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Squire and Kandel (2000). A general textbook on memory (in empirical psychology) isBaddeley (1997). Intellectual colonies and social life: See the account in Collins (1998) of the “lineages” of philosophers (although I don’t think he was aware enough of the Casanova problem to take into account the bias making the works of solo philosophers less likely to survive). For an illustration of the aggressiveness of groups, see nike air max 90 infrared Uglow (2003). Hyman Minsky’s work: Minsky (1982). Asymmetry: Prospect theory (Kahneman and Tversky [1979] and Tversky and Kahneman [1992]) accounts for the asymmetry between bad and good random events, but it also shows that the negative domain is convex while the positive domain is concave, meaning that a loss of 100 is less painful than 100 losses of 1 but that a gain of 100 is also far less pleasurable than 100 times a gain of 1. Neural correlates of the asymmetry: See Davidson’s work in Goleman (2003), Lane et al. (1997), and Gehring and Willoughby (2002). Csikszentmihalyi (1993, 1998) further explains the attractiveness of steady payoffs with his theory of “flow.” Deferred rewards and its neural correlates: McLure et al. (2004) show the brain activation in the cortex upon making a decision to defer, providing insight on the limbic impulse behind immediacy and the cortical activity in delaying. See also Loewenstein et al. (1992), Elster (1998), Berridge (2005). For the neurology of preferences in Capuchin monkeys, Chen et al. (2005). Bleed or blowup: Gladwell (2002) and Taleb (2004c). Why bleed is painful can be explained by dull stress; Sapolsky et al. (2003) and Sapolsky (1998). For how companies like steady returns, Degeorge and Zeckhauser (1999). Poetics of hope: Mihailescu (2006). Discontinuities and jumps: Classified by René Thorn as constituting seven classes; Thorn (1980). Evolution and small probabilities: Consider also the naive evolutionary thinking positing the “optimality” of selection. The founder of sociobiology, the great E. O. Wilson, does not agree with such optimality when it comes to rare events. In Wilson (2002), he writes: The human brain evidently evolved to commit itself emotionally only to a small piece of geography, a limited band of kinsmen, and two or three generations into the future. To look neither far ahead nor far afield is elemental in a Darwinian sense. We are innately inclined to ignore any distant possibility not yet requiring examination. It is, people say, just good common sense. Why do they think in this shortsighted way? The reason is simple: it is a hardwired part of our Paleolithic heritage. For hundreds of millennia, those who worked for short-term gain within a small circle of relatives and friends lived longer and left more offspring—even when their collective striving caused their chiefdoms and empires to crumble around them. The long view that might have saved their distant descendants required a vision and extended altruism instinctively difficult to marshal. See also Miller (2000): “Evolution has no foresight. It lacks the long-term vision of drug company management. A species can’t raise venture capital to pay its bills while its research team . . . This makes it hard to explain innovations. ” Note that neither author considered my age argument. CHAPTER 8 Silent evidence bears the name wrong reference class in the nasty field of philosophy of probability, anthropic bias in physics, and survivorship bias in statistics ( nike air max turnaround economists pre 318 NOTES sent the interesting attribute of having rediscovered it a few times while being severely fooled by it). Confirmation: Bacon says in On Truth, “No pleasure is comparable to the standing upon the vantage ground of truth (a hill not to be commanded and where the air is always clear and serene), and to see the errors, and wanderings, and mists, and tempests, in the vale below.” This easily shows how great intentions can lead to the confirmation fallacy. Bacon did not understand the empiricists: He was looking for the golden mean. Again, from On Truth: There are three sources of error and three species of false philosophy; the sophistic, the empiric and the superstitious Aristotle affords the most eminent instance of the first; for he corrupted natural philosophy by logic—thus he formed the world of categories. . . . Nor is much stress to be laid on his frequent recourse to experiment in his books on animals, his problems and other treatises, for he had already decided, without having properly consulted experience as the basis of his decisions and axioms. . . . The empiric school produces dogmas of a more deformed and monstrous nature than the sophistic or theoretic school; not being founded in the light of common notions (which however poor and sup Nike AU erstitious, is yet in a manner universal and of general tendency), but in the confined obscurity of a few experiments. Bacon’s misconception may be the reason it took us a while to understand that they treated history (and experiments) as mere and vague “guidance,” i.e., epilogy. Publishing: Allen (2005), Klebanoff (2002), Epstein (2001), de Be nike air max womens llaigue (2004), and Blake (1999). For a funny list of rejections, see Bernard (2002) and White (1982). Michael Korda’s memoir, Korda (2 nike air max 87 000), adds some color to the business. These books are anecdotal, but we will see later that books follow steep scale-invariant structures with the implication of a severe role for randomness. Anthropic bias: See the wonderful and comprehensive discussion in Bostrom (2002). In p nike air max 180 hysics, see Barrow and Tipler (1986) and Rees (2004). Sornette (2004) has Gott’s derivation of survival as a power law. In finance, Sullivan et al. (1999) discuss survivorship bias. See also Taleb (2004a). Studies that ignore the bias and state inappropriate conclusions: Stanley and Danko (1996) and the more foolish Stanley (2000). Manuscripts and the Phoenicians: For survival and science, see Cisne (2005). Note that the article takes into account physical su nike air max 90 rvival (like fossil), not cultural, which implies a selection bias. Courtesy Peter Bevelin. Stigler’s law of eponymy: Stigler (2002). Nike Air Max French book statistics: Lire, April 2005. Wliy dispersion matters: More technically, the distribution of the extremum (i.e., the maximum or minimum) of a random variable depends more on the variance of the process than on its mean. Someone whose weight tends to fluctuate a lot is more likely to show you a picture of himself very thin than someone else whose weight is on average lower but remains constant. The mean (read skills) sometimes plays a very, very small role. Fossil record: I thank the reader Frederick Colbourne for his comments on this subject. The literature calls it the “pull of the recent,” but has difficulty estimating the effects, owing to disagreements. See Jablonski et al. (2003). Undiscovered public knowledge: Here is another manifestation of silent evidence: you can actually do lab work sitting in an armchair, just by linking bits and pieces of research by people who labor apart from one another and miss on connections. Using bibliographic analysis, it is possible to find links between published information that had not been known previously by researchers. I “discovered” the vindication of the NOTES 31 9 armchair in Fuller (200 nike air max turnaround 5). For other interesting discoveries, see Spasser (1997) and Swanson (1986a, 1986b, 1987). Crime: The définition of economic “crime” is something that comes in hindsight. Regulations, once enacted, do not run retrospectively, so many activities causing excess are never sanctioned (e.g., bribery). Bastiat: See Bastiat (1862-1864). Casanova: I thank the reader Milo Jones for pointing out to me the exact number of volumes. See Masters (1969). Reference point problem: Taking into account background information requires a form of thinking in conditional terms that, oddly, many scientists (especially the better ones) are incapable of handling. The difference between the two odds is called, simply, cond Nike Online Store itional probability. We are computing the probability of surviving conditional on our being in the sample itself. Simply put, you cannot compute probabilities if your survival is part of the condition of the realization of the process. Plagues: See McNeill (1976). CHAPTER 9 Intelligence and Nobel: Simonton (1999). If IQ scores correlate, they do so very weakly with subsequent success. “Uncertainty”: Knight (1923). My definition of such risk (Taleb, 2007c) is that it is a normative situation, where we can be certain about probabilities, i.e., no metaprobabilities. Whereas, if randomness and risk result from epistemic opacity, the difficulty in seeing causes, then necessarily the distinction is bunk. Any reader of Cicero would recognize it as his probability; see epistemic opacity in his De Divinatione, Liber primus, LVI, 127: Qui enim teneat causas rerum futurarum, idem necesse est omnia teneat quae futura sint. Quod cum nemo facere nisi deus possit, relinquendum est homini, ut signis quibusdam consequentia declarantibus futura praesentiat. “He who knows the causes will understand the future, except that, given that nobody outside God possesses such faculty … ” Philosophy and epistemology of probability: Laplace. Treatise, Keynes (1920), de Finetti (1931), Kyburg (1983), Levi (1970), Ayer, Hacking (1990, 2001), Gillies (2000), von Mises (1928), von Plato (1994), Carnap (1950), Cohen (1989), Popper (1971), Eatwell et al. (1987), and Gigerenzer et women nike air max al. (1989). History of statistical knowledge and methods: I found no intelligent work in the history of statistics, i.e., one that does not fall prey to the ludic fallacy or Gaussianism. For a conventional account, see Bernstein (1996) and David (1962). General books on probability and information theory: Cover and Thomas (1991); less technical but excellent, Bayer (2003). For a probabilistic view of information theory: the posthumous Jaynes (2003) is the only mathematical book other than de Finetti’s work that I can recommend to the general reader, owing to his Bayesian approach and his allergy for the formalism of the idiot savant. Poker: It escapes the ludic fallacy; see Taleb (2006a). Plato’s normative approach to left and right hands: See McManus (2002). Nietzsche’s bildungsphilister: See van Tongeren (2002) and Hicks and Rosenberg (2003). Note that because of the confirmation bias academics will tell you that intellectuals “lack rigor,” and will bring examples of those who do, not those who don’t. Economics books that deal with uncertainty: Carter et al. (1962), Shackle (1961, 1973), Hayek (1994). Hirshleifer and Riley (1992) fits uncertainty into neoclassical economics. Incomputability: For earthquakes, see Freedman and Stark (2003) (courtesy of Gur Huberman). 320 NOTES Academia and philistinism: There is a round-trip fallacy; if academia means rigor (which I doubt, since what I saw called “peer reviewing” is too often a masquerade), nonacademic does not imply nonrigorous. Why do I doubt the “rigor”? By the confirmation bias they show you their contributions yet in spite of the high number of laboring academics, a relatively minute fraction of our results come from them. A disproportionately high number of cont nike air max 95 ributions come from freelance researchers and those dissingly called amateurs: Darwin, Freud, Marx, Mandelbrot, even the early Einstein. Influence on the part of an academic is usually accidental. This even held in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, see Le Goff (1985). Also, the Enlightenment figures (Voltaire, Rousseau, d’Holbach, Diderot, Montesquieu) were all nonacademics at a time when academia was large. CHAPTER 10 Overconfidence: Albert and Raiffa (1982) (though apparently the paper languished for a decade before formal publication). Lichtenstein and, Fischhoff (1977) showed that overconfidence can be influenced by item difficulty; it typically diminishes and turns into underconfidence in easy items (compare with Armelius [1979]). Plenty of papers since have tried to pin down the conditions of calibration failures or robustness (be they task training, ecological aspects of the domain, level of education, or nationality): Dawes (1980), Koriat, Lichtenstein, and Fischhoff (1980), Mayseless and Kruglanski (1987), Dunning et al. (1990), Ayton and McClelland (1997), Gervais and Odean (1999), Griffin and Varey (1996), Juslin (1991, 1993, 1994), Juslin and Olsson (1997), Kadane and Lichtenstein (1982), May (1986), McClelland and Bolger (1994), Pfeifer (1994), Russo and Schoernaker (1992), Klayman et al. (1999). Note the decrease (unexpectedly) in overconfidence under group decisions: see Sniezek and Henry (1989)—and solutions in Pious (1995). I am suspicious here of the Mediocristan/ Extremistan distinction and the unevenness of the variables. Alas, I found no paper making this distinction. There are also solutions in Stoll (1996), Arkes et al. (1987). For overconfidence in finance, see Thorley (1999) and Barber and Odean (1999). For cross-boundaries effects, Yates et al. (1996, 1998), Angele et al. (1982). For simultaneous overconfidence and underconfidence, see Erev, Wallsten, and Budescu (1994). Frequency vs. probability—the ecological problem: Hoffrage and Gigerenzer (1998) think that overconfidence is less significant when the problem is expressed in frequencies as opposed to probabilities. In fact, there has been a debate about the difference between “ecology” and laboratory; see Gigerenzer et al. (2000), Gigerenzer and Richter (1990), and Gigerenzer (1991). We are “fast and frugal” (Gigerenzer and Goldstein [1996]). As far as the Black Swan is concerned, these problems of ecology do not arise: we do not live in an environment in which we are supplied with frequencies or, more generally, for which we are fit. Also in ecology, Spariosu (2004) for the ludic aspect, Cosmides and Tooby (1990). Leary (1987) for Brunswikian ideas, as well as Brunswik (1952). L nike air max light ack of awareness of ignorance: “In short, the same knowledge that underlies the ability to produce correct judgment is also the knowledge that underlies the ability to recognize correct judgment. To lack the former is to be deficient in the latter.” From Kruger and Dunning (1999). Expert problem in isolation: I see the expert problem as indistinguishable from Matthew effects and Extremism fat tails (more later), yet I found no such link in the literatures of sociology and psychology. Clinical knowledge and its problems: See Meehl (1954) and Dawes, Faust, and Meehl (1989). Most entertaining is the essay “Why I Do Not Attend Case Conferences” in Meehl (1973). See also Wagenaar and Keren (1985, 1986). Financial analysts, herding, and forecasting: See Guedj and Bouchaud (2006), Abarbanell and Bernard (1992), Chen et al. (2002), De Bondt and Thaler (1990), Easterwood NOTES 321 and Nutt (1999), Friesen and Weller (2002), Foster (1977), Hong and Kubik (2003), Jacob et al. (1999), Lim (2001), Liu (1998), Maines and Hand (1996), Mendenhall (1991), Mikhail et al. (1997,1999), Zitzewitz (2001), and El-Galfy and Forbes (2005). For a comparison with weather forecasters (unfavorable):

Not once did I get an intelligent answer or one that was not ad hominem. Since I was questioning their entire business, it was understandable that I drew all manner of insults: “obsessive,” “commercial,” “philosophical,” “essayist,” “idle man of leisure,” “repetitive,” “practitioner” (this is an insult in academia), “academic” (this is an insult in business). Being on the receiving end of angry insults is not that bad; you can get quickly used to it and focus on what is not said. Pit traders are trained to handle angry rants. If you work in the chaotic pits, someone in a particularly bad mood from losing money might start cursing at you until he injures his vocal cords, then forget about it and, an hour later, invite you to his Christmas party. So you become numb to insults, particularly if you teach yourself to imagine that the person uttering them is a variant of a noisy ape with little personal control. Just keep your composure, smile, focus on analyzing the speaker not the message, and you’ll win the argument. An ad hominem * More technically, remember my career as an option professional. Not ony does an option on a very long shot benefit from Black Swans, but it benefits disproportionately from them—something Scholes and Merton’s “formula” misses. The option payoff is so powerful that you do not have to be right on the odds: you can be wrong on the probability, but get a monstrously large payoff. I’ve called this the “double bubble”: the rriispricing of the probability and that of the payoff. 