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

If you engage in a Black Swan–dependent activity, it is better to be part of a group.

EL DESIERTO DE LOS TÁRTAROS

Yevgenia met Nero Tulip in the lobby of the Hotel Danieli in Venice. He was a trader who lived between London and New York. At the time, traders from London went to Venice on Friday noon during the low season, just to talk to other traders (from London).

As Yevgenia and Nero stood engaged in an effortless conversation, she noticed that her husband was looking uncomfortably at them from the bar where he sat, trying to stay focused on the pontifications of one of his childhood friends. Yevgenia realized that she was going to see a bit more of Nero.

They met again in New York, first in a clandestine way. Her husband, being a philosophy professor, had too much time on his hands, so he started paying close attention to her schedule and became clingy. The clingier he got, the more stifled Yevgenia felt, which made him even clingier. She dumped him, called her lawyer who was by then expecting to hear from her, and saw more of Nero openly.

Nero had a stiff gait since he was recovering from a helicopter crash—he gets a little too arrogant after episodes of success and starts taking uncalculated physical risks, though he remains financially hyperconservative, even paranoid. He had spent months immobile in a London hospital, hardly able to read or write, trying to resist having to watch television, teasing the nurses, and waiting for his bones to heal. He can draw the ceiling with its fourteen cracks from memory, as well as the shabby white building across the street with its sixty-three windowpanes, all in need of professional cleaning.

Nero claimed that he was comfortable in Italian when he drank, so Yevgenia gave him a copy of Il deserto . Nero did not read novels—“Novels are fun to write, not read,” he claimed. So he left the book by his bedside for a while.

Nero and Yevgenia were, in a sense, like night and day. Yevgenia went to bed at dawn, working on her manuscripts at night. Nero rose at dawn, like most traders, even on weekends. He then worked for an hour on his opus, Treatise on Probability , and never touched it again after that. He had been writing it for a decade and felt rushed to finish it only when his life was threatened. Yevgenia smoked; Nero was mindful of his health, spending at least an hour a day at the gym or in the pool. Yevgenia hung around intellectuals and bohemians; Nero often felt comfortable with street-smart traders and businessmen who had never been to college and spoke with cripplingly severe Brooklyn accents. Yevgenia never understood how a classicist and a polyglot like Nero could socialize with people like that. What was worse, she had this French Fifth Republic overt disdain for money, unless disguised by an intellectual or cultural façade, and she could hardly bear these Brooklyn fellows with thick hairy fingers and gigantic bank accounts. Nero’s post-Brooklyn friends, in turn, found her snotty. (One of the effects of prosperity has been a steady migration of streetwise people from Brooklyn to Staten Island and New Jersey.)

Nero was also elitist, unbearably so, but in a different way. He separated those who could connect the dots , Brooklyn-born or not, from those who could not, regardless of their levels of sophistication and learning.

A few months later, after he was done with Yevgenia (with inordinate relief) he opened Il deserto and was sucked into it. Yevgenia had the prescience that, like her, Nero would identify with Giovanni Drogo, the main character of Il deserto . He did.

Nero, in turn, bought cases of the English (bad) translation of the book and handed copies to anyone who said a polite hello to him, including his New York doorman who could hardly speak English, let alone read it. Nero was so enthusiastic while explaining the story that the doorman got interested and Nero had to order the Spanish translation for him, El desierto de los tártaros .

Bleed or Blowup

Let us separate the world into two categories. Some people are like the turkey, exposed to a major blowup without being aware of it, while others play reverse turkey, prepared for big events that might surprise others. In some strategies and life situations, you gamble dollars to win a succession of pennies while appearing to be winning all the time. In others, you risk a succession of pennies to win dollars. In other words, you bet either that the Black Swan will happen or that it will never happen, two strategies that require completely different mind-sets.

We have seen that we (humans) have a marked preference for making a little bit of income at a time. Recall from Chapter 4 that in the summer of 1982, large American banks lost close to everything they had ever earned, and more.

So some matters that belong to Extremistan are extremely dangerous but do not appear to be so beforehand, since they hide and delay their risks—so suckers think they are “safe.” It is indeed a property of Extremistan to look less risky, in the short run, than it really is.

Nero called the businesses exposed to such blowups dubious businesses, particularly since he distrusted whatever method was being used to compute the odds of a blowup. Recall from Chapter 4 that the accounting period upon which companies’ performances are evaluated is too short to reveal whether or not they are doing a great job. And, owing to the shallowness of our intuitions, we formulate our risk assessments too quickly.

I will rapidly present Nero’s idea. His premise was the following trivial point: some business bets in which one wins big but infrequently, yet loses small but frequently, are worth making if others are suckers for them and if you have the personal and intellectual stamina . But you need such stamina. You also need to deal with people in your entourage heaping all manner of insult on you, much of it blatant. People often accept that a financial strategy with a small chance of success is not necessarily a bad one as long as the success is large enough to justify it. For a spate of psychological reasons, however, people have difficulty carrying out such a strategy, simply because it requires a combination of belief, a capacity for delayed gratification, and the willingness to be spat upon by clients without blinking. And those who lose money for any reason start looking like guilty dogs, eliciting more scorn on the part of their entourage.

Against that background of potential blowup disguised as skills, Nero engaged in a strategy that he called “bleed.” You lose steadily, daily, for a long time, except when some event takes place for which you get paid disproportionately well. No single event can make you blow up, on the other hand—some changes in the world can produce extraordinarily large profits that pay back such bleed for years, sometimes decades, sometimes even centuries.

Of all the people he knew, Nero was the least genetically designed for such a strategy. His brain disagreed so heavily with his body that he found himself in a state of continuous warfare. It was his body that was his problem, which accumulated physical fatigue from the neurobiological effect of exposure to the small continuous losses, Chinese-water-torture-style, throughout the day. Nero discovered that the losses went to his emotional brain, bypassing his higher cortical structures and slowly affecting his hippocampus and weakening his memory. The hippocampus is the structure where memory is supposedly controlled. It is the most plastic part of the brain; it is also the part that is assumed to absorb all the damage from repeated insults like the chronic stress we experience daily from small doses of negative feelings—as opposed to the invigorating “good stress” of the tiger popping up occasionally in your living room. You can rationalize all you want; the hippocampus takes the insult of chronic stress seriously, incurring irreversible atrophy. Contrary to popular belief, these small, seemingly harmless stressors do not strengthen you; they can amputate part of your self.