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

The tower that became his study was inscribed with Greek and Latin sayings, almost all referring to the vulnerability of human knowledge. Its windows offered a wide vista of the surrounding hills.

Montaigne’s subject, officially, was himself, but this was mostly as a means to facilitate the discussion; he was not like those corporate executives who write biographies to make a boastful display of their honors and accomplishments. He was mainly interested in discovering things about himself, making us discover things about himself, and presenting matters that could be generalized—generalized to the entire human race. Among the inscriptions in his study was a remark by the Latin poet Terence: Homo sum, humani a me nil alienum puto —I am a man, and nothing human is foreign to me.

Montaigne is quite refreshing to read after the strains of a modern education since he fully accepted human weaknesses and understood that no philosophy could be effective unless it took into account our deeply ingrained imperfections, the limitations of our rationality, the flaws that make us human. It is not that he was ahead of his time; it would be better said that later scholars (advocating rationality) were backward.

He was a thinking, ruminating fellow, and his ideas did not spring up in his tranquil study, but while on horseback. He went on long rides and came back with ideas. Montaigne was neither one of the academics of the Sorbonne nor a professional man of letters, and he was not these things on two planes. First, he was a doer; he had been a magistrate, a businessman, and the mayor of Bordeaux before he retired to mull over his life and, mostly, his own knowledge. Second, he was an antidogmatist: he was a skeptic with charm, a fallible, noncommittal, personal, introspective writer, and, primarily, someone who, in the great classical tradition, wanted to be a man. Had he been in a different period, he would have been an empirical skeptic—he had skeptical tendencies of the Pyrrhonian variety, the antidogmatic kind like Sextus Empiricus, particularly in his awareness of the need to suspend judgment.

Epistemocracy

Everyone has an idea of utopia. For many it means equality, universal justice, freedom from oppression, freedom from work (for some it may be the more modest, though no more attainable, society with commuter trains free of lawyers on cell phones). To me utopia is an epistemocracy, a society in which anyone of rank is an epistemocrat, and where epistemocrats manage to be elected. It would be a society governed from the basis of the awareness of ignorance, not knowledge.

Alas, one cannot assert authority by accepting one’s own fallibility. Simply, people need to be blinded by knowledge—we are made to follow leaders who can gather people together because the advantages of being in groups trump the disadvantages of being alone. It has been more profitable for us to bind together in the wrong direction than to be alone in the right one. Those who have followed the assertive idiot rather than the introspective wise person have passed us some of their genes. This is apparent from a social pathology: psychopaths rally followers.

Once in a while you encounter members of the human species with so much intellectual superiority that they can change their minds effortlessly.

Note here the following Black Swan asymmetry. I believe that you can be dead certain about some things, and ought to be so. You can be more confident about disconfirmation than confirmation. Karl Popper was accused of promoting self-doubt while writing in an aggressive and confident tone (an accusation that is occasionally addressed to this author by people who don’t follow my logic of skeptical empiricism). Fortunately, we have learned a lot since Montaigne about how to carry on the skeptical-empirical enterprise. The Black Swan asymmetry allows you to be confident about what is wrong , not about what you believe is right. Karl Popper was once asked whether one “could falsify falsification” (in other words, if one could be skeptical about skepticism). His answer was that he threw students out of his lectures for asking far more intelligent questions than that one. Quite tough, Sir Karl was.

THE PAST’S PAST, AND THE PAST’S FUTURE

Some truths only hit children—adults and nonphilosophers get sucked into the minutiae of practical life and need to worry about “serious matters,” so they abandon these insights for seemingly more relevant questions. One of these truths concerns the larger difference in texture and quality between the past and the future. Thanks to my studying this distinction all my life, I understand it better than I did during my childhood, but I no longer envision it as vividly.

The only way you can imagine a future “similar” to the past is by assuming that it will be an exact projection of it, hence predictable. Just as you know with some precision when you were born, you would then know with equal precision when you will die. The notion of future mixed with chance , not a deterministic extension of your perception of the past, is a mental operation that our mind cannot perform. Chance is too fuzzy for us to be a category by itself. There is an asymmetry between past and future, and it is too subtle for us to understand naturally.

The first consequence of this asymmetry is that, in people’s minds, the relationship between the past and the future does not learn from the relationship between the past and the past previous to it. There is a blind spot: when we think of tomorrow we do not frame it in terms of what we thought about yesterday on the day before yesterday. Because of this introspective defect we fail to learn about the difference between our past predictions and the subsequent outcomes. When we think of tomorrow, we just project it as another yesterday.

This small blind spot has other manifestations. Go to the primate section of the Bronx Zoo where you can see our close relatives in the happy primate family leading their own busy social lives. You can also see masses of tourists laughing at the caricature of humans that the lower primates represent. Now imagine being a member of a higher-level species (say a “real” philosopher, a truly wise person), far more sophisticated than the human primates. You would certainly laugh at the people laughing at the nonhuman primates. Clearly, to those people amused by the apes, the idea of a being who would look down on them the way they look down on the apes cannot immediately come to their minds—if it did, it would elicit self-pity. They would stop laughing.

Accordingly, an element in the mechanics of how the human mind learns from the past makes us believe in definitive solutions—yet not consider that those who preceded us thought that they too had definitive solutions. We laugh at others and we don’t realize that someone will be just as justified in laughing at us on some not too remote day. Such a realization would entail the recursive, or second-order, thinking that I mentioned in the Prologue; we are not good at it.

This mental block about the future has not yet been investigated and labeled by psychologists, but it appears to resemble autism. Some autistic subjects can possess high levels of mathematical or technical intelligence. Their social skills are defective, but that is not the root of their problem. Autistic people cannot put themselves in the shoes of others, cannot view the world from their standpoint. They see others as inanimate objects, like machines, moved by explicit rules. They cannot perform such simple mental operations as “he knows that I don’t know that I know,” and it is this inability that impedes their social skills. (Interestingly, autistic subjects, regardless of their “intelligence,” also exhibit an inability to comprehend uncertainty.)