280 THOSE GRAY SWANS OF EXTREMISTAN attack against an intellectual, not against an idea, is highly flattering. It indicates that the person does not have anything intelligent to say about your message. The psychologist Philip Tetlock (the expert buster in Chapter 10), after listening to one of my talks, reported that he was struck by the presence of an acute state of cognitive dissonance in the audience. But how people resolve this cognitive tension, as it strikes at the core of everything they have been taught and at the methods they practice, and realize that they will continue to practice, can vary a lot. It was symptomatic that almost all people who attacked my thinking attacked a deformed version of it, like “it is all random and unpredictable” rather than “it is largely random,” or got mixed up by showing me how the bell curve works in some physical domains. Some even had to change my biography. At a panel in Lugano, Myron Scholes once got in to a s nike air max 180 tate of rage, and went after a transformed version of my ideas. I could see pain in his face. Once, in Paris, a prominent member of the mathematical establishment, who invested part of his life on some minute sub-sub-property of the Gaussian, blew a fuse—right when I showed empirical evidence of the role of Black Swans in markets. He turned red with anger, had difficulty breathing, and started hurling insults at me for having desecrated the institution, lacking pudeur (modesty); he shouted “I am a member of the Academy of Science!” to give more strength to his insults. (The French translation of my book was out of stock the next day.) My best episode was when Steve Ross, an economist perceived to be an intellectual far superior to Scholes and Merton, and deemed a formidable debater, gave a rebuttal to my ideas by signaling small errors or approximations in my presentation, such as “Markowitz was not th nike air max 90 e first to . . .” thus certifying that he had no answer to my main point. Others who had invested much of their lives in these ideas resorted to vandalism on the Web. Economists often invoke a strange argument b Nike air max sale y Milton Friedman that states that models do not have to have realistic assumptions to be acceptable—giving th nike air max 87 em license to produce severely defective mathematical representations of reality. The problem of course is that these Gaussianizations do not have realistic assumptions and do not produce reliable results. They are neither realistic nor predictive. Also note a mental bias I encounter on the occasion: people mistake an event with a small probability, say, one in twenty years for a periodically occurring one. They think that they are safe if they are only exposed to it for ten years. I had trouble getting the message about the difference between Mediocristan and Extremistan through—many arguments presented to me were LOCKE’S MADMEN, OR BELL CURVES IN THE WRONG PLACES 281 about how society has done well with the bell curve—just look at credit bureaus, etc. The only comment I found unacceptable was, “You are right; we need you to remind us of the weakness of these methods, but you cannot throw the baby out with the bath water,” meaning that I needed to accept their reductive Gaussian distribution while also accepting that large deviations could occur—they didn’t realize the incompatibility of the two approaches. It was as if one could be half dead. Not one of these users of portfolio theory in twenty years of debates, explained how they could accept the Gaussian framework as well as large deviations. Not one. Confirmation Along the way I saw enough of the confirmation error to make Karl Popper stand up with rage. People would find data in which there were no jumps or extreme events, and show me a “proof” that one could use the Gaussian. This was exactly like my example of the “proof” that O. J. Simpson is not Cheap nike air max a killer in Chapter 5. The entire statistical business confused absence of proof with proof of absence. Furthermore, people did not understand the elementary asymmetry involved: you need one single observation to reject the Gaussian, but millions of observations will not fully confirm the validity of its application. Why? Because the Gaussian bell curve disallows large deviations, but tools of Extremistan, the alternative, do not disallow long quiet stretches. I did not know that Mandelbrot’s work mattered outside aesthetics and geometry. Unlike him, I was not ostracized: I got a lot of approval from practitioners and decision makers, though not from their research staffs. But suddenly I got the most unexpected vindication. IT WAS JUST A BLACK SWAN Robert Merton, Jr., and Myron Scholes were founding partners in the large speculative trading firm called Long-Term Capital Management, or LTCM, which I mentioned in Chapter 4. It was a collection of people with top-notch résumés, from the highest ranks of academia. They were considered geniuses. The ideas of portfolio theory inspired their risk management of possible outcomes—thanks to their sophisticated “calculations.” They managed to enlarge the ludic fallacy to industrial proportions. 282 THOSE GRAY SWANS OF EXTREMISTAN Then, during the summer of 1998, a combination of large events, triggered by a Russian financial crisis, took place that lay outside their models. It was a Black Swan. LTCM went bust and almost took down the entire financial system with it, as the exposures were massive. Since their models ruled out the possibility of large deviations, they allowed themselves to take a monstrous amount of risk. The ideas of Merton and Scholes, as well as those of Modern Portfolio Theory, were starting to go bust. The magnitude of the losses was spectacular, too spectacular to allow us to ignore the intellectual comedy. Many friends and I thought that the portfolio theorists would suffer the fate of tobacco companies: they were endangering people’s savings and would soon be brought to account for the consequences of their Gaussian-inspired methods. None of that happened. Instead, MBAs in business schools went on learning portfolio theory. And the option formula went on bearing the name Black-Scholes-Merton, instead of reverting to its true owners, Louis Bachelier, Ed Thorp, and other nike air max light s. How to “Prove” Things Merton the younger is a representative of the school of neoclassical economics, which, as we have seen with LTCM, represents most powerfully the dangers of Platonified knowledge.* Looking at his methodology, I see the following pattern. He starts with rigidly Platonic assumptions, completely unrealistic—such as the Gaussian probabilities, along with many more equally disturbing ones. Then he generates “theorems” and “proofs” from these. The math is tight and elegant. The theorems are compatible with other theorems from Modern Portfolio Theory, themselves compatible with still other theorems, building a grand theory of how people consume, save, face uncertainty, spend, and project the future. He assumes that we know the likelihood of events. The beastly word equilibrium is always present. But the whole edifice is like a game that is entirely closed, like Monopoly with all of its rules. * I am selecting Merton because I found him very illustrative of academically stamped obscurantism. I discovered Merton’s shortcomings from an angry and threatening seven-page letter he sent me that gave me the impression that he was not too familiar with how we trade options, his very subject matter. He seemed to be under the impression that traders rely on “rigorous” economic theory—as if birds had to study (bad) engineering in order to fly. LOCKE’S MADMEN, OR BELL CURVES IN THE WRONG PLACES 283 A scholar who applies such methodology resembles Locke’s definition of a madman: someone “reasoning correctly from erroneous premises.” Now, elegant mathematics has this property: it is perfectly right, not 99 percent so. This property appeals to mechanistic minds who do not want to deal with ambiguities. Unfortunately you have to cheat somewhere to make the world fit perfect mathematics; and you have to fudge your assumptions somewhere. We have seen with the Hardy quote that pro nike air max 95 fessional “pure” mathematicians, however, are as honest as they come. So where matters get confusing is when someone like Merton tries to be mathematical and airtight rather than focus on fitness to reality. This is where you learn from the minds of military people and those who have responsibilities in security. They do not care about “perfect” ludic reasoning; they want realistic ecological assumptions. In the end, they care about lives. I mentioned in Chapter 11 how those who started the game of “formal thinking,” by manufacturing phony premises in order to generate “rigorous” theories, were Paul Samuelson, Merton’s tutor, and, in the United Kingdom, John Hicks. These two wrecked the ideas of John Maynard Keynes, which they tried to formalize (Keynes was interested in uncertainty, and complained about the mind-closing cer women nike air max tainties induced by models). Other participants in the formal thinking venture were Kenneth Arrow and Gerard Debreu. All four were Nobeled. All four were in a delusional state under the effect of mathematics—what Dieudonné called “the music of reason,” and what I call Locke’s madness. All Nike air max uk of them can be safely accused of having invented an imaginary world, one that lent itself to their mathematics. The insightful scholar Martin Shubik, who held that the degree of excessive abstraction of these models, a few steps beyond necessity, makes them totally unusable, found himself ostracized, a common fate for dissenters.* If you question what they do, as I did with Merton Jr., they will ask for “tight proof.” So they set the rule nike air max turnaround s of the game, and you need to play by them. Coming from a practitioner background in which the principal asset is being able to work with messy, but empirically acceptable, mathematics, * Medieval medicine was also based on equilibrium ideas when it was top-down and similar to theology. Luckily its practitioners went out of business, as they could not compete with the bottom-up surgeons, ecologically driven former barbers who gained cli nike air max 90 infrared nical experience, and after whom a-Platonic clinical science was born. If I am alive, today, it is because scholastic top-down medicine went out of business a nike air max turnaround few centuries ago. 284 THOSE GRAY SWANS OF EXTREMISTAN TABLE 4: TWO WAYS TO APPROACH RANDOMNESS Skeptical Empiricism and the a-Platonic School Interested in what lies outside the Platonic fold Respect for those who have the guts to say “I don’t know” Fat Tony Thinks of Black Swans as a dominant source of randomness Bottom-up Would ordinarily not wear suits (except to funerals) Prefers to be broadly right Minimal theory, consides theorizing as a disease to resist Does not believe that we can easily compute probabilities Model: Sextus Empiricus and the school of evidence-based, minimumtheory empirical medicine Develops intuitions from practice, goes from observations to books Not inspired by any science, use nike air max womens s messy mathematics and computational methods Ideas based on skepticism, on the unread books In the library Assumes Extremistan as a starting point Sophisticated craft Seeks to be approximately right across a broad set of eventualities The Platonic Approach Focuses on the inside of the Platonic fold “You keep criticizing these models. These models are all we have.” Dr. John Thinks of ordinary fluctuations as a dominant source of randomness, with jumps as an afterthought Top-down Wears dark suits, white shirts; speaks in a boring tone Precisely wrong Everything needs to fit some grand, general socioeconomic model and “the rigor of economic theory”; frowns on the “descriptive”

it was the consequences that he thought were “interesting” (as he put it with characteristic Victorian modesty). In the end it is those who derive consequences and seize the importance of the ideas, seeing their real value, who win the day. They are the ones who can talk about the subject. So let me describe Mandelbrotian geometry. The Geometry of Nature Triangles, squares, circles, and the other geometric concepts that made many of us yawn in the classroom may be beautiful and pure notions, but they seem more present in the minds of architects, design artists, modern art buildings, and schoolteachers than in nature itself. That’s fine, except that most of us aren’t aware of this. Mountains are not triangles or pyra THE AESTHETICS OF RANDOMNESS 257 mids; trees are not circles; straight lines are almost never seen anywhere. Mother Nature did not attend high school geometry courses or read the books of Euclid of Alexandria. Her geometry is jagged, but with a logic of its own and one that is easy to understand. I have said that we seem naturally inclined to Platonify, and to think exclusively in terms of studied material: nobody, whether a bricklayer or a natural philosopher, can easily escape the enslavement of such conditioning. Consider that the great Galileo, otherwise a debunker of falsehoods, wrote the following: The great book of Nature lies ever open before our eyes and the true philosophy is written in it. . . . But we cannot read it unless we have first nike air max turnaround learned the language and the characters in which it is written. . . . It is written in mathematical language and the characters are triangles, circles and other geometric figures. Was Galileo legally blind? Even the great Galileo, with all his alleged independence of mind, was not capable of taking a clean look at Mother Nature. I am confident that he had windows in his house and that he ventured outside from time to time: he should have known that triangles are not easily found in nature. We are so easily brainwashed. We are either blind, or illiterate, or both. That nature’s geometry is not Nike air max sale Euclid’s was so obvious, and nobody, almost nobody, saw it. This (physical) blindness is identical to the ludic fallacy that makes us think casinos represent randomness. Fractality But first, a description of fractals. Then we will show how they link to what we call power laws, or scalable laws. Fractal is a word Mandelbrot coined to describe the geometry of nike air max 90 infrared the rough and broken—from the Latin fractus, the origin of fractured. Fractality is the repetition of geometric patterns at different scales, revealing smaller and smaller versions of themselves. Small parts resemble, to some degree, the whole. I will try to show in this chapter how the fractal applies to the brand of uncertainty that should bear Mandelbrot’s name: Mandelbrotian randomness. The veins in leaves look like branches; branches look like trees; rocks 258 THOSE GRAY SWANS OF EXTREMISTAN look like small mountains. There is no qualitative change when an object changes size. If you look at the coast of Britain from an airplane, it resembles what you see when you look at it with a magnifying glass. This character of self-affinity implies that one deceptively short and simple rule of iteration can be used, either by a computer or, more randomly, by Mother Nature, to build shapes of seemingly great complexity. This can come in handy for computer graphics, but, more important, it is how nature works. Mandelbrot designed the mathematical object now known as the Mandelbrot set, the most famous object in the history of mathematics. It became popular with followers of chaos theory because it generates pictures of ever increasing complexity by using a deceptively minuscule recursive rule; recursive means that something can be r women nike air max eapplied to itself infinitely. You can look at the set at smaller and smaller resolutions without ever reaching the limit; you will continue to see recognizable shapes. The shapes are never the same, yet they bear an affinity to one another, a strong family resemblance. These objects play a role in aesthetics. Consider the following applications: Visual arts: Most computer-generated objects are now based on some version of the Mandelbrotian fractal. We can also see fractals in architecture, paintings, and many works of visual art—of course, not consciously incorporated by the work’s creator. Music: Slowly hum the four-note opening of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony: ta-ta-ta-ta. Then replace each individual note with the same fournote opening, so that you end up with a measure of sixteen notes. You will see (or, rather, hear) that each smaller wave resembles the original larger one. Bach and Mahler, for instance, wrote submovements that resemble the larger movements of which they are a part. Poetry: Emily Dickinson’s poetry, for instance, is fractal: the large resembles the small. It has, according to a commentator, “a consciously made assemblage of dictions, metres, rhetorics, gestures, and tones.” Fractals initially made Beno.t M. a pariah in the mathematical establishment. French mathematicians were horrified. What? Images? Mon dieu! It was like showing a porno movie to an assembly of devout Eastern Orthodox grandmothers in my ancestral village of Amioun. So Mandelbrot spent time as an intellectual refugee at an IBM research center in upstate New York. It was a f * * * you money situation, as IBM let him do whatever he felt like doing. THE AESTHETICS OF RANDOMNESS 259 But the general public (mostly computer geeks) got the point. Mandelbrot’s book The Fractal Geometry of Nature made a splash when it came out a quarter century ago. It spread through artistic circles and led to studies in aesthetics, architectural design, even large industrial applications. Beno.t M. was even offered a position as a professor of medicine! Supposedly the lungs are self-similar. His talks were invaded by all sorts of artists, earning him the nickname the Rock Star of Mathematics. The computer age helped him become one of the most influential mathematicians in history, in terms of the applications of his work, way before his acceptance by the ivory tower. We will see that, in addition to its universality, his work offers an unusual attribute: it is remarkably easy to understand. A few words on his biography. Mandelbrot came to France from Warsaw in 1936, at the age of twelve. Owing to the vicissitudes of a clandestine life during Nazi-occupied France, he was spared some of the conventional Gallic education with its uninspiring algebraic drills, becoming l nike air max 95 argely self-taught. He was later deeply influenced by his uncle Szolem, a prominent member of the French mathematical establishment and holder of a chair at the Collège de France. Beno.t M. later settled in the United States, working most of his life as an industrial scientist, with a few transitory and varied academic appointments. The computer played two roles in the new science Mandelbrot helped conceive. First, fractal objects, as we have seen, can be generated with a simple rule applied to itself, which makes them ideal for the automatic activity of a computer (or Mother Nature). Second, in the generation of visual intuitions lies a dialectic between the mathematician and the objects generated. Now let us see how this takes us to randomness. In fact, it is with probability that Mandelbrot started his career. A Visual Approach to Extremistan/Mediocristan nike air max light I am looking at the rug in my study. If I examine it with a microscope, I will see a very rugged terrain. If I look at it with a magnifying glass, the terrain will be smoother but still highly uneven. But when I look at it from a standing position, it appears uniform—it is almost as smooth as a sheet of paper. The rug at eye level corresponds to Mediocristan and the law of large numbers: I am seeing the sum of undulations, and these iron out. This is like Gaussian randomness: the reason my cup of coffee does not 260 THOSE GRAY SWANS OF EXTREMISTAN jump is that the sum of all of its moving particles becomes smooth. Likewise, you reach certainties by adding up small Gaussian uncertainties: this is the law of large numbers. The Gaussian is not self-similar, and that is why my coffee cup does not jump on my desk. Now, consider a trip up a mountain. No matter how high you go on the surface of the earth, it will remain jagged. This is even true at a height of 30,000 feet. When you are flying above the Alps, you will still see jagged mountains in place of small stones. So some