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

Recall from the Prologue the story of the hypothetical legislator whose actions might have avoided the attack of September 11. How many such people are walking the street without the upright gait of the phony hero?

Have the guts to consider the silent consequences when standing in front of the next snake-oil humanitarian.

Doctors

Our neglect of silent evidence kills people daily. Assume that a drug saves many people from a potentially dangerous ailment, but runs the risk of killing a few, with a net benefit to society. Would a doctor prescribe it? He has no incentive to do so. The lawyers of the person hurt by the side effects will go after the doctor like attack dogs, while the lives saved by the drug might not be accounted for anywhere.

A life saved is a statistic; a person hurt is an anecdote. Statistics are invisible; anecdotes are salient. Likewise, the risk of a Black Swan is invisible. *

Giacomo Casanova, a.k.a. Jacques, Chevalier de Seingalt. Some readers might be surprised that the legendary seducer did not look quite like James Bond.

THE TEFLON-STYLE PROTECTION OF GIACOMO CASANOVA

This brings us to gravest of all manifestations of silent evidence, the illusion of stability. The bias lowers our perception of the risks we incurred in the past, particularly for those of us who were lucky to have survived them. Your life came under a serious threat but, having survived it, you retrospectively underestimate how risky the situation actually was.

The adventurer Giacomo Casanova, later self-styled Jacques, Chevalier de Seingalt, the wannabe intellectual and legendary seducer of women, seems to have had a Teflon-style trait that would cause envy on the part of the most resilient of Mafia dons: misfortune did not stick to him. Casanova, while known for his seductions, viewed himself as some sort of a scholar. He aimed at literary fame with his twelve-volume History of My Life , written in bad (charmingly bad) French. In addition to the extremely useful lessons on how to become a seducer, the History provides an engrossing account of a succession of reversals of fortune. Casanova felt that every time he got into difficulties, his lucky star, his étoile , would pull him out of trouble. After things got bad for him, they somehow recovered by some invisible hand, and he was led to believe that it was his intrinsic property to recover from hardships by running every time into a new opportunity. He would somehow meet someone in extremis who offered him a financial transaction, a new patron that he had not betrayed in the past, or someone generous enough and with a weak enough memory to forget past betrayals. Could Casanova have been selected by destiny to bounce back from all hardships?

Not necessarily. Consider the following: of all the colorful adventurers who have lived on our planet, many were occasionally crushed, and a few did bounce back repeatedly. It is those who survive who will tend to believe that they are indestructible; they will have a long and interesting enough experience to write books about it. Until, of course …

Actually, adventurers who feel singled out by destiny abound, simply because there are plenty of adventurers, and we do not hear the stories of those down on their luck. As I started writing this chapter, I recalled a conversation with a woman about her flamboyant fiancé, the son of a civil servant, who managed through a few financial transactions to catapult himself into the life of a character in a novel, with handmade shoes, Cuban cigars, collectible cars, and so on. The French have a word for this, flambeur , which means a mixture of extravagant bon vivant, wild speculator, and risk taker, all the while bearing considerable personal charm; a word that does not seem to be available in Anglo-Saxon cultures. The fiancé was spending his money very quickly, and as we were having the conversation about his fate (she was going to marry him, after all), she explained to me that he was undergoing slightly difficult times, but that there was no need to worry since he always came back with a vengeance. That was a few years ago. Out of curiosity, I have just tracked him down (trying to do so tactfully): he has not recovered (yet) from his latest blow of fortune. He also dropped out of the scene and is no longer to be found among other flambeurs .

How does this relate to the dynamics of history? Consider what is generally called the resilience of New York City. For seemingly transcendental reasons, every time it gets close to the brink of disaster, the city manages to pull back and recover. Some people truly believe that this is an internal property of New York City. The following quote is from a New York Times article:

Which is why New York still needs Samuel M. E. An economist who turns 77 today, Mr. E. studied New York City through half a century of booms and busts. … “We have a record of going through tough times and coming back stronger than ever,” he said.

Now run the idea in reverse: think of cities as little Giacomo Casanovas, or as rats in my laboratory. As we put the thousands of rats through a very dangerous process, let’s put a collection of cities in a simulator of history: Rome, Athens, Carthage, Byzantium, Tyre, Catal Hyuk (located in modern-day Turkey, it is one of the first known human settlements), Jericho, Peoria, and, of course, New York City. Some cities will survive the harsh conditions of the simulator. As to others, we know that history might not be too kind. I am sure that Carthage, Tyre, and Jericho had their local, no less eloquent, Samuel M. E., saying, “Our enemies have tried to destroy us many times; but we always came back more resilient than before. We are now invincible.”

This bias causes the survivor to be an unqualified witness of the process. Unsettling? The fact that you survived is a condition that may weaken your interpretation of the properties of the survival, including the shallow notion of “cause.”

You can do a lot with the above statement. Replace the retired economist Samuel E. with a CEO discussing his corporation’s ability to recover from past problems. How about the touted “resilience of the financial system”? How about a general who has had a good run?

The reader can now see why I use Casanova’s unfailing luck as a generalized framework for the analysis of history, all histories. I generate artificial histories featuring, say, millions of Giacomo Casanovas, and observe the difference between the attributes of the successful Casanovas (because you generate them, you know their exact properties) and those an observer of the result would obtain. From that perspective, it is not a good idea to be a Casanova.

“I Am a Risk Taker”

Consider the restaurant business in a competitive place like New York City. One has indeed to be foolish to open one, owing to the enormous risks involved and the harrying quantity of work to get anywhere in the business, not counting the finicky fashion-minded clients. The cemetery of failed restaurants is very silent: walk around Midtown Manhattan and you will see these warm patron-filled restaurants with limos waiting outside for the diners to come out with their second, trophy, spouses. The owner is overworked but happy to have all these important people patronize his eatery. Does this mean that it makes sense to open a restaurant in such a competitive neighborhood? Certainly not, yet people do it out of the foolish risk-taking trait that pushes us to jump into such adventures blinded by the outcome.

Clearly there is an element of the surviving Casanovas in us, that of the risk-taking genes, which encourages us to take blind risks, unaware of the variability in the possible outcomes. We inherited the taste for uncalculated risk taking. Should we encourage such behavior?