it), parallel-processed, and can lend itself to errors. It is what we call “intuition,” and performs these quick acts of prowess that became popular under the name blink , after the title of Malcolm Gladwell’s bestselling book. System 1 is highly emotional, precisely because it is quick. It produces shortcuts, called “heuristics,” that allow us to function rapidly and effectively. Dan Goldstein calls these heuristics “fast and frugal.” Others prefer to call them “quick and dirty.” Now, these shortcuts are certainly virtuous, since they are rapid, but, at times, they can lead us into some severe mistakes. This main idea generated an entire school of research called the heuristics and biases approach (heuristics corresponds to the study of shortcuts, biases stand for mistakes).

System 2 , the cogitative one, is what we normally call thinking . It is what you use in a classroom, as it is effortful (even for Frenchmen), reasoned, slow, logical, serial, progressive, and self-aware (you can follow the steps in your reasoning). It makes fewer mistakes than the experiential system, and, since you know how you derived your result, you can retrace your steps and correct them in an adaptive manner.

Most of our mistakes in reasoning come from using System 1 when we are in fact thinking that we are using System 2. How? Since we react without thinking and introspection, the main property of System 1 is our lack of awareness of using it!

Recall the round-trip error, our tendency to confuse “no evidence of Black Swans” with “evidence of no Black Swans;” it shows System 1 at work. You have to make an effort (System 2) to override your first reaction. Clearly Mother Nature makes you use the fast System 1 to get out of trouble, so that you do not sit down and cogitate whether there is truly a tiger attacking you or if it is an optical illusion. You run immediately, before you become “conscious” of the presence of the tiger.

Emotions are assumed to be the weapon System 1 uses to direct us and force us to act quickly. It mediates risk avoidance far more effectively than our cognitive system. Indeed, neurobiologists who have studied the emotional system show how it often reacts to the presence of danger long before we are consciously aware of it—we experience fear and start reacting a few milliseconds before we realize that we are facing a snake.

Much of the trouble with human nature resides in our inability to use much of System 2, or to use it in a prolonged way without having to take a long beach vacation. In addition, we often just forget to use it.

Beware the Brain

Note that neurobiologists make, roughly, a similar distinction to that between System 1 and System 2, except that they operate along anatomical lines. Their distinction differentiates between parts of the brain, the cortical part, which we are supposed to use for thinking, and which distinguishes us from other animals, and the fast-reacting limbic brain, which is the center of emotions, and which we share with other mammals.

As a skeptical empiricist, I do not want to be the turkey, so I do not want to focus solely on specific organs in the brain, since we do not observe brain functions very well. Some people try to identify what are called the neural correlates of, say, decision making, or more aggressively the neural “substrates” of, say, memory. The brain might be more complicated machinery than we think; its anatomy has fooled us repeatedly in the past. We can, however, assess regularities by running precise and thorough experiments on how people react under certain conditions, and keep a tally of what we see.

For an example that justifies skepticism about unconditional reliance on neurobiology, and vindicates the ideas of the empirical school of medicine to which Sextus belonged, let’s consider the intelligence of birds. I kept reading in various texts that the cortex is where animals do their “thinking,” and that the creatures with the largest cortex have the highest intelligence—we humans have the largest cortex, followed by bank executives, dolphins, and our cousins the apes. Well, it turns out that some birds, such as parrots, have a high level of intelligence, equivalent to that of dolphins, but that the intelligence of birds correlates with the size of another part of the brain, called the hyperstriatum. So neurobiology with its attribute of “hard science” can sometimes (though not always) fool you into a Platonified, reductive statement. I am amazed that the “empirics,” skeptical about links between anatomy and function, had such insight—no wonder their school played a very small part in intellectual history. As a skeptical empiricist I prefer the experiments of empirical psychology to the theories-based MRI scans of neurobiologists, even if the former appear less “scientific” to the public.

How to Avert the Narrative Fallacy

I’ll conclude by saying that our misunderstanding of the Black Swan can be largely attributed to our using System 1, i.e., narratives, and the sensational—as well as the emotional—which imposes on us a wrong map of the likelihood of events. On a day-to-day basis, we are not introspective enough to realize that we understand what is going on a little less than warranted from a dispassionate observation of our experiences. We also tend to forget about the notion of Black Swans immediately after one occurs—since they are too abstract for us—focusing, rather, on the precise and vivid events that easily come to our minds. We do worry about Black Swans, just the wrong ones.

Let me bring Mediocristan into this. In Mediocristan, narratives seem to work—the past is likely to yield to our inquisition. But not in Extremistan, where you do not have repetition, and where you need to remain suspicious of the sneaky past and avoid the easy and obvious narrative.

Given that I have lived largely deprived of information, I’ve often felt that I inhabit a different planet than my peers, which can sometimes be extremely painful. It’s like they have a virus controlling their brains that prevents them from seeing things going forward—the Black Swan around the corner.