ON THE PLUMAGE OF BIRDS
Before the discovery of Australia, people in the old world were convinced that all swans were white, an unassailable belief as it seemed completely confirmed by empirical evidence. The sighting of the first black swan might have been an interesting surprise for a few orni...
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ON THE PLUMAGE OF BIRDS
Before the discovery of Australia, people in the old world were convinced that all swans were white, an unassailable belief as it seemed completely confirmed by empirical evidence. The sighting of the first black swan might have been an interesting surprise for a few ornithologists (and others extremely concerned with the coloring of birds), but that is not where the significance of the story lies. It illustrates a severe limitation to our learning from observations or experience and the fragility of our knowledge. One single observation can invalidate a general statement derived from millennia of confirmatory sightings of millions of white swans. All you need is one single (and, I am told, quite ugly) black bird.*
I push one step beyond this philosophical-logical question into an empirical reality, and one that has obsessed me since childhood. What we call here a Black Swan (and capitalize it) is an event with the following three attributes.
First, it is an outlier, as it lies outside the realm of regular expectations, because nothing in the past can convincingly point to its possibility. Second, it carries an extreme impact. Third, in spite of its outlier status, human nature makes us concoct explanations for its occurrence after the fact, making it explainable andpredictable.
I stop and summarize the triplet: rarity, extreme impact, and retrospective (though not prospective) predictability.* A small number of Black Swans explain almost everything in our world, from the success of ideas and religions, to the dynamics of historical events, to elements of our own personal lives. Ever since we left the Pleistocene, some ten millennia ago, the effect of these Black Swans has been increasing. It started accelerating during the industrial revolution, as the world started getting more complicated, while ordinary events, the ones we study and discuss and try to predict from reading the newspapers, have become increasingly inconsequential.
Just imagine how little your understanding of the world on the eve of the events of 1914 would have helped you guess what was to happen next. (Don't cheat by using the explanations drilled into your cranium by your dull high school teacher). How about the rise of Hitler and the subsequent war? How about the precipitous demise of the Soviet bloc? How about the rise of Islamic fundamentalism? How about the spread of the Internet? How about the market crash of 1987 (and the more unexpected recovery)? Fads, epidemics, fashion, ideas, the emergence of art genres and schools. All follow these Black Swan dynamics. Literally, just about everything of significance around you might qualify.
This combination of low predictability and large impact makes the Black Swan a great puzzle; but that is not yet the core concern of this book. Add to this phenomenon the fact that we tend to act as if it does not exist! I don't mean just you, your cousin Joey, and me, but almost all "social scientists" who, for over a century, have operated under the false belief that their tools could measure uncertainty. For the applications of the sciences of uncertainty to real-world problems has had ridiculous effects; I have been privileged to see it in finance and economics. Go ask your portfolio manager for his definition of "risk," and odds are that he will supply you with a measure that excludes the possibility of the Black Swan?hence one that has no better predictive value for assessing the total risks than astrology (we will see how they dress up the intellectual fraud with mathematics). This problem is endemic in social matters.
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운, 불확실성, 확률, 그리고 지식의 문제에 몰두해 있는 사람이다. 철학자, 역사가, 수학자이며 현직 월스트리트의 투자전문가다. 1960년 그리스 정교를 믿는 레바논에서 태어났다. 그는 스스로를 레바논 출신이 아니라 레반트인이라고 소개한다. 종교적 다원성, 철학적 유연성, 문화적 풍부함을 자랑하던 레반트 지역을 자신의 자양분으로 여기고 있다는 것이다. 이러한 배경에서 탈레브는 미국 펜실베이니아 대학 워튼 스쿨에서 경영학 석사를 취득한 뒤 프랑스 파리 제9대학에서 금융공학으로 박사학위를 취득했다. 이후 월가에서 10여 년 간 증권분석가이자 투자전문가로 일했는데, 주 분야는 파생금융상품이었다. 레바논 전쟁을 겪으며 회의주의 철학에 심취하고 거대이론을 혐오하던 그는 투자은행에서 일하던 1987년 '블랙 먼데이'를 겪으면서 '검은 백조'아이디어를 떠올리게 됐다. 박식하고 철두철미한 필치에 신랄하고, 통렬하며, 공격적인 독설을 날린 그는 책의 발간 무렵 '상상할 수 있는 최악의 파국이 앞으로 월가를 덮칠 것'이라고 경고했다. 현재 '월스트리트의 새로운 현자'로 불리며 독자적인 투자회사를 운영하는 한편 뉴욕대학 폴리테크닉 연구소의 특훈교수, 런던 비즈니스 스쿨 방문교수로서 연구와 집필을 계속하고 있다.
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북소믈리에 한마디!
The Black Swan is an intriguing title - can you give us an overview of what a black swan looks like?
The Black Swan is about these unexpected events that end up controlling our lives, the world, the economy, history, everything. Before they happen we consider them close to impossible; after they happen we think that they were predictable and partake of a larger scheme. They are rare, but their impact is monstrous. My main problem is: Why we don’t know that these events play such a large role. Why are we blind to them?
What is your favorite example of a black swan?
I had to write one for the book, with the fictional character of Yevgenia Krasnova. She starts as an unsuccessful writer, becomes famous and creates a new style ?later people found her so obviously talented and believed that the emergence of such style was unavoidable. Most successful stories in the arts and letters are Black Swans. Outside the arts, my favorite one is the emergence of the computer and the internet. Also, almost all drug discoveries are Black Swans. The existence of the universe is a Black Swan…
What first got you interested in the world of uncertainty and probability?
I have been thinking about the neglected role of luck and our overestimation of knowledge ever since I can remember, though not in clear form. You know, children philosophize more than adults ?and they are critical of adults. I hated school because I liked to daydream and the system tried to stop me from that. Later, I figured out that that the system taught you what little certainties we think we had, and trained you to become a sucker by making you ashamed of saying "I don’t know". The world is too ambiguous ?the Black Swan comes from believing in crisp and neat texture of reality, and from the overestimation of our skills in mapping the world. But I was only able to express my idea after I started working in the city of London and in Wall Street. It seemed so obvious that people in Wall Street didn’t know what was going on, yet thought that they did. It was so blatant that they overestimated their explanations, the role of "skills", yet didn’t realize it. So I kept a tally of predictions and realized they can’t predict but somehow manage to convince themselves they could. The Black Swan, that rare, high-impact event, was the main reason for their failure to predict and understand the world. It was both a psychological problem (we didn’t know) and an empirical one; so I approached the problem from both ends.
What do you want people to take away from reading your book?
How not to be a fool for things that matter. You can take advantage of uncertainty if you know how to look it in the eye, and know the limits of what we understand. You should learn to accept fuzziness and know that we know very little in some domains ?but that it can be so useful a guidance to reality. How to avoid taking seriously the "faux experts" (those who wear suits and act in a pompous way). How listening to the media,or studying economics, degrades your knowledge of the world.
How do you write? Do you have a special room in which you work and a set routine?
My principal activity is daydreaming, so I may write mostly in my head. I have no routine, no work ethics. For years I had an upper limit of 50 minutes a day of actual writing so I would keep enjoying it. If I am bored, I stop right away, or I try to change the subject. You can easily fool yourself, not the reader: if you don’t enjoy what you are writing about, the reader will somehow figure it out. So I may go for a long time without writing anything except a check. Also, I need an aesthetic environment. I write in my " literary library", the one that does not have technical books and technical papers ?it is like a sacred space. I also like to write in cafes away from business people, with bohemian people around. Writing is sacred, other activities are profane, and I don’t want them to corrupt my writing.