The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

At the start of the Jewish revolt in the first century of our era, much of the Jews’ anger was caused by the Romans’ insistence on putting a statue of Caligula in their temple in Jerusalem in exchange for placing a statue of the Jewish god Yahweh in Roman temples. The Romans did not realize that what the Jews (and the subsequent Levantine monotheists) meant by god was abstract, all embracing, and had nothing to do with the anthropomorphic, too human representation that Romans had in mind when they said deus. Critically, the Jewish god did not lend himself to symbolic representation. Likewise, what many people commoditize and label as “unknown,” “improbable,” or “uncertain” is not the same thing to me; it is not a concrete and precise category of knowledge, a nerdified field, but its opposite; it is the lack (and limitations) of knowledge. It is the exact contrary of knowledge; one should learn to avoid using terms made for knowledge to describe its opposite.

What I call Platonicity, after the ideas (and personality) of the philosopher Plato, is our tendency to mistake the map for the territory, to focus on pure and well-defined “forms,” whether objects, like triangles, or social notions, like Utopias (societies built according to some blueprint of what “makes sense”), even nationalities. When these ideas and crisp constructs inhabit our minds, we privilege them over other less elegant objects, those with messier and less tractable structures (an idea that I will elaborate progressively throughout this book).

Platonicity is what makes us think that we understand more than we actually do. But this does not happen everywhere. I am not saying that Platonic forms don’t exist. Models and constructions, these intellectual maps of reality, are not always wrong; they are wrong only in some specific applications. The difficulty is that a) you do not know beforehand (only after the fact) where the map will be wrong, and b) the mistakes can lead to severe consequences. These models are like potentially helpful medicines that carry random but very severe side effects.

The Platonic fold is the explosive boundary where the Platonic mindset enters in contact with messy reality, where the gap between what you know and what you think you know becomes dangerously wide. It is here that the Black Swan is produced.

TOO DULL TO WRITE ABOUT

It was said that the artistic filmmaker Luchino Visconti made sure that when actors pointed at a closed box meant to contain jewels, there were real jewels inside. It could be an effective way to make actors live their part. I think that Visconti’s gesture may also come out of a plain sense of aesthetics and a desire for authenticity—somehow it may not feel right to fool the viewer.

This is an essay expressing a primary idea; it is neither the recycling nor repackaging of other people’s thoughts. An essay is an impulsive meditation, not science reporting. I apologize if I skip a few obvious topics in this book out of the conviction that what is too dull for me to write about might be too dull for the reader to read. (Also, to avoid dullness may help to filter out the nonessential.)