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

In a primitive environment, the relevant is the sensational. This applies to our knowledge. When we try to collect information about the world around us, we tend to be guided by our biology, and our attention flows effortlessly toward the sensational—not the relevant so much as the sensational. Somehow the guidance system has gone wrong in the process of our coevolution with our habitat—it was transplanted into a world in which the relevant is often boring, nonsensational.

Furthermore, we think that if, say, two variables are causally linked, then a steady input in one variable should always yield a result in the other one. Our emotional apparatus is designed for linear causality. For instance, if you study every day, you expect to learn something in proportion to your studies. If you feel that you are not going anywhere, your emotions will cause you to become demoralized. But modern reality rarely gives us the privilege of a satisfying, linear, positive progression: you may think about a problem for a year and learn nothing; then, unless you are disheartened by the emptiness of the results and give up, something will come to you in a flash.

Researchers spent some time dealing with this notion of gratification; neurology has been enlightening us about the tension between the notions of immediate rewards and delayed ones. Would you like a massage today, or two next week? Well, the news is that the logical part of our mind, that “higher” one, which distinguishes us from animals, can override our animal instinct, which asks for immediate rewards. So we are a little better than animals, after all—but perhaps not by much. And not all of the time.

Nonlinearities

The situation can get a little more tragic—the world is more nonlinear than we think, and than scientists would like to think.

With linearities, relationships between variables are clear, crisp, and constant, therefore Platonically easy to grasp in a single sentence, such as “A 10 percent increase in money in the bank corresponds to a 10 percent increase in interest income and a 5 percent increase in obsequiousness on the part of the personal banker.” If you have more money in the bank, you get more interest. Nonlinear relationships can vary; perhaps the best way to describe them is to say that they cannot be expressed verbally in a way that does justice to them. Take the relationship between pleasure and drinking water. If you are in a state of painful thirst, then a bottle of water increases your well-being significantly. More water means more pleasure. But what if I gave you a cistern of water? Clearly your well-being becomes rapidly insensitive to further quantities. As a matter of fact, if I gave you the choice between a bottle or a cistern you would prefer the bottle—so your enjoyment declines with additional quantities.

These nonlinear relationships are ubiquitous in life. Linear relationships are truly the exception; we only focus on them in classrooms and textbooks because they are easier to understand. Yesterday afternoon I tried to take a fresh look around me to catalog what I could see during my day that was linear. I could not find anything, no more than someone hunting for squares or triangles could find them in the rain forest—or, as we will see in Part Three, any more than someone looking for bell-shape randomness finding it in socioeconomic phenomena.

You play tennis every day with no improvement, then suddenly you start beating the pro.

Your child does not seem to have a learning impediment, but he does not seem to want to speak. The schoolmaster pressures you to start considering “other options,” namely therapy. You argue with her to no avail (she is supposed to be the “expert”). Then, suddenly, the child starts composing elaborate sentences, perhaps a bit too elaborate for his age group. I will repeat that linear progression, a Platonic idea, is not the norm.

Process over Results

We favor the sensational and the extremely visible. This affects the way we judge heroes. There is little room in our consciousness for heroes who do not deliver visible results—or those heroes who focus on process rather than results.

However, those who claim that they value process over result are not telling the whole truth, assuming of course that they are members of the human species. We often hear the semi-lie that writers do not write for glory, that artists create for the sake of art, because the activity is “its own reward.” True, these activities can generate a steady flow of autosatisfaction. But this does not mean that artists do not crave some form of attention, or that they would not be better off if they got some publicity; it does not mean that writers do not wake up early Saturday morning to check if The New York Times Book Review has featured their work, even if it is a very long shot, or that they do not keep checking their mailbox for that long-awaited reply from The New Yorker . Even a philosopher the caliber of Hume spent a few weeks sick in bed after the trashing of his masterpiece (what later became known as his version of the Black Swan problem) by some dim-thinking reviewer—whom he knew to be wrong and to have missed his whole point.

Where it gets painful is when you see one of your peers, whom you despise, heading to Stockholm for his Nobel reception.

Most people engaged in the pursuits that I call “concentrated” spend most of their time waiting for the big day that (usually) never comes.

True, this takes your mind away from the pettiness of life—the cappuccino that is too warm or too cold, the waiter too slow or too intrusive, the food too spicy or not enough, the overpriced hotel room that does not quite resemble the advertised picture—all these considerations disappear because you have your mind on much bigger and better things. But this does not mean that the person insulated from materialistic pursuits becomes impervious to other pains, those issuing from disrespect. Often these Black Swan hunters feel shame, or are made to feel shame, at not contributing. “You betrayed those who had high hopes for you,” they are told, increasing their feeling of guilt. The problem of lumpy payoffs is not so much in the lack of income they entail, but the pecking order, the loss of dignity, the subtle humiliations near the watercooler.

It is my great hope someday to see science and decision makers rediscover what the ancients have always known, namely that our highest currency is respect.

Even economically, the individual Black Swan hunters are not the ones who make the bucks. The researcher Thomas Astebro has shown that returns on independent inventions (you take the cemetery into account) are far lower than those on venture capital. Some blindness to the odds or an obsession with their own positive Black Swan is necessary for entrepreneurs to function. The venture capitalist is the one who gets the shekels. The economist William Baumol calls this “a touch of madness.” This may indeed apply to all concentrated businesses: when you look at the empirical record, you not only see that venture capitalists do better than entrepreneurs, but publishers do better than writers, dealers do better than artists, and science does better than scientists (about 50 percent of scientific and scholarly papers, costing months, sometimes years, of effort, are never truly read). The person involved in such gambles is paid in a currency other than material success: hope.

Human Nature, Happiness, and Lumpy Rewards

Let me distill the main idea behind what researchers call hedonic happiness.

Making $1 million in one year, but nothing in the preceding nine, does not bring the same pleasure as having the total evenly distributed over the same period, that is, $100,000 every year for ten years in a row. The same applies to the inverse order—making a bundle the first year, then nothing for the remaining period. Somehow, your pleasure system will be saturated rather quickly, and it will not carry forward the hedonic balance like a sum on a tax return. As a matter of fact, your happiness depends far more on the number of instances of positive feelings, what psychologists call “positive affect,” than on their intensity when they hit. In other words, good news is good news first; how good matters rather little. So to have a pleasant life you should spread these small “affects” across time as evenly as possible. Plenty of mildly good news is preferable to one single lump of great news.