Black swan nassim. Nassim Taleb: The Black Swan. Under the sign of unpredictability. The concept of limitation will help us make the right choice.
Hummingbird publishing illustration
Very briefly: The advice of a well-known economist-analyst teaches you to succeed without relying on luck and intuition, to calculate options and take into account events and risks that seem impossible.
"Black swans" are events that seem to be impossible, but taking place
Human talent is to turn all environmental signals into meaningful information. This made it possible to create a scientific method, philosophize about the nature of being and invent complex mathematical models.
Our ability to think about the world and manage it does not mean that we are good at it. We tend to think narrowly in our ideas about it. Having come to any judgment, we cling to it with a stranglehold.
Human knowledge is constantly increasing, and such a dogmatic approach is not effective. Two hundred years ago, doctors and scientists were absolutely confident in their knowledge of medicine, but just imagine that, having turned to a doctor with complaints of a runny nose, they write out a prescription for leeches!
Confidence in judgments forces us to take concepts outside the framework of the system of concepts that we accept as true. How to understand medicine without knowing about the existence of microbes? One can come up with a reasonable explanation for the disease, but it will be erroneous due to the lack of important information.
This kind of thinking can lead to unexpected surprises. Sometimes events are surprising, not because they are random, but because our worldview is too narrow. Such surprises are called "black swans" and can make us reconsider the picture of the world.
Before man first saw the black swan, everyone assumed that they were only white. White color was considered their integral part. Seeing the black swan, people radically changed their idea of this bird. Black swans are as common as swans white color, and as fatal as bankruptcy due to the fall of the stock market.
Black swans could have life-changing consequences for those who are blind to them
The black swan effect is not the same for everyone. Some may be seriously affected by it, while others will not even notice it. Access to relevant information is important: the less you know, the greater the risk of becoming a victim of a “black swan”.
Example. Imagine that at the races you bet on your favorite horse named Rocket. Because of the horse's physique, his list of awards, the skill of the jockey, and the lackluster competition, you bet all your money on winning it. Now imagine your surprise when the Rocket not only did not run after the launch, but preferred to just lie down. This is the black swan. Given the information available, the Rocket should have won, but somehow you lost all the money. In contrast, Rocket's owner got rich by betting against her. Unlike you, he knew the Rocket would go on strike to protest animal cruelty. This knowledge saved him from the "black swan".
The influence of "black swans" can affect not only individuals, but entire societies. In such cases, the "black swan" can change the world, affecting, for example, philosophy, theology and physics.
Example. Copernicus suggested that the Earth was not the center of the universe, and the consequences were colossal: the discovery called into question both the authority of the ruling Catholics and the Bible itself.
Subsequently, this "black swan" laid the foundation for a new European society.
It is very easy to confuse us even with elementary logical errors.
People often make the mistake of making predictions based on what they know about the past. Considering that the future is a reflection of the past, we are mistaken, because many unknown factors go against our assumptions.
Example. Imagine that you are a turkey on a farm. For many years the farmer fed you, groomed and cherished. Based on the past, there is no reason to expect change. Alas, on Thanksgiving you were beheaded, roasted and eaten.
When we make predictions based on the past, we are wrong, and this leads to serious consequences. A similar fallacy is cognitive bias, when we look for evidence only for pre-existing beliefs.
We do not accept information contrary to that which we already believe and are unlikely to explore further. But if we decide to figure it out, we will look for sources that dispute this information.
Example. If you firmly believe that "climate change" is a conspiracy, and then you see a documentary called "The Undeniable Evidence of Climate Change", it is likely that you will be very upset. And if you search the Internet, you'll find "climate change is a hoax" in the search terms, not "evidence for and against climate change."
That is, we unwittingly draw the wrong conclusions: it is inherent in our nature.
Our brains group information in a way that makes it difficult to make accurate predictions.
Over the course of evolution, the human brain has learned to classify information so that it can survive in the wild. But when we need to learn and quickly adapt to a dangerous environment, this method is completely useless.
The misclassification of information is called false narrative: a person creates linear descriptions of the current situation. Due to the sheer amount of information we receive daily, our brain only selects what it considers important.
Example. You probably remember what you ate for breakfast, but you can hardly name the color of the shoes of every passenger on the subway.
