The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

It took five years for Yevgenia to graduate from the “egomaniac without anything to justify it, stubborn and difficult to deal with” category to “persevering, resolute, painstaking, and fiercely independent.” For her book slowly caught fire, becoming one of the great and strange successes in literary history, selling millions of copies and drawing so-called critical acclaim. The start-up house has since become a big corporation, with a (polite) receptionist to greet visitors as they enter the main office. Her book has been translated into forty languages (even French). You see her picture everywhere. She is said to be a pioneer of something called the Consilient School. Publishers now have a theory that “truck drivers who read books do not read books written for truck drivers” and hold that “readers despise writers who pander to them.” A scientific paper, it is now understood, can hide trivialities or irrelevance with equations and jargon; consilient prose, by exposing an idea in raw form, allows it to be judged by the public.

Today, Yevgenia has stopped marrying philosophers (they argue too much), and she hides from the press. In classrooms, literary scholars discuss the many clues indicating the inevitability of the new style. The distinction between fiction and nonfiction is considered too archaic to withstand the challenges of modern society. It was so evident that we needed to remedy the fragmentation between art and science. After the fact, her talent was so obvious.

Many of the editors she later met blamed her for not coming to them, convinced that they would have immediately seen the merit in her work. In a few years, a literary scholar will write the essay “From Kundera to Krasnova,” showing how the seeds of her work can be found in Kundera—a precursor who mixed essay and metacommentary (Yevgenia never read Kundera, but did see the movie version of one of his books—there was no commentary in the movie). A prominent scholar will show how the influence of Gregory Bateson, who injected autobiographical scenes into his scholarly research papers, is visible on every page (Yevgenia has never heard of Bateson).

Yevgenia’s book is a Black Swan.

Chapter Three: THE SPECULATOR AND THE PROSTITUTE

On the critical difference between speculators and prostitutes—Fairness, unfairness, and Black Swans—Theory of knowledge and professional incomes—How Extremistan is not the best place to visit, except, perhaps, if you are a winner

Yevgenia’s rise from the second basement to superstar is possible in only one environment, which I call Extremistan.[12] I will soon introduce the central distinction between the Black Swan-generating province of Extremistan and the tame, quiet, and uneventful province of Mediocristan.

THE BEST (WORST) ADVICE

When I play back in my mind all the “advice” people have given me, I see that only a couple of ideas have stuck with me for life. The rest has been mere words, and I am glad that I did not heed most of it. Most consisted of recommendations such as “be measured and reasonable in your statements,” contradicting the Black Swan idea, since empirical reality is not “measured,” and its own version of “reasonableness” does not correspond to the conventional middlebrow definition. To be genuinely empirical is to reflect reality as faithfully as possible; to be honorable implies not fearing the appearance and consequences of being outlandish. The next time someone pesters you with unneeded advice, gently remind him of the fate of the monk whom Ivan the Terrible put to death for delivering uninvited (and moralizing) advice. It works as a short-term cure.

The most important piece of advice was, in retrospect, bad, but it was also, paradoxically, the most consequential, as it pushed me deeper into the dynamics of the Black Swan. It came when I was twenty-two, one February afternoon, in the corridor of a building at 3400 Walnut Street in Philadelphia, where I lived. A second-year Wharton student told me to get a profession that is “scalable,” that is, one in which you are not paid by the hour and thus subject to the limitations of the amount of your labor. It was a very simple way to discriminate among professions and, from that, to generalize a separation between types of uncertainty—and it led me to the major philosophical problem, the problem of induction, which is the technical name for the Black Swan. It allowed me to turn the Black Swan from a logical impasse into an easy-to-implement solution, and, as we will see in the next chapters, to ground it in the texture of empirical reality.