surfaces are not from Mediocristan, and changing the resolution does not make them much smoother. (Note that this effect only disappears when you go up to more extreme heights. Our planet looks smooth to an observer from space, but this is because it is too small. If it were a bigger planet, then it would have mountains that would dwarf the Himalayas, and it would require observation from a greater distance for it to look smooth. Likewise, if the planet had a larger population, even maintaining the same average wealth, we would be likely to find someone whose net worth would vastly surpass that of Bill Gates.) Figures 11 and 12 illustrate the above point: an observer looking at the first picture might think that a lens cap has fallen on the ground. Recall our brief discussion of the coast of Britain. If you look at it from an airplane, its contours are not so dif nike air max 180 ferent from the contours you see on the shore. The change in scaling does not alter the shapes or their degree of smoothness. Pearls to Swine What does fractal geometry have to do with the distribution of wealth, the size of cities, returns in the financial markets, the num nike air max turnaround ber of casualties in war, or the size of planets? Let us connect the dots. The key here is that the fractal has numerical or statistical measures that are (somewhat) preserved across scales—the ratio is the same, unlike the G nike air max 90 aussian. Another view of such self-similarity is presented in Figure 13. As we saw in Chapter 15, the superrich are similar to the rich, only richer—wealth is scale independent, or, more precisely, of unknown scale dependence. In the 1960s Mandelbrot presented his ideas Nike air max uk on the prices of commodities and financial securities to the economics establishment, and the financial economists got all excited. In 1963 the then dean of th Cheap nike air max e Uni ver THE AESTHETICS OF RANDOMNESS 261 FIGURE 11 : Apparently, a lens cap has been dropped on the ground. Now turn the page. sity of Chicago Graduate School of Business, George Shultz, offered him a professorship. This is the same George Shultz who later became Ronald Reagan’s secretary of state. Shultz called him one evening to rescind the offer. At the time of writing, forty-four years later, nothing has happened in economics and social science statistics—except for some cosmetic fiddling that treats the world as if we were subject only to mild randomness—and yet Nobel medals were being distributed. Some papers were written offering “evidence” that Mandelbrot was wrong by people who do not get the central argument of this book—you can always produce data “corroborating” that the underlying process is Gaussian by finding periods that do not have rare events, just like you can find an afternoon during which no one killed anyone and use it as “evidence” of honest behavior. I will repeat that, because of the asymmetry with induction, just as it is easier to reject innocence than accept it, it is easier to reject a bell curve than accept it; conversely, it is more difficult to reject a fractal than to accept it. Why? Because a single event can destroy the argument that we face a Gaussian bell curve. In sum, four decades ago, Mandelbrot gave pearls to economists and résumé-building philistines, which they rejected because the ideas were 262 THOSE GRAY SWANS OF EXTREMISTAN FIGURE 12: The object is not in fact a lens cap. These two photos illustrate scale invariance: the terrain is fractal. Compare it to man-made objects such as a car or a house. Source: Professor Stephen W. Wheatcraft, University of Nevada, Reno. too good for them. It was, as the saying goes, margaritas ante porcos, pearls before swine. In the rest of this chapter I will explain how I can endorse Mandelbrotian fractals as a representation of much of randomness without necessarily accepting their precise use. Fractals should be the default, the approximation, the framework. They do not solve the Black Swan problem and do not turn all Black Swans into predictable events, but they significantly mitigate the Black Swan problem by making such large events conceivable. (It makes them gray. Why gray? Because only the Gaussian give you certainties. More on that, later.) THE LOGIC OF FRACTAL RANDOMNESS (WITH A WARNING)* I have shown in the wealth lists in Chapter 15 the logic of a fractal distribution: if wealth doubles from 1 million to 2 million, the incidence of peo * The nontechnical reader can skip from here until the end of the chapter. THE AESTHETICS OF RANDOMNESS 263 FIGURE 13: THE PURE FRACTAL STATISTICAL MOUNTAIN The degree of inequality will be the same in all sixteen subsections of the graph. In the Gaussian world, disparities in wealth (or any other quantity) decrease when you look at the upper end—so billionaires should be more equal in relation to one another than millionaires are, and millionaires more equal in relation to one another than the middle class. This lack of equality at all wealth levels, in a nutshell, is statistical self-similarity. pie with at least that much money is cut in four, which is an exponent of two. If the exponent were one, then the incidence of that wealth or more would be cut in two. The exponent is called the “power” (which is why some people use the term power law). Let us call the number of occurrences higher than a certain level an “exceedance”—an exceedance of two million is the number of persons with wealth more than two million. One main property of these fractals (or another way to express their main property, scalability) is that the ratio of two exceedances* is going to be the ratio of the two numbers to the negative power of the power exponent. * By using symmetry we could also examine the incidences below the number. 264 THOSE GRAY SWANS OF EXTREMISTAN TABLE 2: ASSUMED EXPONENTS FOR VARIOUS PHENOMENA* Phenomenon Assumed Exponent (vague approximation) Frequency of use of words 1.2 Number of hits on websites 1.4 Number of books sold in the U.S. 1.5 Telephone calls received 1.22 Magnitude of earthquakes 2.8 Diameter of moon craters 2.14 Intensity of solar flares 0.8 Intensity of wars 0.8 Net worth of Americans 1.1 Number of persons per family 1 name Population of U.S. cities 1.3 Market moves 3 (or lower) Company size 1.5 People killed in terrorist attacks 2 (but possibly a much lower exponent) * Source: M.E.J. Newman (2005) and the author’s own calculations. Let us illus nike air max womens trate this. Say that you “think” that only 96 books a year will sell more than 250,000 copies (which is what happened last year), and that you “think” that the exponent is around 1.5. You can extrapolate to estimate that around 34 books will sell more than 500,000 copies— simply 96 times (500,000/250,000)15. We can continue, and note tha nike air max 87 t around 8 books should sell more than a million copies, here 96 times (l,000,000/250,000)15. Let me show the different measured exponents for a variety of phenomena. Let me tell you upfront that these exponents mean very little in terms of numerical precision. We will see why in a minute, but just note for now that we do not observe these parameters; we simply guess them, or infer them for statistical information, which makes it hard at times to know the THE AESTHETICS OF RANDOMNESS 265 TABLE 3: THE MEANING OF THE

Note that scholars are judged mostly on how many times their work is referenced in other people’s work, and thus cliques of people who quote one another are formed (it’s an “I quote you, you quote me” type of business). Eventually, authors who are not often cited will drop nike air max 87 out of the game by, say, going to work for the government (if they are of a gentle nature), or for the Mafia, or for a Wall Street firm (if they have a high level of hormones). Those who got a good push in the beginning of their scholarly careers will keep getting persistent cumulative advantages throughout life. It is easier for the rich to get richer, for the famous to become more famous. In sociology, Matthew effects bear the less nike air max 180 literary name “cumulative * Much of the perception of the importance of precocity in the career of researchers can be owed to the misunderstanding of the perverse role of this effect, especially when reinforced by bias. Enough counterexamples, even in fields like mathematics meant to be purely a “young man’s game,” illustrate the age fallacy: simply, it is necessary to be successful early, and even very early at that. 218 THOSE GRAY SWANS OF EXTREMISTAN advantage.” This theory can easily apply to companies, businessmen, actors, writers, and anyone else who benefits from past success. If you get published in The New Yorker because the color of your letterhead attracted the attention of the editor, who was daydreaming of daisies, the resultant reward can follow you for life. More significantly, it will follow others for life. Failure is also cumulative; losers are likely to also lose in the future, even if we don’t take into account the mechanism nike air max 90 of demoralization that might exacerbate it and cause additional failure. Note that art, because of its dependence on word of mouth, is extremely prone to these cumulative-advantage effects. I mentioned clustering in Chapter 1, and how journalism helps perpetuate these clusters. Our opinions about artistic merit are the result of arbitrary contagion even more than our political ideas are. One person writes a book review; another person reads it and writes a commentary that uses the same arguments. Soon you have nike air max 95 several hundred reviews that actually sum up in their contents to no more than two or three because there is so much overlap. For an anecdotal example read Fire the Bastards!, whose author, Jack Green, goes systematically through the reviews of William Gaddis’s novel The Recognitions. Green shows clearly how book reviewers anchor on other reviews and reveals powerful mutual influence, even in their wording. This phenomenon is reminiscent of the herding of financial analysts I discussed in Chapter 10. The advent of the modern media has accelerated these cumulative nike air max womens advantages. The sociologist Pierre Bourdieu noted a link between the increased concentration of success and the globalization of culture and economic life. But I am not trying to play sociologist here, only show that unpredictable elements can play a role in social outcomes. Merton’s cumulative-advantage idea has a more general precursor, “preferential attachment,” which, reversing the chronology (though not the logic), I will present next. Merton was interested in the social aspect of knowledge, not in the dynamics of social randomness, so his studies nike air max turnaround were derived separately from research on the dynamics of randomness in more mathematical sciences. Lingua Franca The theory of preferential attachment is ubiquitous in its applications: it can explain why city size is from Extremistan, why vocabulary is concen FROM MEDIOCRISTAN TO EXTREMISTAN, AND BACK 21 9 trated among a small number of words, or why bacteria populations can vary hugely in size. The scientists J. C. Willis and G. U. Yule published a landmark paper in Nature in 1922 called “Some Statistics of Evolution and Geographical Distribution in Plants and Animals, and Their Significance.” Willis and Yule noted the presence in biology of the so-called power laws, atractable versions of the scalable randomness that I discussed in Chapter 3. These power laws (on which more technical information in the following chapters) had been noticed earlier by Vilfredo Pareto, who found that they applied to the distribution of income. Later, Yule presented a simple model showing how power laws can be generated. His point was as follows: Let’s say species split in two at some constant rate, so that new species arise. The richer in species a genus is, the richer it will tend to get, with the same logic as the Mathew effect. Note the following caveat: in Yule’s model the species never die out. During the 1940s, a Harvard linguist, George Zipf, examined the properties of language and came up with an empirical regularity now known as Zipf’s law, which, of course, is not a law (and if it were, it would not be Zipf’s). It is just another way to think about the process of inequality. The mechanisms he described were as follows: the more you use a word, the less effortful you will find it to use that word again, so you borrow words from your private dictionary in proportion to their past use. This explains why out of the sixty thousand main words in English, only a few hundred constitute the bulk of what is used in writings, and even fewer appear regularly in conversation. Likewise, the more people aggregate in a particular city, the more likely a stranger will be nike trainers to pick that city as his destination. The big get bigger and the small stay small, or get relatively smaller. A great illustration of preferential attachment can be seen in the mushrooming use of English as a lingua franca—though not for its intrinsic qualities, but because people need to use one single language, or stick to one as much as possible, when they are having a conversation. So whatever language appears to have the upper hand will suddenly draw people in droves; its usage will spread like an epidemic, and other languages will be rapidly dislodged. I am often amazed to listen to conversations between people from two neighboring countries, say, between a Turk and an Iranian, or a Lebanese and a Cypriot, communicating in bad English, moving their hands for emphasis, searching for these words that come out of their 220 THOSE GRAY SWANS OF EXTREMISTAN throats at the cost of great physical effort. Even members of the Swiss Army use English (not French) as a lingua franca (it would be fun to listen). Consider that a very small minority of Americans of northern European descent is from England; traditionally the preponderant ethnic groups are of German, Irish, Dutch, French, and other northern European extraction. Yet because all these groups now use English as their main tongue, they have to study the roots of their adoptive tongue and develop a cultural association with parts of a particular wet island, along with its history, its traditions, and its customs! Ideas and Contagions The same model can be used for the contagions and concentration of ideas. But there are some restrictions on the nature of epidemics I must discuss here. Ideas do not spread without some form of structure. Recall the discussion in Chapter 4 about how we come prepared to make inferences. Just as we tend to generalize some matters but not others, so there seem to be “basins of attraction” directing us to certain beliefs. Some ideas will prove contagious, but not others; some forms of superstitions will spread, but not others; some types of religious beliefs will dominate, but not others. The anthropologist, cognitive scientist, and philosopher Dan Sperber has proposed the following idea on the epidemiology of representations. What people call “mêmes,” ideas that spread and that compete with one another using people as carriers, are not truly like genes. Ideas spread because, alas, they have for carriers self-serving agents who are interested in them, and interested in distorting them in the replication process. You do not make a cake for the sake of merely replicating a recipe—you try to make your own cake, using ideas from others to improve it. We humans are not photocopiers. So contagious mental categories must be those in which we are prepared to believe, perhaps even programmed to believe. To be contagious, a mental category must agree with our nature. NOBODY IS SAFE IN EXTREMISTAN There is something extremely na.ve about all these models of the dynamics of concentration I’ve presented so far, particularly the socioeconomic ones. For instance, although Merton’s idea includes luck, it misses an additional layer of randomness. In all these models the winner stays a win FROM MEDIOCRISTAN TO EXTREMISTAN. AND nike air max light BACK 221 ner. Now, a loser might always remain a loser, but a winner could be unseated by someone new popping up out of nowhere. Nobody is safe. Preferential-attachment theories are intuitively appealing, but they do not account for the possibility of being supplanted by newcomers—what every schoolchild knows as the decline of civilizations. Consider the logic of cities: How did Rome, with a population of 1.2 million in the first century A.D. , end up with a population of twelve thousand in the third? How did Baltimore, once a principal American city, become a relic? And how did Philadelphia come to be overshadowed by New York? A Brooklyn Frenchman When I started trading foreign exchange, I befriended a fellow named Vincent who exactly resembled a Brooklyn trader, down to the mannerisms of Fat Tony, except that he spoke the French version of Brooklynese. Vincent taught me a few tricks. Among his sayings were “Trading may have princes, but nobody sta cheap nike trainers ys a king” and “The people you meet on the way up, you will meet again on the way down.” There were theories when I was a child about class warfare and struggles by innocent individuals against powerful monster-corporations capable of swallowing the world. Anyone with intellectual hunger was fed these theories, which were inherited from the Marxist belief that the tools of exploitation were self-feeding, that the powerful would grow more and more powerful, furthering the unfairness of the system. But one had only to look around to see that these large corporate monsters dropped like flies. Take a cross section of the dominant corporations at any particular time; many of them will be out of business a few decades later, while firms nobody ever heard of will have popped onto the scene from some garage in California or from some college dorm. Consider the following sobering statistic. Of the five hundred largest U.S. companies in 1957, only seventy-four were still part of that select group, the Standard and Poor’s 500, forty years later. Only a few had disappeared in mergers; the rest either shrank or went bust. Interestingly, almost all these large corporations were located in the most capitalist country on earth, the United States. The more socialist a country’s orientation, the easier it was for the large corporate monsters to stick around. Why did capitalism (and not socialism) destroy these ogres? In other words, if you leave companies alone, they tend to get eaten up. Those in favor of economic freedom claim that beastly and greedy corpo 222 THOSE GRAY SWANS OF EXTREMISTAN rations pose no threat because competition