To give meaning to information, we connect it. So, as you think about your life, you mark certain events as significant and build them into a narrative that explains how you got to where you are.
Example. You love music because your mom used to sing to you before bed.
This is not the way to fully understand the world. The process works only with an eye to the past and does not take into account the almost limitless interpretations of any event. Even tiny events can have unpredictable, important consequences.
Example. A butterfly flapping its wings in India causes a hurricane in New York a month later.
If we arrange causes and effects in the order of their occurrence, we will see a clear, cause-and-effect relationship between events. But since we only see the result - a hurricane - we can only guess which of the simultaneously occurring events actually influenced such an outcome.
We find it difficult to distinguish between scalable and non-scalable information
We do not distinguish very well between the types of information - "scalable" and "non-scalable". The difference between them is fundamental.
Information that is not scalable, such as body weight or height, has a statistical upper and lower limit. That is, the weight of the body is not scalable, since there are physical limitations: it is impossible to weigh 4500 kg. Limiting the parameters of such unscalable information allows predictions to be made about averages.
But non-physical or fundamentally abstract things, such as the distribution of wealth or album sales, are scalable.
Example. If an album is sold through iTunes, there is no limit to the number of sales: it is not limited to the volume of physical copies. And because transactions are online, there's no shortage of physical currency, and there's nothing stopping you from selling trillions of albums.
The difference between scalable and non-scalable information is critical to seeing an accurate picture of the world. If rules that are effective for non-scalable information are applied to scalable information, errors will occur.
Example. You want to measure the wealth of the population of England. The easiest way is to calculate wealth per capita by adding up income and dividing it by the number of citizens. However, wealth is scalable: a tiny percentage of the population can own an incredibly large percentage of the wealth.
Data on income per capita will not reflect the real state of affairs in your income distribution.
We're too sure of what we think we know
Everyone wants to keep themselves out of harm's way. One way is to assess risks and manage them. So we buy insurance and try not to put all our eggs in one basket.
Most make every effort to assess risks as accurately as possible, so as not to miss opportunities and at the same time not do something that can be regretted. To do this, you need to assess all the risks, and then the likelihood that these risks will materialize.
Example. Let's say you're going to buy insurance, but without spending too much money. Then it is necessary to assess the threat of illness or accident and make an informed decision.
Unfortunately, we are convinced that we know all the possible risks that we must protect against. This is a game fallacy: we tend to treat risk as a game, with a set of rules and probabilities that can be determined before it starts.
Treating risk in this way is very dangerous.
Example. Casinos want to earn as much money as possible, so they have developed a security system and disqualify players who win too much and often. But their approach is based on a game error. The main threat to the casino is not lucky or thieves, but kidnappers who take the child of the casino owner hostage, or an employee who has not submitted an income declaration to the Tax Service. Serious dangers for the casino are completely unpredictable.
It doesn't matter how hard we try. It is impossible to accurately predict any risk.
Why is it important to be aware of your ignorance?
Realizing that you do not know much, you will be able to better assess the risks
Everyone knows the phrase: “Knowledge is power”. But when knowledge is limited, it is more profitable to admit it.
By focusing only on what you know, you limit your perception of all possible outcomes of a given event, creating fertile ground for the emergence of a “black swan”.
Example. You want to buy shares in a company but know too little about the stock market. In this case, you will see a few ups and downs, but in general, you will only notice that the trends are positive. Believing that the situation will continue, you spend all your money on stocks. The next day the market crashes and you lose everything you had.
Having studied the topic a little better, you would see the numerous ups and downs of the market throughout history. By focusing only on what we know, we expose ourselves to serious risks.
If you admit that you do not know something, you can significantly reduce the risk.
Example. Good poker players know that this principle is critical to the success of the game. They understand that their opponents' cards can be better, but they also know that there is certain information they don't know, such as the opponent's strategy and how determined they are to go all the way.
Realizing the presence of unknown factors, players focus exclusively on their cards, better assessing the possible risks.
The concept of limitation will help us make the right choice.
The best defense against cognitive traps is to have a good understanding of predictive tools as well as their limitations. Let this not save you from a miss, but it will help reduce the number of unsuccessful decisions.
