The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

Silent evidence pervades everything connected to the notion of history. By history, I don’t just mean those learned-but-dull books in the history section (with Renaissance paintings on their cover to attract buyers). History, I will repeat, is any succession of events seen with the effect of posteriority.

This bias extends to the ascription of factors in the success of ideas and religions, to the illusion of skill in many professions, to success in artistic occupations, to the nature versus nurture debate, to mistakes in using evidence in the court of law, to illusions about the “logic” of history—and of course, most severely, in our perception of the nature of extreme events.

You are in a classroom listening to someone self-important, dignified, and ponderous (but dull), wearing a tweed jacket (white shirt, polka-dot tie), pontificating for two hours on the theories of history. You are too paralyzed by boredom to understand what on earth he is talking about, but you hear the names of big guns: Hegel, Fichte, Marx, Proudhon, Plato, Herodotus, Ibn Khaldoun, Toynbee, Spengler, Michelet, Carr, Bloch, Fukuyama, Schmukuyama, Trukuyama. He seems deep and knowledgeable, making sure that no attention lapse will make you forget that his approach is “post-Marxist,” “postdialectical,” or post-something, whatever that means. Then you realize that a large part of what he is saying reposes on a simple optical illusion! But this will not make a difference: he is so invested in it that if you questioned his method he would react by throwing even more names at you.

It is so easy to avoid looking at the cemetery while concocting historical theories. But this is not just a problem with history. It is a problem with the way we construct samples and gather evidence in every domain. We shall call this distortion a bias, i.e., the difference between what you see and what is there. By bias I mean a systematic error consistently showing a more positive, or negative, effect from the phenomenon, like a scale that unfailingly shows you a few pounds heavier or lighter than your true weight, or a video camera that adds a few sizes to your waistline. This bias has been rediscovered here and there throughout the past century across disciplines, often to be rapidly forgotten (like Cicero’s insight). As drowned worshippers do not write histories of their experiences (it is better to be alive for that), so it is with the losers in history, whether people or ideas. Remarkably, historians and other scholars in the humanities who need to understand silent evidence the most do not seem to have a name for it (and I looked hard). As for journalists, fuhgedaboudit! They are industrial producers of the distortion.

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 in the arts. Accordingly, the Phoenician invention of the alphabet served the lower purpose of commercial record keeping rather than the more noble purpose 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.