keeps them in check. What I saw at the Wharton School convinced me that the real reason includes a large share of something else: chance. But when people discuss chance (which they rarely do), they usually only look at their own luck. The luck of others counts greatly. Another corporation may luck out thanks to a blockbuster product and displace the current winners. Capitalism is, among other things, the revitalization of the world thanks to the opportunity to be lucky. Luck is the women nike air max grand equalizer, because almost everyone can benefit from it. The socialist governments protected thei nike air max turnaround r monsters and, by doing so, killed potential newcomers in the womb. Everything is transitory. Luck both made and unmade Carthage; it both made and unmade Rome. I said earlier that randomness is bad, but it is not always so. Luck is far more egalitarian than even intelligence. If people were rewarded strictly according to their abilities, things would still be unfair—people don’t choose their abilities. Randomness has the beneficial effect of reshuffling society’s cards, knocking down the big guy. In the arts, fads do the same job. A newcomer may benefit from a fad, as followers multiply thanks to a preferential attachment-style epidemic. T nike air max 90 infrared hen, guess what? He too becomes history. It is quite interesting to look at the acclaimed authors of a particular era and see how many have dropped out of consciousness. It even happens in countries such as France where the government supports established reputations, just as it supports ailing large companies. When I visit Beirut, I often spot in relatives’ homes the remnants of a series of distinctively white-leather-bound “Nobel books.” Some hyperactive salesman once managed to populate private libraries with these beautifully made volumes; many people buy books for decorative purposes and want a simple selection criterion. The criterion this series offered was one book by a Nobel winner in literature every year—a simple way to build the ultimate library. The series was supposed to be updated every year, but I presume the company went out of business in the eighties. I feel a pang every time I look at these volumes: Do you hear much today about Sully Prudhomme (the first recipient), Pearl Buck (an American woman), Romain Rolland, Anatole France (the last two were the most famous French authors of their generations), St. John Perse, Roger Martin du Gard, or Frédéric Mistral? FROM MEDIOCRISTAN TO EXTREMISTAN, AND BACK 223 The Long Tail nike trainers uk I have said that nobody is safe in Extremistan. This has a converse: nobody is threatened with complete extinction either. Our current environment allows the little guy to bide his time in the antechamber of success—as long as there is life, there is hope. This idea was recently revived by Chris Anderson, one of a very few who get the point that the dynamics of fractal concentration has another layer of randomness. He packaged it with his idea of the “long tail,” about which in a moment. Anderson is lucky not to be a professional statistician (people who have had the misfortune of going through conventional statistical training think we live in Mediocristan). He was able to take a fresh look at the dynamics of the world. True, the Web produces acute concentration. A large number of users visit just a few sites, such as Google, which, at the time of this writing, has total market dominance. At no time in history has a company grown so dominant so quickly—Google can service people from Nicaragua to southwestern Mongolia to the American West Coast, without having to worry about phone operators, shipping, delivery, and manufacturing. This is the ultimate winner-take-all case study.

called “anticipated utility” by Danny Kahneman and “affective forecasting” by Dan Gilbert. The point is not so much that we tend to mispredict our future happiness, but rather that we do not learn recursively from past experiences. We have evidence of a mental block and distortions in the way we fail to learn from our past errors in projecting the future of our affective states. We grossly overestimate the length of the effect of misfortune on our lives. You think that the loss of your fortune or current position will be devastating, but you are nike trainers uk probably wrong. More likely, you will adapt to anything, as you probably did after past misfortunes. You may feel a sting, but it will not be as bad as you expect. This kind of misprediction may have a purpose: to motivate us to perform important acts (like buying new cars or getting rich) and to prevent us from taking certain unnecessary risks. And it is part of a more general problem: we humans are supposed to fool ourselves a little bit here and there. According to Trivers’s theory of self-deception, this is supposed to orient us favorably toward the future. But self-deception is not a desirable feature outside of its natural domain. nike air max turnaround It prevents us from taking some unnecessary risks—but we saw in Chapter 6 how it does not as readily cover a spate of modern risks that we do not fear because they are not vivid, such as investment risks, environmental dangers, or long-term nike air max 87 security. Helenus and the Reverse Prophecies If you are in the business of being a seer, describing the future to other less- privileged mortals, you are judged on the merits of your predictions. Helenus, in The Iliad, was a different kind of seer. The son of Priam and Hecuba, he was the cleverest man in the Trojan army. It was he who, under torture, told the Achaeans how they would capture Troy (apparently he didn’t predict that he himself would be captured). But this is not what distinguished him. Helenus, unlike other seers, was able to predict 196 WE JUST CAN’T PREDICT the past with great precision—without having been given any details of it. He predicted backward. Our problem is not just that we do not know the future, we do not know much of the past e nike air max 95 ither. We badly need someone like Helenus if we are to know history. Let us see how. The Melting Ice Cube Consider the following thought experiment borrowed from my friends Aaron Brown and Paul Wilmott: Operation 1 (the melting ice cube): Imagine an ice cube and consider how it may melt over the next two hours while you play a few rounds of poker with your friends. Try to envision the shape of the resulting puddle. Operation 2 (where did the water come from?): Consider a puddle of water on the floor. Now try to reconstruct in your mind’s eye the shape of the ice cube it may once have been. Note that the puddle may not have necessarily originated from an ice cube. The second operation is harder. Helenus indeed had to have skills. The difference between these two processes resides in the following. If you have the right models (and some time on your hands, and nothing better to do) you can predict with great precision how the ice cube will m nike air max womens elt— this is a specific engineering problem devoid of complexity, easier than the one involving billiard balls. However, from the pool of water you can build infinite possible ice cubes, if there was in fact an ice cube there at all. The first direction, from the ice cube to the puddle, is called the forward process. The second direction, the backward process, is much, much more complicated. The forward process is generally used in physics and engineering; the backward process in nonrepeatable, nonexperimental historical approaches. In a way, the limitations that prevent us from unfrying an egg also prevent us from reverse engineering history. Now, let me increase the complexity of the forward-backward problem just a bit by assuming nonlinearity. Take what is generally called the “butterfly in India” paradigm from the discussion of Lorenz’s discovery in the previous chapter. As we have seen, a small input in a complex system can lead to nonrandom large results, depending on very special conditions. A single butterfly flapping its wings in New Delhi may be the certain cause of a hurricane in North Carolina, though the hurricane may tak nike air max light e EPISTEMOCRACY, A DREAM 197 place a couple of years later. However, given the observation of a hurricane in North Carolina, it is dubious that you could figure out the causes with any precision: there are billions of billions of such small things as wing-flapping butterflies in Timbuktu or sneezing wild dogs in Australia that could have caused it. The process from the butterfly to the hurricane is greatly simpler than the reverse process from the hurricane to the potential butterfly. Confusion between the two is disastrously widespread in common culture. This “butterfly in India” metaphor has fooled at least one filmmaker. For instance, Happenstance (a.k.a. The Beating of a Butterfly’s Wings), a French-language film by one Laurent Firode, meant to encourage people to focus on small things that can change the course of their lives. Hey, since a small event (a petal falling on the ground and getting your attention) can lead to your choosing one person over another as a mate for life, you should focus on these very small details. Neither the filmmaker nor the critics realized that they were dealing with the backward process; there are trillions of such small things in the course of a simple day, and examining all of them lies outside of our reach. Once Again, Incomplete Information Take a personal computer. You can use a sp nike air max 90 readsheet program to generate a random sequence, a succession of points we can call a history. How? The computer program responds to a very complicated equation of a nonlinear nature that produces numbers that seem random. The equation is very simple: if you know it, you can predict the sequence. It is almost impossible, however, for a human being to reverse engineer the equation and predict further sequences. I am talking about a simple one-line computer program (called the “tent map”) generating a handful of nike air max 180 data points, not about the billions of simultaneous events that constitute the real history of the world. In other words, even if history were a nonrandom series generated by some “equation of the world,” as long as reverse engineering such an equation does not seem within human possibility, it should be deemed random and not bear the name “deterministic chaos.” Historians should stay away from chaos theory and the difficulties of reverse engineering except to discuss general properties of the world and learn the limits of what they can’t know. This brings me to a greater problem with the historian’s craft. I will 198 WE JUST CAN’T PREDICT state the fundamental problem of practice as follows: while in theory randomness is an intrinsic property, in practice, randomness is incomplete information, what I called opacity in Chapter 1. Nonpractitioners of randomness do not understand the subtlety. Often, in conferences when they hear me talk about uncertainty and randomness, philosophers, and sometimes mathematicians, bug me about the least relevant point, namely whether the randomness I address is “true randomness” or “deterministic chaos” that masquerades as randomness. A true random system is in fact random and does not have predictable properties. A chaotic system has entirely predictable properties, but they are hard to know. So my answer to them is dual. a) There is no functional difference in practice between the two since we will never get to make the distinction—the difference is mathematical, not practical. If I see a pregnant woman, the sex of her child is a purely random matter to me (a 50 percent chance for either sex)—but not to her doctor, who might have done an ultrasound. In practice, randomness is fundamentally incomplete information. b) The mere fact that a person is talking about the difference implies that he has never made a meaningful decision under uncertainty—which is why he does not realize that they are indistinguishable in practice. Randomness, in the end, is just unknowledge. The world is opaque and appearances fool us. What They Call Knowledge One final word on history. History is like a museum where one can go to see the repository of the past, and taste the charm of olden days. It is a wonderful mirror in which we can see our own narratives. You can even track the pa nike air max turnaround st using DNA analyses. I am fond of literary history. Ancient history satisfies my desire to build my own self-narrative, my identity, to connect with my (complicated) Eastern Mediterranean roots. I even prefer the accounts of older, patently less accurate books to modern ones. Among the authors I’ve reread (the ultimate test of whether you like an author is if you’ve reread him) the following come to mind: Plutarch, Livy, Suetonius, Diodorus Siculus, Gibbon, Carlyle, Renan, and Michelet. These accounts are patently substandard, compared to today nike trainers ‘s works; they are largely anecdotal, and full of myths. But I know this. History is useful for the thrill of knowing the past, and for the narra EPISTEMOCRACY, A DREAM 199 tive (indeed), provided it remains a harmless narrative. One should learn under severe caution. History is certainly not a place to theorize or derive general knowledge, nor is it meant to help in the future, without some caution. We can get negative confirmation from history, which is invaluable, but we get plenty of illusions of knowledge along with it. This brings me back once again to Menodotus and the treatment of the turkey problem and how to not be a sucker for the past. The empirical doctor’s approach to the problem of induction was to know history without theorizing from it. Learn to read history, get all the knowledge you can, do not frown on the anecdote, but do not draw any causal links, do not try to reverse engineer too much—but if you do, do not make big scientific claims. Remember that the empirical skeptics had respect for custom: they used it as a default, a basis for action, but not for more than that. This clean approach to the past they called epilogism.* But most historians have another opinion. Consider the representative introspection What Is History? by Edward Hallett Carr. You will catch him explicitly pursuing causation as a central aspect of his job. You can even go higher up: Herodotus, deemed to be the father of the subject, defined his women nike air max purpose in the opening of his work: To preserve a memory of the deeds of the Greeks and barbarians, “and in particular, beyond everything else, to give a cause [emphasis mine] to their fighting one another.” You see the same with all theoreticians of history, whether Ibn Khaldoun, Marx, or Hegel. The more we try to turn history into anything other than an enumeration of accounts to be enjoyed with minimal theorizing, the more we get into trouble. Are we so plagued with the narrative fallacy?! * Yogi Berra might have a theory of epilogism with his saying, “You can observe a lot by just watching.” f While looking at the past it would be a good idea to resist na.ve analogies. Many people have compared the United States today to Ancient Rome, both from a military standpoint (the destruction of Carthage was often invoked as an incentive for the destruction of enemy regimes) and from a social one (the endless platitudinous warnings of the upcoming decline and fall). Alas, we need to be extremely careful in transposing knowledge from a simple environment that is closer to type 1, like the one we had in antiquity, to today’s type 2, complex system, with its intricate webs of casual links. Another error is to draw casual conclusions from the absence of nuclear war, since, invoking the Casanova argument of Chapter 8,1 would repeat that we would not be here had a nuclear war taken place, and it is not a good idea for us to derive a “cause” when our survival is conditioned on that cause. 200 WE JUST CAN’T PREDICT We may have to wait for a generation of skeptical-empiricist historians capable of understanding the difference between a forward process and a reverse one. Just as Popper attacked the historicists in their making claims about the future, I have just presented the weakness of the historical approach in knowing the past itself. After this discussion about future (and past) blindness, let us see what to do about it. Remarkably, there are extremely practical measures we can take. We will explore this next. Chapter Thirteen APPELLES THE PAINTER, OR WHAT DO YOU DO IF YOU CANNOT PREDICT?* You should charge people for advice—My two cents here—Nobody knows anything, but, at least, he knows it—Go to parties ADVICE IS CHEAP, VERY CHEAP It is not a good habit to stuff one’s text with quotations from prominent thinkers, except to make fun of them or provide a historical reference. They “make sense,” but well-sounding maxims force themselves on our gullibility and do not always stand up to empirical tests. So I chose the ioU lowing statement by the ùberphilos nike air max 90 infrared opher Bertrand Russell precisely because I disagree with it. The demand for certainty is one which is natural to man, but is nevertheless an intellectual vice. If you take your children for a picnic on a doubtful day, they will demand a dogmatic answer as to whether it will be fine or wet, and be disa cheap nike trainers ppointed in you when you cannot be sure. .. . * This chapter provides a general conclusion for those who by now say, “Taleb, I get the point, but what should I do?” My answer is that if you got the point, you are pretty much there. But here is a nudge. 202 WE JUST CAN’T PREDICT But so long as men are not trained [emphasis mine] to

