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

Sadly, it may be even worse for you to make $10 million, then lose back nine, than to making nothing at all! True, you may end up with a million (as compared to nothing), but it may be better had you got zilch. (This assumes, of course, that you care about financial rewards.)

So from a narrowly defined accounting point of view, which I may call here “hedonic calculus,” it does not pay to shoot for one large win. Mother Nature destined us to derive enjoyment from a steady flow of pleasant small, but frequent, rewards. As I said, the rewards do not have to be large, just frequent—a little bit here, a little bit there. Consider that our major satisfaction for thousands of years came in the form of food and water (and something else more private), and that while we need these steadily, we quickly reach saturation.

The problem, of course, is that we do not live in an environment where results are delivered in a steady manner—Black Swans dominate much of human history. It is unfortunate that the right strategy for our current environment may not offer internal rewards and positive feedback.

The same property in reverse applies to our unhappiness. It is better to lump all your pain into a brief period rather than have it spread out over a longer one.

But some people find it possible to transcend the asymmetry of pains and joys, escape the hedonic deficit, set themselves outside that game—and live with hope. There is some good news, as we see next.

The Antechamber of Hope

For Yevgenia Krasnova, a person could love one book, at most a few—beyond this was a form of promiscuity. Those who talk about books as commodities are inauthentic, just as those who collect acquaintances can be superficial in their friendships. A novel you like resembles a friend. You read it and reread it, getting to know it better. Like a friend, you accept it the way it is; you do not judge it. Montaigne was asked “why” he and the writer Etienne de la Boétie were friends—the kind of question people ask you at a cocktail party as if you knew the answer, or as if there were an answer to know. It was typical of Montaigne to reply, “Parce que c’était lui, parce que c’était moi” (because it was him and because it was me). Likewise, Yevgenia claims that she likes that one book “because it is it and because I am me.” Yevgenia once even walked out on a schoolteacher because he analyzed that book and thus violated her rule. One does not sit idle listening as people wax analytical about your friends. A very stubborn schoolchild she was.

This book she has as a friend is Il deserto dei tartari , by Dino Buzzati, a novel that was well known in Italy and France during her childhood, but that, strangely, nobody she knows in America had heard of. Its English title is mistranslated as The Tartar Steppe instead of The Desert of the Tartars .

Yevgenia encountered Il deserto when she was thirteen, in her parents’ weekend country house in a small village two hundred kilometers outside Paris, where their Russian and French books multiplied without the constraints of the overfed Parisian apartment. She was so bored in the country that she could not even read. Then, one afternoon, she opened the book and was sucked into it.

Inebriated by Hope

Giovanni Drogo is a man of promise. He has just graduated from the military academy with the rank of junior officer, and active life is just starting. But things do not turn out as planned: his initial four-year assignment is a remote outpost, the Bastiani fortress, protecting the nation from the Tartars likely to invade from the border desert—not too desirable a position. The fortress is located a few days by horseback from the town; there is nothing but bareness around it—none of the social buzz that a man of his age could look forward to. Drogo thinks that his assignment in the outpost is temporary, a way for him to pay his dues before more appealing positions present themselves. Later, back in town, in his impeccably ironed uniform and with his athletic figure, few ladies will be able to resist him.

What is Drogo to do in this hole? He discovers a loophole, a way to be transferred after only four months. He decides to use the loophole.

At the very last minute, however, Drogo takes a glance at the desert from the window of the medical office and decides to extend his stay. Something in the walls of the fort and the silent landscape ensnares him. The appeal of the fort and waiting for the attackers, the big battle with the ferocious Tartars, gradually become his only reason to exist. The entire atmosphere of the fort is one of anticipation. The other men spend their time looking at the horizon and awaiting the big event of the enemy attack. They are so focused that, on rare occasions, they can detect the most insignificant stray animal that appears at the edge of the desert and mistake it for an enemy attack.

Sure enough, Drogo spends the rest of his life extending his stay, delaying the beginning of his life in the city—thirty-five years of pure hope, spent in the grip of the idea that one day, from the remote hills that no human has ever crossed, the attackers will eventually emerge and help him rise to the occasion.

At the end of the novel we see Drogo dying in a roadside inn as the event for which he has waited all his life takes place. He has missed it.

The Sweet Trap of Anticipation

Yevgenia read Il deserto numerous times; she even learned Italian (and perhaps married an Italian) so she could read it in the original. Yet she never had the heart to reread the painful ending.

I presented the Black Swan as the outlier, the important event that is not expected to happen. But consider the opposite: the unexpected event that you very badly want to happen . Drogo is obsessed and blinded by the possibility of an unlikely event; that rare occurrence is his raison d’être. At thirteen, when she encountered the book, little did Yevgenia know that she would spend an entire life playing Giovanni Drogo in the antechamber of hope, waiting for the big event, sacrificing for it, and refusing intermediate steps, the consolation prizes.

She did not mind the sweet trap of anticipation: to her it was a life worth living; it was worth living in the cathartic simplicity of a single purpose. Indeed, “be careful what you wish for”: she may have been happier before the Black Swan of her success than after.

One of the attributes of a Black Swan is an asymmetry in consequences—either positive or negative. For Drogo the consequences were thirty-five years spent waiting in the antechamber of hope for just a few randomly distributed hours of glory—which he ended up missing.

When You Need the Bastiani Fortress

Note that there was no brother-in-law around in Drogo’s social network. He was lucky to have companions in his mission. He was a member of a community at the gate of the desert intently looking together at the horizon. Drogo had the advantage of an association with peers and the avoidance of social contact with others outside the community. We are local animals, interested in our immediate neighborhood—even if people far away consider us total idiots. Those homo sapiens are abstract and remote and we do not care about them because we do not run into them in elevators or make eye contact with them. Our shallowness can sometimes work for us.

It may be a banality that we need others for many things, but we need them far more than we realize, particularly for dignity and respect. Indeed, we have very few historical records of people who have achieved anything extraordinary without such peer validation—but we have the freedom to choose our peers. If we look at the history of ideas, we see schools of thought occasionally forming, producing unusual work unpopular outside the school. You hear about the Stoics, the Academic Skeptics, the Cynics, the Pyrrhonian Skeptics, the Essenes, the Surrealists, the Dadaists, the anarchists, the hippies, the fundamentalists. A school allows someone with unusual ideas with the remote possibility of a payoff to find company and create a microcosm insulated from others. The members of the group can be ostracized together—which is better than being ostracized alone.