If you are aware that you are subject to cognitive bias, it is much easier to understand that you are looking for information that confirms already existing statements. Or, knowing that people like to boil things down to clear, cause-and-effect narratives, you will tend to look for additional information to get a better idea of the "big picture".
You need to be aware of your shortcomings.
Example. If you understand that there are always unforeseen risks, despite the prospect of an opportunity, you will be more careful to invest heavily in it.
It is impossible to overcome all chance or our limitations in understanding the complexity of the world, but it is possible to at least mitigate the damage caused by ignorance.
The most important
Although we constantly make predictions, we are not good at it. We are overconfident in our knowledge and underestimate our ignorance. The inability to understand and define randomness, and even our very nature, contributes to unsuccessful decision making and the appearance of "black swans", that is, events that seem impossible and force us to rethink our understanding of the world.
Be wary of "because". Instead of wanting to see events in a clear causal relationship, consider a range of possibilities rather than focusing on one.
Realize that you don't know something. For meaningful forecasts for the future, whether it is buying insurance, investing, changing jobs, and so on, it is not enough to take into account everything you “know” - this gives only a partial understanding of the risks. Instead, acknowledge that you don't know something so you don't unnecessarily limit the information you're dealing with.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The Impact of the Highly Improbable
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Black Swan
Under the sign of unpredictability
Prologue. About bird plumage9
Part I Antilibrary Umberto Eco,
or About seeking evidence28
Chapter i. Years of teaching empiricist skeptic31
Chapter 2
Chapter h. Speculator and prostitute63
Chapter 4
or How not to be a sucker81
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
hidden evidence problem174
Chapter 9
or Uncertainty "botany"207
Part II. We are not allowed to foresee
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12. Epistemocracy, dream310
Chapter 13. Apelles painter,
or How to live in conditions of unpredictability 326
Part III. Gray swans of Extremistan 343
Chapter 14. From Mediocristan to Extremistan and back 345
Chapter 15. Normal distribution curve,
great intellectual deception 366
Chapter 16. Aesthetics of chance 402
Chapter 17. Locke's madmen,
or "Gaussian curves" out of place 432
Chapter 18. Uncertainty "linden" 449
Part IV, final 459
Chapter 19. The middle half, or How to make ends meet
meet with the black swan 459
End 464
Epilogue. White swans of Evgenia 466
Glossary 469
Bibliography 474
Dedicated to Benoit Mandelbrot, a Greek among the Romans
PROLOGUE. About bird plumage
About bird plumage
D O the discovery of Australia, the inhabitants of the Old World were convinced that all swans were white. Their unshakable confidence was fully confirmed by experience. The sighting of the first black swan must have taken ornithologists by surprise (and anyone else who, for some reason, cares about the color of bird feathers), but this story is important for another reason. It shows in what rigid boundaries of observation or experience our learning takes place and how relative our knowledge is. A single observation can cross out the axiom, derived over several millennia, when people admired only white swans. One (and, they say, rather ugly) black bird was enough to refute it*.
I go beyond this logical-philosophical question into the field of empirical reality, which has interested me since childhood. What we will call the Black Swan (with a capital letter) is an event that has the following three characteristics.
First, it is anomalous, because nothing in the past foreshadowed it. Secondly, it has huge force impact. Thirdly, human nature forces us to come up with explanations for what happened after it happened, making an event, at first perceived as a surprise, explainable and predictable.
Let's stop and analyze this triad: exclusivity, impact power and retrospective (but not prospective) predictability**. These rare Black Swans explain almost everything that happens in the world, from the success of ideas and religions to the dynamics of historical events and the details of our personal lives. Since we emerged from the Pleistocene - about ten thousand years ago - the role of Black Swans has increased significantly. Its growth was especially intensive during the industrial revolution, when the world began to become more complex, and everyday life- the one we think about, talk about, which we try to plan based on the news read from the newspapers - has gone off the beaten track.
Before the discovery of Australia, the inhabitants of the Old World were convinced that all swans were white. Their unshakable confidence was fully confirmed by experience. The sighting of the first black swan must have taken ornithologists by surprise (and anyone else who, for some reason, cares about the color of bird feathers), but this story is important for another reason. It shows in what rigid boundaries of observation or experience our learning takes place and how relative our knowledge is. A single observation can cross out the axiom, derived over several millennia, when people admired only white swans. One (moreover, they say, rather ugly) black bird was enough to refute it.