Fahrenheit, with an expected error rate of forty degrees than if I told you that my margin of error was only five degrees. The policies we need to make decisions on should depend far more on the range of possible outcomes than on the expected final number. I have seen, while working for a bank, how people project cash flows for companies without wrapping them in the thinnest layer of uncertainty. Go to the stockbroker and check on what method they use to forecast sales ten years ahead to “calibrate” their valuation models. Go nike air max 180 find out how analysts forecast government deficits. Go to a bank or security-analysis training program and see how they teach * While forecast errors have always been entertaining, commodity prices have been a great trap for suckers. Consider this 1970 forecast by U.S. officials (signed by the U.S. Secretaries of the Treasury, State, Interior, and Defense): “the standard price of foreign crude oil by 1980 may well decline and will in any event not experience a substantial increase.” Oil prices went up tenfold by 1980. I just wonder if current forecasters lack in intellectual curiosity or if they are intentionally ignoring forecast errors. Also note this additional aberration: since high oil prices are marking up their inventories, oil companies are making record bucks and oil executives are getting huge bonuses because “they did a good job”—as if they brought profits by causing the rise of oil prices. 162 WE JUST CAN’T PREDICT trainees to make assumptions; they do not teach you to build an error rate around those assumptions—but their error rate is so large that it is far more significant than the projection itself! The second fallacy lies in f nike air max 90 infrared ailing to take into account forecast degradation as the projected period lengthens. We do not realize the full extent of the difference between near and far futures. Yet the degradation in such forecasting through time becomes evident through simple introspective examination—without even recourse to scientific papers, which on this topic are suspiciously rare. Consider forecasts, whether economic or technological, made in 1905 for the following quarter of a century. How close to the projections did 1925 turn out to be? For a convincing experience, go read George Orwell’s 1984. Or look at more recent forecasts made in 1975 about the prospects for the new millennium. Many events have taken place and new technologies have appeared that lay outside the forecasters’ imaginations; many more that were expected to take place or appear did not do so. Our forecast errors have traditionally been enormous, and there may be no reasons for us to believe that we are suddenly in a more privileged position to see into th nike usa online e future compared to our blind predecessors. Forecasting by bureaucrats tends to be used for anxiety relief rather than for adequate policy making. The third fallacy, and perhaps the gravest, concerns a misunderstanding of the random character of the variables being forecast. Owing to the Black Swan, these variables can accommodate far more optimistic—or far more pessimistic—scenarios than are currently expected. Recall from my experiment with Dan Goldstein testing the domain-specificity of our intuitions, how we tend to make no mistakes in Mediocristan, but make large ones in Extremistan as we do not realize the consequences of the rare event. What is the implication here? Even if you agree with a given forecast, you have to worry about the real possibility of significant divergence from it. These divergences may be welcomed by a speculator who does not depend on steady income; a retiree, however, with set risk attributes cannot afford such gyrations. I would go even further and, using the argument about the depth of the river, state that it is the lower bound of estimates (i.e., the worst case) that matters when engaging in a policy—the worst case is far more consequential than the forecast itself. This is particularly true if the bad scenario is not acceptable. Yet the current phraseology makes no allowance for that. None. THE SCANDAL OF PREDICTION 163 It is often said that “is wise he who can see things coming.” Perhaps the wise one is the one who knows that he cannot see things nike air max light far away. Get Another Job The two typical replies I face when I question forecasters’ business are: “What should he do? Do you have a better way for us to predict?” and “If you’re so smart, show me your own prediction.” In fact, the latter question, usually boastfully presented, aims to show the superiority of the practitioner and “doer” over the philosopher, and mostly comes from people who do not know that I was a trader. If there is one advantage of having been in the daily practice of uncertainty, it is that one does not have to take any crap from bureaucrats. One of my clients asked for my predictions. When I told him I had none, he was offended and decided to dispense with my services. There is in fact a routine, unintrospective habit of making businesses answer questionnaires and fill out paragraphs showing their “outlooks.” I have never had an outlook and have never made professional predictions—but at least I know that I cannot forecast and a small number of people (those I care about) take that as an asset. There are those people who produce forecasts uncritically. When asked why they forecast, they answer, “Well, that’s what we’re paid to do here.” My suggestion: get another job. This suggestion is not too demanding: unless you are a slave, I assume you have some amount of control over your job selection. Otherwise this becomes a problem of ethics, and a grave one at that. People who are trapped in their jobs who forecast simply because “that’s my job,” knowing pretty well that their forecast is ineffectual, are not what I would call ethical. What they do is no different from repeating lies simply because “it’s my job.” Anyone who causes harm by forecasting should be treated as either a fool or a liar. Some forecasters cause more damage to society than criminals. Please, don’t drive a school bus blindfolded. At JFK At New York’s JFK airport you can find gigantic newsstands with walls full of magazines. They are usually manned by a very polite family from 164 WE JUST CAN’T PREDICT Caravaggio’s The Forfune-Teller. We have always been suckers for those who tell us about the future. In this picture the fortune-teller is stealing the victim’s ring. the Indian subcontinent (just the parents; the children are in medical school). These walls present you with the entire corpus of what an “informed” person needs in order “to know what’s going on.” I wonder how long it would take to read every single one of these magazines, excluding the fishing and motorcycle periodicals (but including the gossip magazines—you might as well have some fun). Half a lifetime? An entire lifetime? Sadly, all this knowledge would not help the reader to forecast what is to happen tomorrow. Actually, it might decrease his ability to forecast. There is another aspect to the problem of prediction: its inherent limitations, those that have little to do with human nature, but instead arise from the very nature of information itself. I have said that the Black Swan has three attributes: unpredictability, consequences, and retrospective explainability. Let us examine this unpredictability business.* * I owe the reader an answer concerning Catherine’s lover count. She had only twelve. Chapter Eleven HOW TO LOOK FOR BIRD POOP Popper’s prediction about the predictors—Poincaré plays with billiard balls— Von Hayek is allowed to be irreverent—Anticipation machines—Paul Samuel- son wants you to be rational—Beware the philosopher—Demand some certainties. We’ve seen that a) we tend to both tunnel and think “narrowly” (epistemic arrogance), and b) our prediction record is highly overestimated— many people who think they can predict actually can’t. We will now go deeper into the unadvertised structural limitations on our ability to predict. These limitations may arise not from us but from the nature of the activity itself—too complicated, not just for us, but for any tools we haye or can conceivably obtain. Some Black Swans will remain elusive, enough nike air max usa to kill our forecasts. nike air max turnaround HOW TO LOOK FOR BIRD POOP In the summer of 1998 I worked at a European-owned financial institution. It wanted to disting nike air max 90 uish itself by being rigorous and farsighted. The unit involved in trading had five managers, all serious-looking (always in dark blue suits, even on dress-down Frida women nike air max ys), who had to meet throughout the summer in order “to formulate the five-year plan.” This was sup 166 WE JUST CAN’T PREDICT posed to be a meaty document, a sort of user’s manual for the firm. A f nike air max womens ive- year plan? To a fellow deeply skeptical of the central planner, the notion was ludicrous; growth within the firm had been organic and unpredictable, bottom-up not top-down. It was well known that the firm’s most lucrative department was the product of a chance call from a customer asking for a specific but strange financial transaction. The firm accidentally realized that they could build a unit just to handle these transactions, since they were profitable, and it rapidly grew to dominate their activities. The managers flew across the world in order to meet: Barcelona, Hong Kong, et cetera. A lot of miles for a lot of verbiage. Needless to say they were usually sleep-deprived. Being an executive does not require very developed frontal lobes, but rather a combination of charisma, a capacity to sustain boredom, and the ability to shallowly perform on harrying schedules. Add to these tasks the “duty” of attending opera performances. The managers sat down to brainstorm during these meetings, about, of course, the medium-term future—they wanted to have “vision.” But then an event occurred that was not in the previous five-year plan: the Black Swan of the Russian financial default of 1998 and the accompanying meltdown of the values of Latin American debt markets. It had such an effect on the firm that, although the institution had a sticky employment policy of retaining managers, none of the five was still employed there a month after the sketch of the 1998 five-year plan. 520 Yet I am confident that today their replacements are still meeting to work on the next “five-year plan.” We never learn. Inadvertent Discoveries The discovery of human epistemic arrogance, as we saw in the previous chapter, was allegedly inadvertent. But so were many other discoveries as well. Many more than we think. The classical model of discovery is as follows: you search for what you know (say, a new way to reach India) and find something you didn’t know was there (America). If you think that the inventions we see around us came from someone sitting in a cubicle and concocting them according to a timetable, think again: almost everything of the moment is the product of serendipity. The term serendipity was coined in a letter by the writer Hugh Walpole, who derived it from a fairy tale, “The Three Princes of Serendip.” These HOW TO LOOK FOR BIRD POOP 167 princes “were always making discoveries by accident or sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of.” In other words, you find something you are not looking for and it changes the world, while wondering after its discovery why it “took so long” to arrive at something so obvious. No journalist was present when the wheel was invented, but I am ready to bet that people did not just embark on the project of inventing the wheel (that main engine of growth) and then complete it according to a timetable. Likewise with most inventions. Sir Francis Bacon commented that the most important advances are the least predictable ones, those “lying out of the path of the imagination.” Bacon was not the last intellectual to point this out. The idea keeps popping up, yet then rapidly dying out. Almost half a century ago, the bestselling novelist Arthur Koestler wrote an entire book about it, aptly called The Sleepwalkers. It describes discoverers as sleepwalkers stumbling upon results and not realizing what they have in their hands. We think that the import of Copernicus’s discoveries concerning planetary motions was obvious to him and to others in his day; he had been dead seventy-five years before the authorities started getting offended. Likewise we think that Galileo was a victim in the name of science; in fact, the church didn’t take him too seriously. It seems, rather, that Galileo caused the uproar himself by ruffling a few feathers. At the end of the year in which Darwin and Wallace presented their papers on evolution by natural selection that changed the way we view the world, the president of the Linnean society, where the papers were presented, announced that the society saw “no striking discovery,” nothing in particular that could revolutionize science. We forget about unpredictability when it is our turn to predict. This is why people can read this chapter and similar accounts, agree entirely with them, yet fail to heed their arguments when thinking about the future. Take this dramatic example of a serendipitous discovery. Alexander Fleming was cleaning up his laboratory when he found that pénicillium mold had contaminated one of his old experiments. He thus happened upon the antibacterial properties of penicillin, the reason many of us are alive today (including, as I said in Chapter 8, myself, for typhoid fever is often fatal when untreated). True, Fleming was looking for “something,” but the actual discovery was simply serendipitous. Furthermore, while in hindsight the discovery appears momentous, it took a very long time for 168 WE JUST CAN’T PREDICT health officiais to realize the importance of what they had on their hands. Even Fleming lost faith in the idea before it was subsequently revived. In 1965 two radio astronomists at Bell Labs in New Jersey who were mounting a large antenna were bothered by a background noise, a hiss, cheap nike air max like the static that you hear when you have bad reception. The noise could not be eradicated—even after they cleaned the bird excrement out of the dish, since they were convinced that bird poop was behind the noise. It took a while for them to figure out that what they were hearing was the trace of the birth of the universe, the cosmic background microwave radiation. This discovery revived the big bang theory, a languishing idea that was posited by earlier researchers. I found the following comments on Bell Labs’ website commenting on how this “discovery” was one of the century’s greatest advances: Dan Stanzione, then Bell Labs president and Lucent’s chief operating officer when Penzias [one of the radio astronomers involved in the discovery] retired, said Penzias “embodies the creativity and technical excellence that are the hallmarks of Bell Labs.” He called him a Renaissance figure who “extended our fragile understanding of creation, and advanced the frontiers of science in many important areas.” Renaissance shmenaissance. The two fellows were looking for bird poop! Not only were they not looking for anything remotely like the evidence of the big bang but, as usual in these cases, they did not immediately see the importance of their find. Sadly, the physicist Ralph Alpher, the pe nike air max 95 rson nike air max 87 who initially conceived of the idea, in a paper coauthored with heavyweights George Gamow and Hans Bethe, was surprised to read about the discovery in The New York Times. In fact, in the languishing papers positing the birth of the universe, scientists were doubtful whether such radiation could ever be measured. A nike air max turnaround s happens so often in discovery, those looking for evidence did not find it; those not looking for it found it and were hailed as discoverers. We have a paradox. Not only have forecasters generally failed dismally to foresee the drastic changes brought about by unpredictable discoveries, but incremental change has turned out to be generally slower than forecasters expected. When a new technology emerges, we either grossly underestimate or severely overestimate its importance. Thomas Watson, the founder of IBM, once predicted that there would be no need for more than just a handful of computers. HOW TO LOOK FOR BIRD POOP 169 That the reader of this book is probably reading these lines not on a screen but in the pages of that anachronistic device, the book, would seem quite an aberration to certain pundits of the “digital revolution.” That you are reading them in archaic, messy, and inconsistent English, French, or Swahili, instead of in Esperanto, defies the predictions of half a century ago that the world would soon be communicating in a logical, unambiguous, and Platonically designed lingua franca. Likewise, we are not spending long weekends in space stations as was universally predicted three decades ago. In an example of corporate arrogance, after the first moon

