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

So the main idea is to trade duration for intensity—for a hedonic gain. Recall the reasoning I presented in Chapter 6 about hedonic effects. Just as people prefer large but sudden losses to small but regular ones, just as one becomes dulled to pain beyond a certain threshold, so unpleasant experiences, like working out without external stimuli (say in a gym), or spending time in New Jersey, need to be as concentrated and as intense as possible.

Another way to view the connection to the Black Swan idea is as follows. Classical thermodynamics produces Gaussian variations, while informational variations are from Extremistan. Let me explain. If you consider your diet and exercise as simple energy deficits and excesses, with a straight calorie-in, calorie-burned equation, you will fall into the trap of misspecifying the system into simple causal and mechanical links. Your food intake becomes the equivalent of filling up the tank of your new BMW. If, on the other hand, you look at food and exercise as activating metabolic signals, with potential metabolic cascades and nonlinearities from network effects, and with recursive links, then welcome to complexity, hence Extremistan. Both food and workouts provide your body with information about stressors in the environment. As I have been saying throughout, informational randomness is from Extremistan. Medicine fell into the trap of using simple thermodynamics, with the same physics envy, and the same mentality, and the same tools as economists did when they looked at the economy as a web of simple links. *And both humans and societies are complex systems.

But these lifestyle ideas do not come from mere self-experimentation or some quack theory. All the results were completely expected from the evidence-based, peer-reviewed research that is available. Hunger (or episodic energy deficit) strengthens the body and the immune system and helps rejuvenate brain cells, weaken cancer cells, and prevent diabetes. It was just that the current thinking—in a way similar to economics—was out of sync with the empirical research. I was able to re-create 90 percent of the benefits of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle with minimal effort, without compromising a modern lifestyle, in the aesthetics of an urban setting (I get extremely bored in nature and prefer walking around the Jewish quarter of Venice to spending time in Bora Bora). *

By the same argument we can lower 90 percent of Black Swan risks in economic life … by just eliminating speculative debt.

The only thing currently missing from my life is panic, from, say, finding a gigantic snake in my library, or watching the economist Myron Scholes, armed to the teeth, walk into my bedroom in the middle of the night. I lack what the biologist Robert Sapolsky calls the beneficial aspect of acute stress, compared to the deleterious one of dull stress—another barbell, for no stress plus a little bit of extreme stress is vastly better than a little bit of stress (like mortgage worries) all the time.

Some have argued that my health benefits come from long walks, about ten to fifteen hours a week (though nobody has explained to me why they would count as workouts since I walk slowly), while others claim that they come from my few minutes of sprinting; I’ve had the same problem explaining the inseparability of the two extremes as I did explaining economic deviations. If you have acute stressors, then periods of rest, how can you separate the stressors from the recovery? Extremistan is characterized by both polar extremes, a high share of low impact, a low share of high impact. Consider that the presence of concentration, here energy expenditure, necessitates that a high number of observations do not contribute to anything except to the dilution. Just as the condition that makes market volatility explained by bursts (say one day in five years represents half the variance) requires that most other days remain exceedingly quiet. If one in a million authors makes half the sales, you need a lot of authors to sell no books.

This is the turkey trap I will discuss later: philistines (and Federal Reserve chairpersons) mistake periods of low volatility (caused by stabilization policies) for periods of low risk, not for switches into Extremistan.

Welcome to Gray Extremistan. Do not tamper too much with the complex system Mother Nature gave you: your body.

Beware Manufactured Stability

By a variant of the same reasoning we can see how the fear of volatility I mentioned earlier, leading to interference with nature so as to impose “regularity,” makes us more fragile across so many domains. Preventing small forest fires sets the stage for more extreme ones; giving out antibiotics when it is not very necessary makes us more vulnerable to severe epidemics—and perhaps to that big one, the grand infection that will be resistant to known antibiotics and will travel on Air France.

Which brings me to another organism: economic life. Our aversion to variability and desire for order, and our acting on those feelings, have helped precipitate severe crises. Making something artificially bigger (instead of letting it die early if it cannot survive stressors) makes it more and more vulnerable to a very severe collapse—as I showed with the Black Swan vulnerability associated with an increase in size. Another thing we saw in the 2008 debacle: the U.S. government (or, rather, the Federal Reserve) had been trying for years to iron out the business cycle, leaving us exposed to a severe disintegration. This is my argument against “stabilization” policies and the manufacturing of a nonvolatile environment. More on that, later. Next, I will discuss a few things about the Black Swan idea that do not appear to easily penetrate consciousness. Predictably.

* There is a difference between stressors and toxic exposure that weakens organisms, like the radiation I discussed in Chapter 8 with the story of the rats.

† There is a sociology-of-science dimension to the problem. The science writer Gary Taubes has convinced me that the majority of dietary recommendations (about lowering fats in diets) stand against the evidence. I can understand how one can harbor beliefs about natural things without justifying them empirically; I fail to understand beliefs that contravene both nature and scientific evidence.

* The financial equations used by the villains for the “random walk” is based on heat diffusion.

* The argument often heard about primitive people living on average less than thirty years ignores the distribution around that average; life expectancy needs to be analyzed conditionally. Plenty died early, from injuries; many lived very long—and healthy—lives. This is exactly the elementary “fooled by randomness” mistake, relying on the notion of “average” in the presence of variance, that makes people underestimate risks in the stock market.

III

MARGARITAS ANTE PORCOS *

How to not sell books in airports—Mineral water in the desert—How to denigrate other people’s ideas and succeed at it

Let me start again. The Black Swan is about consequential epistemic limitations, both psychological (hubris and biases) and philosophical (mathematical) limits to knowledge, both individual and collective. I say “consequential” because the focus is on impactful rare events, as our knowledge, both empirical and theoretical, breaks down with those—the more remote the events, the less we can forecast them, yet they are the most impactful. So The Black Swan is about human error in some domains, swelled by a long tradition of scientism and a plethora of information that fuels confidence without increasing knowledge. It covers the expert problem—harm caused by reliance on scientific-looking charlatans, with or without equations, or regular noncharlatanic scientists with a bit more confidence about their methods than the evidence warrants. The focus is in not being the turkey in places where it matters, though there is nothing wrong in being a fool where that has no effect.