I go beyond this logical-philosophical question into the field of empirical reality, which has interested me since childhood. What we will call the Black Swan (with a capital letter) is an event that has the following three characteristics.
First, it abnormal because nothing in the past foreshadowed it. Secondly, it has enormous power of influence. Thirdly, human nature forces us to come up with explanations for what happened. after how it happened, making an event, at first perceived as a surprise, explainable and predictable.
Let's stop and analyze this triad: exclusivity, impact power and retrospective (but not prospective) predictability. These rare Black Swans explain almost everything that happens in the world, from the success of ideas and religions to the dynamics of historical events and the details of our personal lives. Since we emerged from the Pleistocene - about ten thousand years ago - the role of Black Swans has increased significantly. Its growth was especially intensive during the industrial revolution, when the world began to become more complex, and everyday life - the one we think about, talk about, which we try to plan based on the news read from the newspapers - went off the beaten track.
Think how little your knowledge of the world would help you if, before the war of 1914, you suddenly wanted to present a further course of history. (Just don't be fooled by what your nerdy schoolteachers stuffed your head with.) For example, you could foresee Hitler's rise to power and world war? What about the rapid collapse of the Soviet bloc? And the outbreak of Muslim fundamentalism? And the spread of the Internet? And what about the market crash in 1987 (and a completely unexpected revival)? Fashion, epidemics, habits, ideas, the emergence of artistic genres and schools - everything follows the “black swan” dynamics. Literally everything that has at least some significance.
The combination of low predictability with the power of impact turns the Black Swan into a mystery, but our book is still not about that. It's mostly about our unwillingness to admit that it exists! And I don't just mean you, your cousin Joe, and me, but almost all the so-called social scientists, who for more than a century have entertained the false hope that their methods can measure uncertainty. Applying non-concrete sciences to problems real world gives a ludicrous effect. I have seen how this happens in the field of economics and finance. Ask your “portfolio manager” how he calculates risk. He will almost certainly call you exclusion criterion the probability of a Black Swan - that is, one that can be used to predict risks with about the same success as astrology (we will see how intellectual swindle is dressed in mathematical clothes). And so in all humanitarian spheres.
The main point of this book is our blindness to chance, especially on a large scale; why do we, scientists and ignoramuses, geniuses and mediocrities, count pennies, but forget about millions? Why do we focus on the little things and not on possible significant events, despite their obvious gigantic impact? And - if you have not missed the thread of my reasoning - why reading a newspaper reduces our knowledge of the world?
It is easy to understand that life is defined by the cumulative effect of a series of significant shocks. You can feel the consciousness of the role of the Black Swans without getting up from your chair (or from a bar stool). Here's a simple exercise for you. Take your own life. List significant developments, technological advances since you were born, and compare them to how they were seen in the future. How many of them arrived on schedule? Take a look at your personal life, at the choice of profession or meeting loved ones, at the departure from your native places, at the betrayals that you had to face, at sudden enrichment or impoverishment. How often did these events go according to plan?
What don't you know
Black Swan logic does what you don't know far more important than what you know. After all, if you think about it, many Black Swans came into the world and shocked it precisely because no one was waiting for them.
Take the attacks of September 11, 2001: if this kind of danger could be anticipate September 10, nothing would have happened. Fighters would have patrolled around the WTC towers, interlocking bulletproof doors would have been installed in the planes, and the attack would not have taken place. Dot. Something else could have happened. What exactly? Don't know.
Isn't it strange that an event happens precisely because it shouldn't happen? How to protect yourself from this? If you know something (for example, that New York is an attractive target for terrorists) - your knowledge is worthless if the enemy knows that you know it. It's strange that in a strategy game like this, what you know may not matter.
This applies to any occupation. Take, for example, the “secret recipe” for phenomenal success in the restaurant business. If it were known and obvious, someone would have invented it already and it would have turned into something trivial. To beat everyone, you need to give out an idea that is unlikely to occur to the current generation of restaurateurs. It must be completely unexpected. The less predictable the success of such an enterprise, the fewer competitors it has and the greater the likely profit. The same applies to the shoe or book business - yes, in fact, to any business. The same applies to scientific theories - no one is interested in listening to platitudes. The success of human undertakings, as a rule, is inversely proportional to the predictability of their outcome.