There is no effective difference between my guessing a variable that is not random, but for which my information is partial or deficient, such as the number of lovers who transited through the bed of Catherine II of Russia, and predicting a random one, like tomorrow’s unemployment rate or next year’s stock market. In this sense, guessing (what I don’t know, but what someone else may know) and predicting (what has not taken place yet) are the same thing. To further appreciate the connection between guessing and predicting, assume that instead of trying to gauge the number of lovers of Catherine of Russia, you are estimating the less interesting but, for some, more important question of the population growth for the next century, the stockmarket returns, the social-security déficit, the price of oil, the results of your great-uncle’s estate sale, or the environmental conditions of Brazil two decades from now. Or, if you are the publisher of Yevgenia Krasnova’s book, you may need to produce an estimate of the possible future sales. We are now getting into dangerous waters: just consider that most professionals who make forecasts are also afflicted with the mental impediment discussed above. Furthermore, people who make forecasts professionally are often more affected by such impediments than those who don’t. INFORMATION IS BAD FOR KNOWLEDGE You may wonder how learning, education, and experience affect epistemic arrogance—how educated people might score on the above test, as compared with the rest of the population (using Mikhail the cabdriver as a benchmark). You will be surprised by the answer: it depends on the pro THE SCANDAL OF PREDICTION 143 fession. I will first look at the advantages of the “informed” over the rest of us in the humbling business of prediction. I recall visiting a friend at a New York investment bank and seeing a frenetic hotshot “master of the universe” type walking around with a set of wireless headphones wrapped around his ears and a microphone jutting out of the right side that prevented me from focusing on his lips during my twenty-second conversation with him. I asked my friend the purpose of that contraption. “He likes to keep in touch with London,” I was told. When you are employed, hence dependent on other people’s judgment, looking busy can help you claim responsibility for the results in a random environment. The appearance of busyness reinforces the perception of causality, of the link between results and one’s role in them. This of course applies even more to the CEOs of large companies who need to trumpet a link between their “presence” and “leadership” and the results of the company. I am not aware of any studies that probe the usefulness of their time being invested in conversations and the absorption of small-time information—nor have too many writers had the guts to question how large the CEO’s role is in a corporation’s success. Let us discuss one main effect of information: impediment to knowledge. Aristotle Onassis, perhaps the first mediatized tycoon, was principally famous for being rich—and for exhibiting it. An ethnic Greek refugee from southern Turkey, he went to Argentina, made a lump of cash by importing Turkish tobacco, then became a ship cheap nike air max ping magnate. He was reviled when he married Jacqueline Kennedy, the widow of the American president John F. Kennedy, which drove the heartbroken opera singer Maria Callas to immure herself in a Paris apartment to nike air max light await death. If you study Onassis’s life, which I spent part of my early adulthood doing, you would notice an interesting regularity: “work,” in the conventional sense, was not his thing. He did not even bother to have a desk, let alone an office. He was not just a dealmaker, which does not necessitate having an office, but he also ran a shipping empire, which requires day-today monitoring. Yet his main tool was a notebook, which contained all the information he needed. Onassis spent his life trying to socialize with the rich and famous, and to pursue (and coll nike air max turnaround ect) women. He generally woke up at noon. If he needed legal advice, he would summon his lawyers to some nightclub in Paris at two A.M. He was said to have an irresistible charm, which helped him take advantage of people. Let us go beyond the anecdote. There may be a “fooled by random 144 WE JUST CAN’T PREDICT ness” effect here, of making a causal link between Onassis’s success and his modus operandi. I may never know if Onassis was skilled or lucky, though I am convinced that his charm opened doors for him, but I can subject his modus to a rigorous examination by looking at empirical research on the link between information and understanding. So this statement, additional knowledge of the minutiae of daily business can be useless, even actually toxic, is indirectly but quite effectively testable. Show two groups of people a blurry image of a fire hydrant, blurry enough for them not to recognize what it is. For one group, increase the resolution slowly, in ten steps. For the second, do it faster, in five steps. Stop at a point where both groups have been presented an identical image and ask each of them to identify what they see. The members of the group that saw fewer intermediate steps are likely to recognize the hydrant much faster. Moral? The more information you give someone, the more hypotheses they will formulate along the way, and the worse off they will be. They see more random noise and mistake it for information. The problem is that our ideas are sticky: once we produce a theory, we are not likely to change our minds—so thos nike air max 90 infrared e who delay developing their theories are better off. When you develop your opinions on the basis of weak evidence, you will have difficulty interpreting subsequent information that contradicts these opinions, even if this new information is obviously more accurate. Two mechanisms are at play here: the confirmation bias that we saw in Chapter 5, and belief perseverance, the tendency not to reverse opinions you already have. Remember that we treat ideas like possessions, and it will be hard for us to part with them. The fire hydrant experiment was first done in the sixties, and replicated several times since. I have also studied this effect using the mathematics of information: the more detailed knowledge one gets of empirical reality, the more one will see the noise (i.e., the anecdote) and mistake it for actual information. Remember that we are swayed by the sensational. Listening to the news on the radio every hour is far worse for you than reading a weekly magazine, because the longer interval allows information to be filtered a bit. In 1965, Stuart Oskamp supplied clini nike air max womens cal psychologists with successive files, each containing an increasing amount of information about patients; the psychologists’ diagnostic abilities did not grow with the additional supply of information. They just got more confident in their original diagnosis. Granted, one may not expect too much of psychologists of the 1965 variety, but these findings seem to hold across disciplines. THE SCANDAL OF PREDICTION 145 nike usa online Finally, in another telling experiment, the psychologist Paul Slovic asked bookmakers to select from eighty-eight variables in past horse races those that they found useful in computing the odds. These variables included all manner of statistical information about past performances. The bookmakers were given the ten most useful variables, then asked to predict the outcome of races. Then they were given ten more and asked to predict again. The increase in the information set did not lead to an increase in their accuracy; their confidence in their choices, on t nike air max 180 he other hand, went up markedly. Information proved to be toxic. I’ve struggled much of my li nike air max turnaround fe with the common middlebrow belief that “more is better”—more is sometimes, but not always, better. This toxicity of knowledge will show in our investigation of the so-called expert. THE EXPERT PROBLEM, OR THE TRAGEDY OF THE EMPTY SUIT So far we have not questioned the authority of the professionals involved but rather their ability to gauge the boundaries of their own knowledge. Epistemic arrogance does not preclude skills. A plumber will almost always kno nike air max 90 w more about plumbing than a stubborn essayist and mathematical trader. A hernia surgeon will rarely know less about hernias than a belly dancer. But their probabilities, on the other hand, will be off—and, this is the disturbing point, you may know much more on that score than the expert. No matter what anyone tells you, it is a good idea to question the error rate of an expert’s procedure. Do not question his procedure, only his confidence. (As someone who was burned by the medical establishment, I learned to be cautious, and I urge everyone to be: if you walk into a doctor’s office with a symptom, do not listen to his odds of its not being cancer.) I will separate the two cases as follows. The mild case: arrogance in the presence of (some) competence, and the severe case: arrogance mixed with incompetence (the empty suit). There are some professions in which you know more than the experts, who are, alas, people for whose opinions you are paying—instead of them paying you to listen to them. Which ones? What Moves and What Does Not Move There is a very rich literature on the so-called expert problem, running empirical testing on experts to verify their record. But it seems to be confus 146 WE JUST CAN’T PREDICT ing at first. On one hand, we are shown by a class of expert-busting researchers such as Paul Meehl and Robyn Dawes that the “expert” is the closest thing to a fraud, performing no better than a computer using a single metric, their intuition getting in the way and blinding them. (As an example of a computer using a single metric, the ratio of liquid assets to debt fares better than the majority of credit analysts.) On the other h women nike air max and, there is abundant literature showing that many people can beat computers thanks to their intuition. Which one is correct? There must be some disciplines with true experts. Let us ask the following questions: Would you rather have your upcoming brain surgery performed by a newspaper’s science reporter or by a certified brain surgeon? On the other hand, would you prefer to listen to an economic forecast by someone with a PhD in finance from some “prominent” institution such as the Wharton School, or by a newspaper’s business writer? While the answer to the first question is empirically obvious, the answer to the second one isn’t at all. We can already see the difference between “knowhow” and “know-what.” The Greeks made a distinction between techn. and epistèmê. The empirical school of medicine of Menodotus of Nicomedia and Heraclites of Tarentum wanted its practitioners to stay closest to techn. (i.e., “craft”), and away from epistèmê (i.e., “knowledge,” “science”). The psychologist James Shanteau undertook the task of finding out which disciplines have experts and which have none. Note the confirmation problem here: if you want to prove that there are no experts, then you will be able to find a profession in which experts are useless. And you can prove the opposite just as well. But there is a regularity: there are professions where experts play a role, and others where there is no evidence of skills. Which are which? Experts who tend to be experts: livestock judges, astronomers, test pilots, soil judges, chess masters, physicists, mathematicians (when they deal with mathematical problems, not empirical ones), accountants, grain inspectors, photo interpreters, insurance analysts (dealing with bell curve- style statistics). Experts who tend to be . .. not experts: stockbrokers, clinical psychologists, psychiatrists, college admissions officers, court judges, councilors, personnel selectors, intelligence analysts (the CIA’s record, in spite of its costs, is pitiful). I would add these results from my own examination of the literature: economists, financial forecasters, finance professors, political scientists, “risk experts,” Bank for International Settlements staff, THE SCANDAL OF PREDICTION 147 august members of the International Association of Financial Engineers, and personal financial advisers. Simply, things that move, and therefore require knowledge, do not usually have experts, while things that don’t move seem to have some experts. In other words, professions that deal with the future and base their studies on the nonrepeatable past have an expert problem (with the exception of the weather and businesses involving short-term physical processes, not socioeconomic ones). I am not saying that no one who deals with the future provides any valuable information (as I pointed out earlier, newspapers can predict theater opening hours rather well), but rather that those who provide no tangible added value are generally dealing with the future. Another way to see it is that things that move are often Black Swan-prone. Experts are narrowly focused persons who need to “tunnel.” In situations where tunneling is safe, because Black Swans are not consequential, the expert will do well. Robert Trivers, an evolutionary psychologist and a man of supernormal insights, has another answer (he became one of the most influential evolutionary thinkers since Darwin with ideas he developed while trying to go to law school). He links it to self-deception. In fields where we have ancestral traditions, such as pillaging, we are very good at predicting outcomes by gauging the balance of power. Humans and chimps can immediately sense which side has the upper hand, and make a cost-benefit analysis about whether to attack and take the goods and the mates. Once you start raiding, you put yourself into a delusional mind-set that makes you ignore additional information—it is best to avoid wavering during battle. On the other hand, unlike raids, large-scale wars are not something present in human heritage—we are new to them—so we tend to misestimate their duration and overestimate our relative power. Recall the underestimation of the duration of the Lebanese war. Those who foug nike air max 95 ht in the Great War thought it would be a mere cakewalk. So it was with the Vietnam conflict, so it is with the Iraq war, and just about every modern conflict. You cannot ignore self-delusion. The problem with experts is that they do not know what they do not know. Lack of knowledge and delusion about the quality of your knowledge come together—the same process that makes you know less also makes you satisfied with your knowledge. Next, instead of the range of forecasts, we will concern ourselves with the accuracy of forecasts, i.e., the ability to predict the number itself. 148 WE JUST CAN’T PREDICT How to Have the Last Laugh We can also learn about prediction erro nike air max 87 rs from trading activities. We quants have ample data about economic and financial forecasts—from general data about large economic variables to the forecasts and market calls of the television “experts” or “authorities.” The abundance of such data and the ability to process it on a computer make the subject invaluable for an empiricist. If I had been a journalist, or, God forbid, a historian, I would have had a far more difficult time testing the predictive effectiveness of these verbal discussions. You cannot process verbal commentaries with a computer—at least not so nike air max usa easily. Furthermore, many economists naively make the mistake of producing a lot of forecasts concerning many variables, giving us a database of economists and variables, which enables us to see whether some economists are better than others (there is no consequential difference) or if there are certain variables for which they are more competent (alas, none that are meaningful). I was in a seat to observe from very close our ability to predict. In my full-time trader days, a couple of times a week, at 8:30 A.M. , my screen would flash some economic number released by the Department of Commerce, or Treasury, or Trade, or some such honorable institution. I never had a clue about what these numbers meant and never saw any need to invest energy in finding out. So I would not have cared the least about them except that people got all excited and talked quite a bit about what these figures were going to mean, pouring verbal sauce around the forecasts. Among such numbers you have the Consumer Price Index (CPI), Nonfarm Payrolls (changes in the number of employed individuals), the Index of Leading Economic Indicators, Sales of Durable Goods (dubbed “doable girls” by traders), the Gross Domestic Product (the most important one), and many more that generate different levels of excitement depending on their presence in the discourse. The data vendors allow you to take a peek at forecasts by “leading economists,” people (in suits) who work for the venerable institutions, such as J. P. Morgan Chase or Morgan Stanley. You can watch these economists talk, theorizing eloquently and convincingly. Most of them earn seven figures and they rank as stars, with teams of researchers crunching numbers and projections. But the stars are foolish enough to publish their projected numbers, right there, for posterity to observe and assess their degree of competence. Worse yet, many financial institutions produce booklets every year-end

The term bias also indicates the condition’s potentially quantifiable nature: you may be able to calculate the distortion, and to correct for it by taking into account both the dead and the living, instead of only the living. Silent evidence is what events use to conceal their own randomness, particularly the Black Swan type of randomness. Sir Francis Bacon is an interesting and endearing fellow in many respects. He harbored a deep-seated, skeptical, nonacademic, antidogmatic, and obsessively empirical nature, which, to someone skeptical, nonacademic, antidogmatic, and obsessively empirical, like this author, is a quality almost impossible to find in the thinking business. (Anyone can be skeptical; any scientist can be overly empirical—it is the rigor coming from the combination of skepticism and empiricism that’s hard to come by.) The problem is that his empiricism wanted us to confirm, not disconfirm; thus he introduced the problem of confirmation, that beastly corroboration that generates the Black Swan. THE CEMETERY OF LETTERS The Phoenicians, we are often reminded, produced no literature, although they allegedly invented the alphabet. Commentators discuss their philistinism from the basis of this absence of a written legacy, asserting that by race or culture, they were more interested in commerce than i women nike air max n the arts. Accordingly, the Phoenician invention of the alphabet served the lower purpose of commercial record keeping rather than the more noble purpose GIACOMO CASANOVA’S UNFAILING LUCK 103 of literary production. (I remember finding on the shelves of a country house I once rented a mildewed history book by Will and Ariel Durant describing the Phoenicians as the “merchant race.” I was tempted to throw it in the fireplace.) Well, it now seems that the Phoenicians wrote quite a bit, but using a perishable brand of papyrus that did not stand the biodegradative assaults of time. Manuscripts had a high rate of extinction before copyists and authors switched to parchment in the second or third century. Those not copied during that period simply disappeared. The neglect of silent evidence is endemic to the way we study comparative talent, particularly in activities that are plagued with winner-take-all attributes. We may enjoy what we see, but there is no point reading too much into success stories because we do not see the full picture. Recall the winner-take-all effect from Chapter 3: notice the large number of people who call themselves writers but are (only “temporarily”) operating the shiny cappuccino machines at Starbucks. The inequity in this field is larger t nike air max 95 han, say, medicine, since we rarely see medical doctors serving hamburgers. I nike outlet store can thus infer that I can largely gauge the performance of the latter profession’s entire population from what sample is visible to me. Likewise with plumbers, taxi drivers, prostitutes, and those in professions devoid of superstar effects. Let us go beyond the discussion on Extremistan and Mediocristan in Chapter 3. The consequence of the superstar dynamic is that what we call “literary heritage” or “literary treasures” is a minute proportion of what has been produced cumulatively. This is the first point. How it invalidates the identification of talent can be derived immediately from it: say you attribute the success of the nineteenth-century novelist Honoré de Balzac to his superior “realism,” “insights,” “sensitivity,” “treatment of characters,” “ability to keep the reader riveted,” and so on. These may be deemed “superior” qualities that lead to superior performance //, and only if, those who lack what we call talent also lack these qualities. But what if there are dozens of comparable literary masterpieces that happened to perish? And, following my logic, if there are indeed many perished