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

We tend to treat our knowledge as personal property to be protected and defended. It is an ornament that allows us to rise in the pecking order. So this tendency to offend Eco’s library sensibility by focusing on the known is a human bias that extends to our mental operations. People don’t walk around with anti-résumés telling you what they have not studied or experienced (it’s the job of their competitors to do that), but it would be nice if they did. Just as we need to stand library logic on its head, we will work on standing knowledge itself on its head. Note that the Black Swan comes from our misunderstanding of the likelihood of surprises, those unread books, because we take what we know a little too seriously.

Let us call an antischolar—someone who focuses on the unread books, and makes an attempt not to treat his knowledge as a treasure, or even a possession, or even a self-esteem enhancement device—a skeptical empiricist.

The chapters in this section address the question of how we humans deal with knowledge—and our preference for the anecdotal over the empirical. Chapter 1 presents the Black Swan as grounded in the story of my own obsession. I will make a central distinction between the two varieties of randomness in Chapter 3. After that, Chapter 4 briefly returns to the Black Swan problem in its original form: how we tend to generalize from what we see. Then I present the three facets of the same Black Swan problem: a) The error of confirmation , or how we are likely to undeservedly scorn the virgin part of the library (the tendency to look at what confirms our knowledge, not our ignorance), in Chapter 5; b) the narrative fallacy , or how we fool ourselves with stories and anecdotes (Chapter 6); c) how emotions get in the way of our inference (Chapter 7); and d) the problem of silent evidence , or the tricks history uses to hide Black Swans from us (Chapter 8). Chapter 9 discusses the lethal fallacy of building knowledge from the world of games.

Chapter One

THE APPRENTICESHIP OF AN EMPIRICAL SKEPTIC

Anatomy of a Black Swan—The triplet of opacity—Reading books backward—The rearview mirror—Everything becomes explainable—Always talk to the driver (with caution)—History doesn’t crawl; it jumps—“It was so unexpected”—Sleeping for twelve hours

This is not an autobiography, so I will skip the scenes of war. Actually, even if it were an autobiography, I would still skip the scenes of war. I cannot compete with action movies or memoirs of adventurers more accomplished than myself, so I will stick to my specialties of chance and uncertainty.

ANATOMY OF A BLACK SWAN

For more than a millennium the eastern Mediterranean seaboard called Syria Libanensis, or Mount Lebanon, had been able to accommodate at least a dozen different sects, ethnicities, and beliefs—it worked like magic. The place resembled major cities of the eastern Mediterranean (called the Levant) more than it did the other parts in the interior of the Near East (it was easier to move by ship than by land through the mountainous terrain). The Levantine cities were mercantile in nature; people dealt with one another according to a clear protocol, preserving a peace conducive to commerce, and they socialized quite a bit across communities. This millennium of peace was interrupted only by small occasional friction within Moslem and Christian communities, rarely between Christians and Moslems. While the cities were mercantile and mostly Hellenistic, the mountains had been settled by all manner of religious minorities who claimed to have fled both the Byzantine and Moslem orthodoxies. A mountainous terrain is an ideal refuge from the mainstream, except that your enemy is the other refugee competing for the same type of rugged real estate. The mosaic of cultures and religions there was deemed an example of coexistence: Christians of all varieties (Maronites, Armenians, Greco-Syrian Byzantine Orthodox, even Byzantine Catholic, in addition to the few Roman Catholics left over from the Crusades); Moslems (Shiite and Sunni); Druzes; and a few Jews. It was taken for granted that people learned to be tolerant there; I recall how we were taught in school how far more civilized and wiser we were than those in the Balkan communities, where not only did the locals refrain from bathing but also fell prey to fractious fighting. Things appeared to be in a state of stable equilibrium, evolving out of a historical tendency for betterment and tolerance. The terms balance and equilibrium were often used.

Both sides of my family came from the Greco-Syrian community, the last Byzantine outpost in northern Syria, which included what is now called Lebanon. Note that the Byzantines called themselves “Romans”— Roumi (plural Roum) in the local languages. We originate from the olive-growing area at the base of Mount Lebanon—we chased the Maronite Christians into the mountains in the famous battle of Amioun, my ancestral village. Since the Arab invasion in the seventh century, we had been living in mercantile peace with the Moslems, with only some occasional harassment by the Lebanese Maronite Christians from the mountains. By some (literally) Byzantine arrangement between the Arab rulers and the Byzantine emperors, we managed to pay taxes to both sides and get protection from both. We thus managed to live in peace for more than a millennium almost devoid of bloodshed: our last true problem was the later troublemaking crusaders, not the Moslem Arabs. The Arabs, who seemed interested only in warfare (and poetry) and, later, the Ottoman Turks, who seemed only concerned with warfare (and pleasure), left to us the uninteresting pursuit of commerce and the less dangerous one of scholarship (like the translation of Aramaic and Greek texts).

By any standard the country called Lebanon, to which we found ourselves suddenly incorporated after the fall of the Ottoman Empire, in the early twentieth century, appeared to be a stable paradise; it was also cut in a way to be predominantly Christian. People were suddenly brainwashed to believe in the nation-state as an entity. *The Christians convinced themselves that they were at the origin and center of what is loosely called Western culture yet with a window on the East. In a classical case of static thinking, nobody took into account the differentials in birthrate between communities and it was assumed that a slight Christian majority would remain permanent. Levantines had been granted Roman citizenship, which allowed Saint Paul, a Syrian, to travel freely through the ancient world. People felt connected to everything they felt was worth connecting to; the place was exceedingly open to the world, with a vastly sophisticated lifestyle, a prosperous economy, and temperate weather just like California, with snow-covered mountains jutting above the Mediterranean. It attracted a collection of spies (both Soviet and Western), prostitutes (blondes), writers, poets, drug dealers, adventurers, compulsive gamblers, tennis players, après-skiers, and merchants—all professions that complement one another. Many people acted as if they were in an old James Bond movie, or the days when playboys smoked, drank, and, instead of going to the gym, cultivated relationships with good tailors.

The main attribute of paradise was there: cabdrivers were said to be polite (though, from what I remember, they were not polite to me). True, with hindsight, the place may appear more Elysian in the memory of people than it actually was.