Consider the 2004 Pacific tsunami. If it had been expected, it would not have caused such damage. The areas affected by it would be evacuated, an early warning system would be activated. Forewarned is forearmed.
Experts and “blank suits”
Failure to predict anomalies leads to failure to predict the course of history, if we take into account the share of anomalies in the dynamics of events.
But we act like we can predict historical events, or even worse - as if we can change the course of history. We forecast budget deficits and oil prices for thirty years, not realizing that we cannot know what they will be next summer. The cumulative errors in political and economic forecasts are so monstrous that when I look at their list, I want to pinch myself to make sure I'm awake. What is surprising is not the scale of our mispredictions, but the fact that we are unaware of it. This is especially worrying when we get into deadly conflicts: wars are by their very nature unpredictable (and we don't know that). Because of this misunderstanding of the cause-and-effect relationships between provocation and action, we can easily provoke the appearance of the Black Swan with our aggressive ignorance - like a child playing with a set of chemicals.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The Impact of the Highly Improbable
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Black Swan
Under the sign of unpredictability
Prologue. About bird plumage9
Part I Antilibrary Umberto Eco,
or About seeking evidence28
Chapter i. Years of teaching empiricist skeptic31
Chapter 2
Chapter h. Speculator and prostitute63
Chapter 4
or How not to be a sucker81
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
hidden evidence problem174
Chapter 9
or Uncertainty "botany"207
Part II. We are not allowed to foresee
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12. Epistemocracy, dream310
Chapter 13. Apelles painter,
or How to live in conditions of unpredictability 326
Part III. Gray swans of Extremistan 343
Chapter 14. From Mediocristan to Extremistan and back 345
Chapter 15. Normal distribution curve,
great intellectual deception 366
Chapter 16. Aesthetics of chance 402
Chapter 17. Locke's madmen,
or "Gaussian curves" out of place 432
Chapter 18. Uncertainty "linden" 449
Part IV, final 459
Chapter 19. The middle half, or How to make ends meet
meet with the black swan 459
End 464
Epilogue. White swans of Evgenia 466
Glossary 469
Bibliography 474
Dedicated to Benoit Mandelbrot, a Greek among the Romans
PROLOGUE. About bird plumage
About bird plumage
D O the discovery of Australia, the inhabitants of the Old World were convinced that all swans were white. Their unshakable confidence was fully confirmed by experience. The sighting of the first black swan must have taken ornithologists by surprise (and anyone else who, for some reason, cares about the color of bird feathers), but this story is important for another reason. It shows in what rigid boundaries of observation or experience our learning takes place and how relative our knowledge is. A single observation can cross out the axiom, derived over several millennia, when people admired only white swans. One (and, they say, rather ugly) black bird was enough to refute it*.
I go beyond this logical-philosophical question into the field of empirical reality, which has interested me since childhood. What we will call the Black Swan (with a capital letter) is an event that has the following three characteristics.
First, it is anomalous, because nothing in the past foreshadowed it. Secondly, it has enormous power of influence. Thirdly, human nature forces us to come up with explanations for what happened after it happened, making an event, at first perceived as a surprise, explainable and predictable.
Let's stop and analyze this triad: exclusivity, impact power and retrospective (but not prospective) predictability**. These rare Black Swans explain almost everything that happens in the world, from the success of ideas and religions to the dynamics of historical events and the details of our personal lives. Since we emerged from the Pleistocene - about ten thousand years ago - the role of Black Swans has increased significantly. Its growth was especially intensive during the industrial revolution, when the world began to become more complicated, and everyday life - the one we think about, talk about, which we try to plan based on the news read from the newspapers - went off the beaten track.
<*Распространение камер в мобильных телефонах привело к тому, что читатели стали присылать мне изображения черных лебедей в огромных количествах. На прошлое Рож-дество я также получил ящик вина "Черный лебедь" (так себе), видеозапись (я не смотрю видео) и две книги. Уж лучше картинки. (Здесь и далее, за исключением особо оговоренных случаев, - прим. автора.)