manuscripts with similar attributes, then, I regret to say, your idol Balzac was just the beneficiary of disproportionate luck compared to his peers. Furthermore, you may be committing an injustice to others by favoring him. My point, I will repeat, is not that Balzac is untalented, but that he is less uniquely talented than we think. Just consider the thousands of writers now completely vanished from consciousness: their record does not 104 UMBERTO ECO’S ANTIUBRARY enter into analyses. We do not see the tons of rejected manuscripts because these writers have never been published. The New Yorker alone rejects close to a hundred manuscripts a day, so imagine the number of geniuses that we will never hear about. In a country like France, where more people write books while, sadly, fewer people read them, respectable literary publishers accept one in ten thousand manuscripts they receive from first- time authors. Consider the number of actors who have never passed an audition but would have done very well had they had that lucky break in life. The next time you visit a Frenchman of comfortable means, you will likely spot the stern books from the collection Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, which their owner will never, almost never, read, mostly on account of their uncomfortable size and weight. Membership in the Pléiade means membership in the literary canon. The tomes are expensive; they have the distinctive smell of ultrathin India paper, compressing the equivalent of fifteen hundred pages into the size of a drugstore paperback. They are supposed to help you maximize the number of masterpieces per Parisian square foot. The publisher Gallimard has been extremely selective in electing writers into the Pléiade collection-only a few authors, such as the aesthete and adventurer André Malraux, have made it in while still alive. Dickens, Dostoyevsky, Hugo, and Stendhal are in, along with Mallarmé, Sartre, Camus, and .. . Balzac. Yet if you follow Balzac’s own ideas, which I will examine next, you would accept that there is no ultimate justification for such an official corpus. Balzac outlined the entire business of silent evidence in his novel Lost Illusions. Lucien de Rubempré (alias o nike air max 87 f Lucien Chardon), the penurious provincial genius, “goes up” to Paris to start a literary career. We are told that he is talented—actually he is told that he is talented by the semiaristocratic set in Angoulême. But it is difficult to figure out whether this is due to his good looks or to the literary quality of his works—or even whether literary quality is visible, or, as Balzac seems to wonder, if it has much to do with anything. Success is presented cynically, as the product of wile and promotion or the lucky surge of interest for reasons completely external to the works themselves. Lucien discovers the existence of the immense cemetery inhabited by what Balzac calls “nightingales.” Lucien was told that this designation “nightingale” was given by bookstores to those works residing on the shelves in the solitary depths of their shops. GIACOMO CASANOVA’S UNFAILING LUCK 105 Balzac presents to us the sorry state of contemporary literature when Lucien’s manuscript is rejected by a publisher who has never read it; later on, when Lucien’s reputation has developed, the very same manuscript is accepted by another publisher who did not read it either! The work itself was a secondary consideration. In another example of silent evidence, the book’s characters keep bemoaning that things are no longer as they were before, implying that literary fairness prevailed in more ancient times—as if there was no cemetery before. They fail to take into account the nightingales among the ancients’ work! Notice that close to two centuries ago people had an idealized opinion of their own past, just as we have an idealized opinion of today’s past. I mentioned earlier that to understand successes and analyze what caused them, we need to study the traits present in failures. It is to a more general version of this point that I turn next. How to Become a Millionaire in Ten Steps Numerous studies of millionaires aimed at figuring out the skills required for hotshotness follow the following methodology. They take a population of hotshots, those with big titles and big jobs, and study their attributes. They look at what those big guns have in common: courage, risk taking, optimism, an nike outlet online d so on, and infer that these traits, most notably risk taking, help you to become successful. You would also probably get the same impression if you read CEOs’ ghostwritten autobiographies or attended their presentations to fawning MBA students. Now take a look at the cemetery. It is quite difficult to do so because people who fail do not seem to write memoirs, and, if they did, those business publishers I know would not even consider giving them the courtesy of a returned phone call (as to returned e-mail, fuhgedit). Readers would not pay $26.95 for a story of failure, even if you convinced them that it had more useful tricks than a story of success.* The entire notion of biography is grounded in the arbitrary ascription of a causal relation between specified traits and subsequent events. Now consider the cemetery. The graveyard of failed persons will be full of people who shared the following traits: courage, risk taking, optimism, et cetera. Just like the population of millionaires. There may be some differences in skills, but * The best noncharlatanic finance book I know is called What I Learned Losing a Million Dollars, by D. Paul and B nike air max turnaround . Moynihan. The authors had to self-publish the book. 106 UMBERTO ECO’S ANTIUBRARY what truly separates the two is for the most part a single factor: luck. Plain luck. You do not need a lot of empiricism to figure this out: a simple thought experiment suffices. The fund-management industry claims that some people are extremely skilled, since year after year they have outperformed the market. They will identify these “geniuses” and convince you of their abilities. My approach has been to manufacture cohorts of purely random investors and, by simple computer simulation, show how it would be impossible to not have these geniuses produced just by luck. Every year you fire the losers, leaving only the winners, and thus end up with long-term steady winners. Since you do not observe the cemetery of failed investors, you will think that it is a good business, and that some operators are considerably better than others. Of course an explanation will be readily provided for the success of the lucky survivors: “He eats tofu,” “She works late; just the other day I called her office at eight P.M. … ” Or of course, “She is naturally lazy. People with that type of laziness can see things clearly.” By the mechanism of retrospective determinism we will find the “cause”—actually, we need to see the cause. I call these simulations of hypothetical cohorts, often done by computer, an engine of c nike air max light omputational epistemology. Your thought experiments can be run on a computer. You just simulate an alternative world, plain random, and verify that it looks similar to the one in which we live. Not getting lucky billionaires in these experiments would be the exception.* Recall the distinction between Mediocristan and Extremistan in Chapter 3.1 said that taking a “scalable” profession is not a good idea, simply because there are far too few winners in these professions. Well, these professions produce a large cemetery: the pool of starving actors is larger than the one of starving accountants, even if you assume that, on average, they earn the same income. * Doctors are rightfully and vigorously skeptical of anecdotal results, and require that studies of drug efficacy probe into the cemetery of silent evidence. However, the same doctors fall for the bias elsewhere! Where? In their personal lives, or in their investment activities. At the cost of being repetitive, I have to once again state my amazement at the aspect of human nature that allows us to mix the most rigorous skepticism and the most acute gullibility. GIACOMO CASANOVA’S UNFAILING LUCK 107 A HEALTH CLUB FOR RATS The second, and more vicious, variety of the problem of silent evidence is as follows. When I was in my early twenties and still read the newspaper, and thought that steadily reading the newspapers was something useful to me, I came across an article discussing the mounting threat of the Russian Mafia in the United States and its displacement of the traditional Louie and Tony in some neighborhoods of Brooklyn. The article explained their toughness and brutality as a result of their being hardened by their Gulag experiences. The Gulag was a network of labor camps in Siberia where criminals and dissidents were routinely deported. Sending people to Siberia was one of the purification methods initially used by the czarist regimes and later continued and perfected by the Soviets. Many deportees did not survive these labor camps. Hardened by the Gulag? The sentence jumped out at me as both profoundly flawed (and a reasonable inference). It took me a while to figure out the nonsense in it since it was protected by cosmetic wrapping; the following thought experiment will give the intuition. Assume that you’re able to find a large, assorted population of rats: fat, thin, sickly, strong, well- proportioned, et cetera. (You can easily get them from the kitchens of fancy New York restaurants.) With these thousands of rats, you build a heterogeneous cohort, one that is well representative of the general New York rat population. You bring them to my laboratory on East Fifty-ninth Street in New York City and we put the entire collection in a large vat. We subject the rats to increasingly higher levels of radiation (since this is supposed to be a thought experiment, I am told that there is no cruelty in the process). At every level of radiation, those that are naturally stronger (and this is the key) will survive; the dead will drop out of your sample. We will progressively have a stronger and stronger collection of rats. Note the following central fact: every single rat, including the strong ones, will be weaker after the radiation than before. An observer endowed with analytical abilities, who probably got excellent grades in college, would be led to believe that treatment in my laboratory is an excellent health-club replacement, and one that could nike outlet uk be generalized to all mammals (think of the potential commercial success). His logic would run as follows: Hey, these rats are stronger than the rest of the rat population. What do they seem to have in common? They all came from that Black Swan guy Taleb’s workshop. N nike air max turnaround ot nike air max womens many people will have the temptation to go look at the dead rats. 108 UMBERTO ECO’S ANTILIBRARY Next we pull the following trick on The New York Times: we let these surviving rats loose in New York City and inform the chief rodent correspondent of the newsworthy disruption in the pecking order in the New York rat population. He will write a lengthy (and analytical) article on the social dynamics of New York rats that includes the following passage: “Those rats are now bullies in the rat population. They literally run the show. Strengthened by their experience in the laboratory of the reclusive (but friendly) statistician/philosopher/trader Dr. Taleb, they … ” Vicious Bias There is a vicious attribute to the bias: it can hide best when its impact is largest. Owing to the invisibility of the dead rats, the more lethal the risks, the less visible they will be, since the severely victimized are likely to be eliminated from the evidence. The more injurious the treatment, the larger the difference between the surviving rats and the rest, and the more fooled you will be about the strengthening effect. One of the two following ingredients is necessary for this difference between the true effect (weakening) and the observed one (strengthening): a) a degree of inequality in strength, or diversity, in the base cohort, or b) unevenness, or diversity, somewhere in the treatment. Diversity here has to do with the degree of uncertainty inherent in the process. More Hidden Applications We can keep going with this argument; it has such universality that once we get the bug it is hard to look at reality with the same eyes again. Clearly it robs our observations of their realistic power. I will enumerate a few more cases to illustrate the weaknesses of our inferential machinery. The stability of species. Take the number of species that we now consider extinct. For a long time scientists took the number of such species as that implied from an analysis of the extant fossils. But this number ignores the silent cemetery of species that came and left without leaving traces in the form of fossils; the fossils that we have managed to find correspond to a smaller proportion of all species that came and disappeared. This implies that our biodiversity was far greater than it seemed at first examination. A more worrisome consequence is that the rate of extinction of species may be far greater than we think—close to 99.5 percent of species tha nike air max 180 t transited through earth are now extinct, a number of sc nike air max 90 ientists have kept rais GIACOMO CASANOVA’S UNFAILING LUCK 109 ing through time. Life is a great deal more fragile than we have allowed for. But this does not mean we (humans) should feel guilty for extinctions around us; nor does it mean that we should act to stop them—species were coming and going before we started messing up the environment. There is no need to feel moral responsibility for every endangered species. Does crime pay? Newspapers report on the criminals who get caught. There is no section in The New York Times recording the stories of those who committed crimes but have not been caught. So it is with cases of tax evasion, government bribes, prostitution rings, poisoning of wealthy spouses (with substances that do not have a name and cannot be detected), and drug trafficking. In addition, our representation of the standard criminal might be based on the properties of those less intelligent ones who were caught. Once we seep ourselves into the notion of silent evidence, so many things around us that were previously hidden start manifesting themselves. Having spent a couple of decades in this mind-set, I am convinced (but cannot prove) that training and education can help us avoid its pitfalls. The Evolution of the Swimmer’s Body What do the popular expressions “a swimmer’s body” and “beginner’s luck” have in common? What do they seem to share with the concept of history? There is a belief among gamblers that beginners are almost always lucky. “It gets worse later, but gamblers are always lucky when they start out,” you hear. This statement is actually empirically true: researchers confirm that gamblers have lucky beginnings (the same applies to stock market speculators). Does this mean that each one of us should become a gambler for a while, take advantage of lady luck’s friendliness to beginners, then stop? The answer is no. The same optical illusion prevails: those who start gamblin nike air max 90 infrared g will be either lucky or unlucky (given that the casino has the advantage, a slightly greater number will be unlucky). The lucky ones, with the feeling of having been selected by destiny, will continue gambling; the others, discouraged, will stop and will not show up in the sample. They will probably take up, depending on their temperaments, bird-watching, Scrabble, piracy, or other pastimes. Those who continue gambling will remember having been lucky as beginners. The dropouts, by definition, will 110 UMBERTO ECO’S ANTIUBRARY no longer be part of the surviving gamblers’ community. This explains beginner’s luck. There is an analogy with what is called in common parlance a “swimmer’s body,” which led to a mistake I shamefully made a few years ago (in spite of my specialty in this bias, I did not notice that I was being fooled). When asking around about the comparative physical elegance of athletes, I was often told that runners looked anorexic, cyclists bottom-heavy, and weight lifters insecure and a little primitive. I inferred that I should spend some time inhaling chlorine, in the New York University pool to get those “elongated muscles.” Now suspend the causality. Assume that a person’s genetic variance allows for a certain type of body shape. Those born with a natural tendency to develop a swimmer’s body become better swimmers. These are the ones you see in your sample splashing up and down at the pools. But they would have looked pretty much the same if they lifted weights. It is a fact that a given muscle grows exactly the same way whether you take steroids or climb walls at the local gym. WHAT YOU SEE AND WHAT YOU DON’T SEE Katrina, the devastating hurricane that hit New Orleans in 2005, got plenty of politicizing politicians on television. These legislators, moved by the images of devastation and the pictures of angry victims made homeless, made promises of “rebuilding.” It was so

