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

Species Density

Mother Nature does not like too much connectivity and globalization— (biological, cultural, or economic). One of the privileges I got as a result of the book was meeting Nathan Myhrvold, the type of person I wish were cloned so I could have one copy here in New York, one in Europe, and one in Lebanon. I started meeting with him regularly; every single meeting has led to a big idea, or the rediscovery of my own ideas through the brain of a more intelligent person—he could easily claim co-authorship of my next book. The problem is that, unlike Spyros and those very few others, he does not have his conversations while walking (though I met him in excellent restaurants).

Myhrvold enlightened me about an additional way to interpret and prove how globalization takes us into Extremistan: the notion of species density. Simply, larger environments are more scalable than smaller ones—allowing the biggest to get even bigger, at the expense of the smallest, through the mechanism of preferential attachment we saw in Chapter 14. We have evidence that small islands have many more species per square meter than larger ones, and, of course, than continents. As we travel more on this planet, epidemics will be more acute—we will have a germ population dominated by a few numbers, and the successful killer will spread vastly more effectively. Cultural life will be dominated by fewer persons: we have fewer books per reader in English than in Italian (this includes bad books). Companies will be more uneven in size. And fads will be more acute. So will runs on the banks, of course.

Once again, I am not saying that we need to stop globalization and prevent travel. We just need to be aware of the side effects, the trade-offs—and few people are. I see the risks of a very strange acute virus spreading throughout the planet.

The Other Types of Redundancy

The other categories of redundancy, more complicated and subtle, explain how elements of nature exploit positive Black Swans (and have an additional toolkit for surviving negative ones). I will discuss this very briefly here, as it is mostly behind my next work on the exploitation of Black Swans, through tinkering or the domestication of uncertainty.

Functional redundancy, studied by biologists, is as follows: unlike organ redundancy—the availability of spare parts, where the same function can be performed by identical elements—very often the same function can be performed by two different structures. Sometimes the term degeneracy is used (by Gerald Edelman and Joseph Gally).

There is another redundancy: when an organ can be employed to perform a certain function that is not its current central one. My friend Peter Bevelin links this idea to the “spandrels of San Marco,” after an essay by Steven Jay Gould. There, the necessary space between arches in the Venetian cathedral of San Marco has led to art that is now central to our aesthetic experience while visiting the place. In what is now called the spandrel effect , an auxiliary offshoot of a certain adaptation leads to a new function. I can also see the adaptation as having a dormant potential function that could wake up in the right environment.

The best way to illustrate such redundancy is with an aspect of the life story of the colorful philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend. Feyerabend was permanently impotent from a war injury, yet he married four times, and was a womanizer to the point of leaving a trail of devastated boyfriends and husbands whose partners he snatched, and an equally long one of broken hearts, including those of many of his students (in his day, certain privileges were allowed to professors, particularly flamboyant professors of philosophy). This was a particular achievement given his impotence. So there were other parts of the body that came to satisfy whatever it was that made women attached to him.

Mother Nature initially created the mouth to eat, perhaps to breathe, perhaps for some other function linked to the existence of the tongue. Then new functions emerged that were most probably not part of the initial plan. Some people use the mouth and tongue to kiss, or to do something more involved to which Feyerabend allegedly had recourse.

Over the past three years I became obsessed with the notion that, under epistemic limitations—some opacity concerning the future—progress (and survival) cannot take place without one of these types of redundancy. You don’t know today what may be needed tomorrow. This conflicts very sharply with the notion of teleological design we all got from reading Aristotle, which has shaped medieval Arabic-western thought. For Aristotle, an object had a clear purpose set by its designer. An eye was there to see, a nose to smell. This is a rationalistic argument, another manifestation of what I call Platonicity. Yet anything that has a secondary use, and one you did not pay for, will present an extra opportunity should a heretofore unknown application emerge or a new environment appear. The organism with the largest number of secondary uses is the one that will gain the most from environmental randomness and epistemic opacity!

Take aspirin. Forty years ago, aspirin’s raison d’être was its antipyretic (fever-reducing) effect. Later it was used for its analgesic (pain-reducing) effect. It has also been used for its anti-inflammatory properties. It is now used mostly as a blood thinner to avoid second (or first) heart attacks. The same thing applies to almost all drugs—many are used for secondary and tertiary properties.

I have just glanced at the desk in my business, nonliterary office (I separate the functional from the aesthetic). A laptop computer is propped up on a book, as I like to have some incline. The book is a French biography of the fiery Lou Andreas Salomé (Nietzsche’s and Freud’s friend) that I can very safely say I will never read; it was selected for its optimal thickness for the task. This makes me reflect on the foolishness of thinking that books are there to be read and could be replaced by electronic files. Think of the spate of functional redundancies provided by books. You cannot impress your neighbors with electronic files. You cannot prop up your ego with electronic files. Objects seem to have invisible but significant auxiliary functions that we are not aware of consciously, but that allow them to thrive—and on occasion, as with decorator books, the auxiliary function becomes the principal one.

So when you have a lot of functional redundancies, randomness helps on balance, but under one condition—that you can benefit from the randomness more than you can be hurt by it (an argument I call more technically convexity to uncertainty) . This is certainly the case with many engineering applications, in which tools emerge from other tools.

Also, I am currently absorbed in the study of the history of medicine, which struggled under this Aristotelian illusion of purpose, with Galen’s rationalistic methods that killed so many people while physicians thought they were curing them. Our psychology conspires: people like to go to a precise destination, rather than face some degree of uncertainty, even if beneficial. And research itself, the way it is designed and funded, seems to be teleological, aiming for precise results rather than looking for maximal exposures to forking avenues.

I have given more complicated names to this idea, in addition to convexity , like optionality —since you have the option of taking the freebie from randomness—but this is still work in progress for me. The progress coming from the second type of randomness is what I call tinkering , or bricolage , the subject of my next book.

Distinctions Without a Difference, Differences Without a Distinction