** The expected absence of an event is also a Black Swan. Note that, according to the laws of symmetry, a highly improbable event is the equivalent of the absence of a highly probable event. >
Think how little your knowledge of the world would help you if, before the war of 1914, you suddenly wanted to imagine the further course of history. (Just don't be fooled by the stuff your nerdy schoolteachers stuffed your head with.) For example, could you foresee Hitler's rise to power and a world war? What about the rapid collapse of the Soviet bloc? And the outbreak of Muslim fundamentalism? And the spread of the Internet? And what about the market crash in 1987 (and a completely unexpected revival)? Fashion, epidemics, habits, ideas, the emergence of artistic genres and schools - everything follows the "black swan" dynamics. Literally everything that has at least some significance.
The combination of low predictability with the power of impact turns the Black Swan into a mystery, but our book is still not about that. It's mostly about our unwillingness to admit that it exists! And I don't just mean you, your cousin Joe, and myself, but almost all the so-called social scientists who, for more than a century, have entertained the false hope that their methods can measure uncertainty. The application of non-concrete sciences to real-world problems has a laughable effect. I have seen how this happens in the field of economics and finance. Ask your "portfolio manager" how he calculates risk. He will almost certainly give you a criterion that eliminates the possibility of a Black Swan - that is, one that can be used to predict risks with about the same success as astrology (we will see how intellectual swindle is dressed in mathematical clothes). And so in all humanitarian spheres.
The main point of this book is our blindness to chance, especially on a large scale;
Black Swan. Under the sign of unpredictability
Dedicated to Benoit Mandelbrot, a Greek among the Romans.
About bird plumage
Before the discovery of Australia, the inhabitants of the Old World were convinced that all swans were white. Their unshakable confidence was fully confirmed by experience. Meeting With The first black swan must have taken ornithologists by surprise (and in general anyone who for some reason reverently relates to the color of bird feathers), but this story is important for another reason. It shows in what rigid boundaries of observation or experience our learning takes place and how relative our knowledge is. A single observation can cross out the axiom, derived over several millennia, when people admired only white swans. One (and, they say, rather ugly) black bird was enough to refute it.
I go beyond this logical-philosophical question into the field of empirical reality, which has interested me since childhood. What we will call the Black Swan (with a capital letter) is an event that has the following three characteristics.
First, it abnormal because nothing in the past foreshadowed it. Secondly, it has enormous power of influence. Thirdly, human nature forces us to come up with explanations for what happened. after how it happened, making an event, at first perceived as a surprise, explainable and predictable.
Let's stop and analyze this triad: exclusivity, force of impact and retrospective (but not prospective) predictability. These rare Black Swans explain almost everything that happens in the world, from the success of ideas and religions to the dynamics of historical events and the details of our personal lives. Since we emerged from the Pleistocene - about ten thousand years ago - the role of Black Swans has increased significantly. Its growth was especially intensive during the industrial revolution, when the world began to become more complicated, and everyday life - the one we think about, talk about, which we try to plan based on the news read from the newspapers - went off the beaten track.
Think how little your knowledge of the world would have helped you, “or, before the war of 1914, you would suddenly want to imagine the further course of history. (Just don't be fooled by the stuff your nerdy schoolteachers stuffed your head with.) For example, could you foresee Hitler's rise to power and a world war? What about the rapid collapse of the Soviet bloc? And the outbreak of Muslim fundamentalism? And the spread of the Internet? And what about the market crash in 1987 (and a completely unexpected revival)? Fashion, epidemics, habits, ideas, the emergence of artistic genres and schools - everything follows the "black swan" dynamics. Literally everything that has at least some significance.
The combination of low predictability with the power of impact turns the Black Swan into a mystery, but our book is still not about that. It's mostly about our unwillingness to admit that it exists! And I don't just mean you, your cousin Joe, and me, but almost all the so-called social scientists, who for more than a century have entertained the false hope that their methods can measure uncertainty. The application of non-concrete sciences to real-world problems has a laughable effect. I have seen how this happens in the field of economics and finance. Ask your "portfolio manager" how he calculates risk. He will almost certainly call you exclusion criterion the probability of a Black Swan - that is, one that can be used to predict risks with about the same success as astrology (we will see how intellectual swindle is dressed in mathematical clothes). And so in all humanitarian spheres.