Cornell Medical Center. Three children, one of whom needed special care, lost their father because of his foolish visit to Central Park. Well, you are likely to avoid Central Park during your stay. You know you can get crime statistics from the Web or from any brochure, rather than anecdotal information from a verbally incontinent salesman. But you can’t help it. For a while, the name Central Park will conjure up the image of that that poor, undeserving man lying on the polluted grass. It will take a lot of statistical information to override your hesitation. Motorcycle Riding. Likewise, the death of a relative in a motorcycle accident is far more likely to influence your attitude toward motorcycles than volumes of statistical analyses. You can effortlessly look up accident statistics on the Web, but they do not easily come to mind. Note that I ride my red Vespa around town, since no one in my immediate environment has recently suffered an accident—although I am aware of this problem in logic, I am incapable of acting on it. Now, I do not disagree with those recommending the use of a narrative to get attention. Indeed, our consciousness may be linked to our ability to concoct some form of story about ourselves. It is just that narrative can be lethal when used in the wrong places. THE NARRATIVE FALLACY 81 THE SHORTCUTS Next I will go beyond narrative to discuss the more general attributes of thinking and reasoning behind our crippling shallowness. These defects in reasoning have been cataloged and investigated by a powerful research tradition represented by a school called the Society of Judgment and Decision Making (the only academic and professional society of which I am a member, and proudly so; its gatherings are the only ones where nike air max turnaround I do not have tension in my shoulders or a nike air max turnaround nger fits). It is associated with the school of research started by Daniel Kahneman, Amos Tversky, and their friends, such as Robyn Dawes and Paul Slovic. It is mostly composed of empirical psychologists and cognitive scientists whose methodology hews strictly to running very precise, controlled experiments (physics-style) on humans and making catalogs of how people react, with minimal theorizing. They look for regularities. Note that empirical psychologists use the bell curve to gauge errors in their testing methods, but as we will see more technically in Chapter 15, this is one of the rare adequate applications of the bell curve in social science, owing to the nature of the experiments. We have seen such types of experiments earlier in this chapter with the flood in California, and with the identification of the confirmation bias in Chapter 5. These researchers have mapped our activities into (roughly) a dual mode of thinking, which they separate as “System 1″ and “System 2,” or the experiential and the cogitative. The distinction is straightforward. System 1, the experiential one, is effortless, automatic, fast, opaque (we do not know that we are using it), parallel-processed, and can lend itself to errors. It is what we call “intuition,” and performs these quick acts of prowess that became popular under the name blink, after the title of Malcolm Gladwell’s bestselling book. System 1 is highly emotional, precisely because it is quick. It produces shortcuts, called “heuristics,” that allow us to function rapidly and effectively. Dan Goldstein calls these heuristics “fast and frugal.” Others prefer to call them “quick and dirty.” Now, these shortcuts are certainly virtuous, since they are rapid, but, at times, they can lead us into some severe mistakes. This main idea generated an entire school of research called the heuristics and biases approach (heuristics corresponds to the study of shortcuts, biases stand for mistakes). System 2, the cogitative one, is what we normally call thinking. It is what you use in a classroom, as it is effortful (even for Frenchmen), reasoned, 82 UMBERTO ECO’S ANTILIBRARY slow, logical, serial, progressive, and self-aware (you can follow the steps in your reasoning). It makes fewer mistakes than the experiential system, and, since you know how you derived your result, you can retrace your steps and correct them in an adaptive manner. Most of our mistakes in reasoning come from using System 1 when we are in fact thinking that we are using System 2. How? Since we react without thinking and introspection, the main property of System 1 is our lack of awareness of using it! Recall the round-trip error, our tendency to confuse “no evidence of Black Swans” with “evidence of no Black Swans”; it shows System 1 at work. You have to make an effort (System 2) to override your first reaction. Clearly Mother Nature makes you usé the fast System 1 to get out of trouble, so that you do not sit down and cogitate whether there is truly a tiger attacking you or if it is an optical illusion. You run immediately, before you become “conscious” of the presence of the tiger. Emotions are assumed to be the weapon System 1 uses to direct us and force us to act quickly. It mediates risk avoidance far more effectively than our cognitive system. Indeed, neurobiologists who have studied the emotional system show how it often reacts to the presence of danger long before we are consciously aware of it—we experience fear and start reacting a few milliseconds before we realize that we are facing a snake. Much of the trouble with human nature resides in our inability to use much of System 2, or to use it in a prolonged way without having to take a long beach vacation. In addition, we often just forget to use it. Beware the Brain Note that neurobiologists make, roughly, a similar distinction to that between System 1 and System 2, except that they operate along anatomical lines. Their distinction differentiates between parts of the brain, the cortical part, which we are supposed to use for thinking, and which distinguishes us from other animals, and the fast-reacting limbic brain, which is the center of emotions, and which we share with other mammals. As a skeptical empiricist, I do not want to be the turkey, so I do not want to focus solely on specific organs in the brain, since we do not observe brain functions very well. Some people try to identify what are called nike outlet online the neural correlates of, say, decision making, or more aggressively the neural “substrates” of, say, memory. The brain might be more complicated machinery than we think; its anatomy has fooled us repeatedly in THE NARRATIVE FALLACY 83 the past. We can, however, assess regularities by running precise and thorough experiments on how people react under certain conditions, and keep a tally of what we see. For an example that justifies skepticism about unconditional reliance on neurobiology, and vindicates the ideas of the empirical school of medicine to which Sextus belonged, let’s consider the intelligence of birds. I kept reading in various texts that the cortex is where animals do their “thinking,” and that the creatures with the la nike air max womens rgest cortex have the highest intelligence—we humans have the largest cortex, followed by bank executives, dolphins, and our cousins the apes. Well, it turns out that some birds, such as parrots, have a high level of intelligence, equivalent to that of dolphins, but that the intelligence of birds correlates with the size of another part of the brain, called the hyperstriatum. So neurobiology with its attribute of “hard science” can sometimes (though not always) fool you into a Platonified, reductive statement. I am amazed that the “empirics,” skeptical about links between anatomy and function, had such insight— no wonder their school played a very small part in intellectual history. As a skeptical empiricist I prefer the experiments of empirical psychology to the theories-based MRI scans of neurobiologists, even if the former appear less “scientific” to the public. How to Avert the Narrative Faliacy I’ll conclude by saying that our misunderstanding of the Black Swan can be largely attributed to our using System 1, i.e., narratives, and the sensational—as well as th nike air max light e nike air max 87 emotional—which imposes on us a wrong map of the likelihood of events. On a day-to-day basis, we are not introspective enough to realize that we understand what is going on a little less than warranted from a dispassionate observation of our experiences. We also tend to forget about the notion of Black Swans immediately after one occurs—since they are too abstract for us—focusing, rather, on the precise and vivid events that easily come to our minds. We do worry about Black Swans, just the wrong ones. Let me bring Mediocristan into this. In Mediocristan, narratives seem to work—the past is likely to yield to our inquisition. But not in Extremistan, where you do not have repetition, and where you need to remain suspicious of the sneaky past and avoid the easy and obvious narrative. Given that I have lived largely deprived of information, I’ve often women nike air max felt that I inhabit a different planet than my peers, which can sometimes be ex 84 UMBERTO ECO’S ANTIUBRARY tremely painful. It’s like they have a virus controlling their brains that prevents them from seeing things going forward—the Black Swan around the corner. The way to avoid the ills of the narrative fallacy is to favor experimentation over storytelling, experience over history, and clinical knowledge over theories. Certainly the newspaper cannot perform an experiment, but it can choose one report over another—there is plenty of empirical research to present and interpret from—as I am doing in this book. Being empirical does not mean running a laboratory in one’s basement: it is just a mind-set that favors a certain class of knowledge over others. I do not forbid myself from using the word cause, but the causes I discuss are either bold speculations (presented as such) or the result of experiments, not stories. Another approach is to predict and keep a tally of the predictions. Finally, there may be a way to use a narrative—but for a good purpose. Only a diamond can cut a diamond; we can use our ability to convince with a story that conveys the right message—what storytellers seem to do. So far we have discussed two internal mechanisms behind our blindness to Black Swans, the confirmation bias and the narrative fallacy. The next chapters will look into an external mechanism: a defect in the way we receive and interpret recorded events, and a defect in the way we act on them. Chapter Seven LIVING IN THE ANTECHAMBER OF HOPE How to avoid watercoolers—Select your brother-in-law—Yevgenia’s favorite book—What deserts can and cannot deliver—On the avoidance of hope— El desierto de los tartaros—The virtues of slow motion Assume that, like Yevgenia, your activities depend on a Black Swan surprise—i.e., you are a reverse turkey. Intellectual, scientific, and artistic activities belong to the province of Extremistan, where there is a severe concentration of success, with a very small number of winners claiming a large share of the pot. This seems to apply to all professional activities I find nondull and “interesting” (I am still looking for a single counterexample, a nondull activity that belongs to Mediocristan). Acknowledging the role of this concentration of success, and acting accordingly, causes us to be punished twice: we live in a society where the reward mechanism is based on the illusion of the regular; our hormonal reward system also needs tangible and steady results. It too thinks that the world is steady and well behaved—it falls for the confirmation error. The world has changed too fast for our genetic makeup. We are alienated from our environment. 86 UMBERTO ECO’S ANTILIBRARY PEER CRUELTY Every morning you leave your cramped apartment in Manhattan’s East Village to go to your laboratory at the Rockefeller University in the East Sixties. You return in the late evening, and people in your social network ask you if you had a good day, just to be polite. At the laboratory, people are more tactful. Of course you did not have a good day; you found nothing. You are not a watch repairman. Your finding nothing is very valuable, since it is part of the process of discovery—hey, you know where not to look. Other researchers, knowing your results, would avoid trying your special experiment, provided a journal is thoughtful enough to consider your “found nothing” as information and publish it. Meanwhile your brother-in-law is a salesman for a Wall Street firm, and keeps getting large commissions—large and steady commiss nike air max 95 ions. “He is doing very well,” you hear, particularly from your father-in-law, with a small pensive nanosecond of silence after the utterance—which makes you realize that he just made a comparison. It was involuntary, but he made one. Holidays can be terrible. You run into your brother-in-law at family reunions and, invariably, detect unmistakable signs of frustration on the part of your wife, who, briefly, fears that she married a loser, before remembering the logic of your profession. But she has to fight her first impulse. Her sister will not stop talking about their renovations, their new wallpaper. Your wife will be a little more sile nike outlet store nt than usual on the drive home. This sulking will be made slightly worse because the car you are driving is rented, since you cannot afford to garage a car in Manhattan. What should you do? Move to Australia and thereby make family reunions less frequent, or switch brothers-in-laws by marrying someone with a less “successful” brother? Or should you dress like a hippie and become defiant? That may work for an artist, but not so easily for a scientist or a businessman. You are trapped. You work on a project that does not deliver immediate or steady results; all the while, people around y nike air max 90 infrared ou work on projects that do. You are in trouble. Such is the lot of scientists, artists, and researchers lost in society rather than living in an insulated community or an artist colony. Positive lumpy outcomes, for which we either collect big or get nothing, prevail in numerous occupations, those invested with a sense of mission, LIVING IN THE ANTECHAMBER OF HOPE 87 such as doggedly pursuing (in a smelly laboratory) the elusive cure for cancer, writing a book that will change the way people view the world nike outlet uk (while living hand to mouth), making music, or painting miniature icons on subway trains and considering it a higher form of art despite the diatribes of the antiquated “scholar” Harold Bloom. If you are a researcher, you will have to publish inconsequential articles in “prestigious” publications so that others say hello to you once in a while when you run into them at conferences. If you run a public-corporation, things were great for you before you had shareholders, when you and your partners were the sole owners, along with savvy venture capitalists who understood uneven results and the lumpy nature of economic life. But now you have a slow-thinking thirty-year-old security analyst at a downtown Manhattan firm who “judges” your results and reads too much into them. He likes routine rewards, and the last thing you can deliver are routine rewards. Many people labor in life under the impression that they are doing something right, yet they may not show solid results for a long time. They need a capacity for continuously adjourned gratification to survive a steady diet of peer cruelty without becoming demoralized. They look like idiots to their cousins, they look like idiots to their peers, they need courage to continue. No confirmation comes to them, no validation, no fawning students, no Nobel, no Shnobel. “How was your year?” brings them a small but containable spasm of pain deep inside, since almost all of their years will seem wasted to someone looking at their life from the outside. Then bang, the lumpy event comes that brings the grand vindication. Or it may never come. Believe me, it is tough to deal with the social consequences of the appearance of continuous failure. We are social animals; hell is other people. Where the Relevant Is the Sensational Our intuitions are not cut out for nonlinearities. Consider our life in a primitive environment nike air max 180 where process and result are closely connected. You are thirsty; drinking brings you adequate satisfaction. Or even in a not-so-primitive environment, when you engage in building, say, a bridge or a stone house, more work will lead to more apparent results, so your mood is propped up by visible continuous feedback. In a primitive environment, the relevant is the sensational. This applies to our knowledge. When we try to collect information about the world 88 UMBERTO ECO’S ANTIUBRARY around us, we tend to be guided by our biology, and our attention flows effortlessly toward the sensational—not the relevant so much as the sensational. Somehow the guidance system has gone wrong in the process of our coevolution with our habitat—it was transplanted into a world in which the relevant is often boring, nonsensational. Furthermore, we think that if, say, two variables are causally linked, then a steady input in one variable should always yield a result in the other one. Our emotional apparatus is designed for linear causality. For instance, if you study every day, you expect to learn something in proportion to your studies. If you feel that you are not going anywhere, your emotions will cause you to become demoralized. But modern reality rarely gives us the privilege of a satisfying, linear, positive progression: you may think about a problem for a year and learn nothing; then, unless you are disheartened by the emptiness of the results and give up, something will come to you in a flash. Researchers spent some time dealing with this notion of gratification; neurology has been enlightening us about the tension between the notions of immediate rewards and delayed ones. Would you like a massage today, or two next week? Well, the news is that the logical part of our mind, that “higher” one, which distinguishes us from animals, can override our animal instinct, which asks for immediate rewards. So we are a little better than animals, after all—but perhaps not by much. And not all of the time. Nonlinearities The situation can get a little more tragic—the world is more nonlinear than we think, and than scientists would like to think. With linearities, relationships between variables are clear, crisp, and constant, therefore Platonically easy to grasp in a single sentence, such as “A 10 percent increase in money in the bank corresponds to a 10 percent increase in interest income and a 5 percent increase in obsequiousness on the part of the personal banker.” If you have more money in the bank, you get more interest. Nonlinear relationships can vary; perhaps the best way to describe them is to say t nike air max 90 hat they cannot be expressed verbally in a way that does justice to them. Take the relationship between pleasure and drinking water. If you are in a state of painful thirst, then a bottle of water increases your well-being significantly. More water means more pleasure. But what if I gave you a cistern of water? Clearly your well-being becomes LIVING IN THE ANTECHAMBER OF HOPE 89 rapidly insensitive to further quantities. As a matter of fact, if I gave you the choice between a bottle or a cistern you would prefer the bottle—so your enjoyment declines with additional quantities. These nonlinear relationships are ubiquitous in life. Linear relationships are truly the exception; we only focus on them in classrooms and textbooks because they are easier to understand. Yesterday afternoon I tried to take a fresh look around me to catalog what I could see during my day that was linear. I could not find anything, no more than someone hunting for squares or triangles could find them in the rain forest—or, as we will see in Part Three, any more than someone looking for bell-shape randomness finding it in socioeconomic phenomena. You play tennis every day with no improvement, then suddenly you start beating the pro.