The main point of this book is our blindness to chance, especially on a large scale; why do we, scientists and ignoramuses, geniuses and mediocrities, count pennies, but forget about millions? Why do we focus on the little things and not on possible significant events, despite their obvious gigantic impact? And - if you have not missed the thread of my reasoning - why does reading a newspaper reduce our knowledge of the world?
It is easy to understand that life is defined by the cumulative effect of a series of significant shocks. You can feel the consciousness of the role of the Black Swans without getting up from your chair (or from a bar stool). Here's a simple exercise for you. Take your own life. List significant developments, technological advances since you were born, and compare them to how they were seen in the future. How many of them arrived on schedule? Look at your personal life, at choosing a profession or meeting loved ones, at leaving your native places, at the betrayals that you had to face, at sudden enrichment or impoverishment. How often did these events go according to plan?
What don't you know
Black Swan logic does what you don't know far more important than what you know. After all, if you think about it, many Black Swans came into the world and shocked it precisely because no one was waiting for them.
Take the terrorist attacks of September 2001: if this kind of danger could have been foreseen on September 10, nothing would have happened. Fighters would have patrolled around the WTC towers, interlocking bulletproof doors would have been installed in the planes, and the attack would not have taken place. Dot. Something else could have happened. What exactly? Don't know.
Isn't it strange that an event happens precisely because it shouldn't happen? How to protect yourself from this? If you know something (for example, that New York is an attractive target for terrorists) - your knowledge is worthless if the enemy knows that you know it. It's strange that in a strategy game like this, what you know may not matter.
This applies to any occupation. Take, for example, the "secret recipe" for phenomenal success in the restaurant business. If it were known and obvious, someone would have invented it already and it would have turned into something trivial. To beat everyone, you need to give out an idea that is unlikely to occur to the current generation of restaurateurs. It must be completely unexpected. The less predictable the success of such an enterprise, the fewer competitors it has and the greater the likely profit. The same applies to the shoe or book business - yes, in fact, to any business. The same applies to scientific theories - no one is interested in listening to platitudes. The success of human undertakings, as a rule, is inversely proportional to the predictability of their outcome.
Consider the 2004 Pacific tsunami. If it had been expected, it would not have caused such damage. The areas affected by it would be evacuated, an early warning system would be activated. Forewarned is forearmed.
Experts and "blank suits"
Failure to predict anomalies leads to failure to predict the course of history, if we take into account the share of anomalies in the dynamics of events.
But we act as if we can predict historical events, or even worse, as if we can change the course of history. We forecast budget deficits and oil prices for thirty years, not realizing that we cannot know what they will be next summer. The cumulative errors in political and economic forecasts are so monstrous that when I look at their list, I want to pinch myself to make sure I'm awake. What is surprising is not the scale of our mispredictions, but the fact that we are unaware of it. This is especially worrying when we get into deadly conflicts: wars are by their very nature unpredictable (and we don't know that). Because of this misunderstanding of the cause-and-effect relationships between provocation and action, we can easily provoke the appearance of the Black Swan with our aggressive ignorance - like a child playing with a set of chemicals.
Our inability to predict in an environment infested with Black Swans, coupled with a general lack of understanding of this state of affairs, means that some professionals who think they are experts are not. If you look at their track record, it becomes clear that they understand their field no better than the man on the street, only much better at talking about it or, even more dangerous, clouding our brains with mathematical models. They also mostly wear a tie.
Since Black Swans are unpredictable, we should adjust to their existence (instead of naively trying to predict them). We can achieve a lot if we focus on anti-knowledge, that is, on what we do not know. Among other things, you can tune in to catch happy Black Swans (those that give a positive effect), if possible, going towards them. In some areas, such as research and venture capital, it is extremely profitable to bet on the unknown, because, as a rule, when you lose, the losses are small, but when you win, the profit is huge. We will see that, contrary to the claims of social scientists, almost all important discoveries and technical inventions were not the result of strategic planning - they were just Black Swans. Scientists and businessmen should rely as little as possible on planning and improvise as much as possible, trying not to miss the chance. I disagree with the followers of Marx and Adam Smith: the free market works because it allows a person to "catch" luck on the path of gambling trial and error, and not to receive it as a reward for diligence and skill. That is my advice to you: experiment to the maximum, trying to catch as many Black Swans as possible.
