In a world where people assume all swans are white, the discovery of a black swan can be devastating to one’s preconceptions about what it means to be a swan in the first place. In his book, The Black Swan: the Impact of the Highly Improbable, Nassim Nicholas Taleb uses the discovery of a black swan to illustrate the unpredictability of life: “It [the Black Swan] 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” (vxii).
Black Swans are rare events that have extreme impact, that is, they are “highly improbable consequential events” (18). Taleb believes that 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” (xviii). Simply consider the unpredicted yet incalculable impact of both World Wars, the demise of the Soviet bloc, the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, the spread of the internet, and 9/11. The Black Swan exposes our relative uncertainty about all things (xxiv).
Because “highly improbable consequential events” (18) define our world and our lives, there are two ways we can approach life: In our experience, we can rule out the extraordinary and focus on the “normal” or we can learn to understand our lives in light of the extraordinary cumulative effect of Black Swans.
According to Taleb, the “normal” is largely irrelevant to understanding life:
If you want to get an idea of a friend’s temperament, ethics, and personal elegance, you need to look at him under the tests of severe circumstances, not under the regular rosy glow of daily life. Can you assess the danger a criminal poses by examining only what he does on an ordinary day? Can we understand health without considering wild diseases and epidemics? Indeed the normal is often irrelevant. (xxiv)
Taleb draws us into sharing his views on the significance of Black Swans by asking us to consider a few of our own personal Black Swans:
Go through the following exercise. Look into your own existence. Count the significant events, the technological changes, and the inventions that have taken place in our environment since you were born and compare them to what was expected before their advent. How many of them came on a schedule? Look into your own personal life, to your choice of profession, say, or meeting your mate, your exile from your country of origin, the betrayals you faced, your sudden enrichment or impoverishment. How often did these things occur according to plan? (xix)
In order to deal with a life full of uncertainties, we must come to terms with our own ignorance. Our cumulative experiences offer little aid in understanding life. The “Problem of Inductive Knowledge” is that it is difficult to “logically go from specific instances to reach general conclusions” (40). One of the best illustrations Taleb uses to communicate this is the life of a turkey on a farm: “Consider a turkey that is fed every day. Every single feeding will firm up the bird’s belief that it is the general rule of life to be fed every day by friendly members of the human race ‘looking out for its best interests,’ as a politician would say. On the afternoon of the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, something unexpected will happen to the turkey. It will incur a revision of belief” (40). All of the turkey’s prior particular experiences will not aid it in understanding the most fundamental general truth – that it is being fattened for slaughter!
Because of the weakness of inductive knowledge, Taleb argues that “We can get closer to the truth by negative instances, not by verification! It is misleading to build a general rule from observed facts” (56). Put another way: we can “know what is wrong with a lot more confidence than [we] can know what is right” (58). (This is similar to the mystics’ emphasis on apophatic theology, but Taleb only mentions this without developing it.) Therefore, if we hope to survive in a world of Black Swans we must recognize “that understanding how to act under conditions of incomplete information is the highest and most urgent human pursuit” (57).
Taleb is highly suspicious of attempting to weave a narrative into events in order to better understand their meaning. He calls this “the narrative fallacy” or more particularly, “the narrative fraud” (63). Summarizing and simplifying events in order to explain them reduces their meaning. He is certainly correct that events can be overly-simplified and wrongly narrated – things are always infinitely more complex than we imagine and no one explanation ever pins anything down. But his rejection of narrative makes it nearly impossible to discern any real meaning in regard to events or individual lives. This may be fine for Taleb – and his extraordinary intellect may be able to rest in this – but this will not “work” for most people. Indeed, his Black Swan theory is, in a sense, a narrative. And the fact that most of life is “normal” and routine does beg for some validity to narration.
As a committed empiricist, Taleb may desire too much certainty. Knowledge extends beyond that with which we are certain. Much of what we believe and act upon is done with relative confidence – not absolute certainty. If there is anything that modernity has taught us (judging by the critique of postmodernity) it is that absolute certainty is relatively impossible. To attempt to live one’s life only by acting upon that with which one is certain reduces rather than enhances life.
The most valuable truth I gleaned from this book is that most great discoveries occur by accident. Things rarely turn out as planned. The ability to be flexible, to persevere in moving on after a series of failures, to accept what is discovered even if it is not what one expected – all these are important life skills that enable us to live with and benefit from Black Swans. Predictions are merely that – predictions. We rarely see clearly enough to completely understand the significance (or lack of significance) of events. We should rightly be wary of predictions and forecasts – especially those that have to do with events that are years away. (Global warming, anyone?) Five-year plans have limited value. They are almost always wrong, and one Black Swan can completely overturn any limited value they might have in the first place.
Taleb’s call to be prepared for anything that may arise is hardly helpful advice. However, people of much lesser intellectual power than Taleb could offer the same advice.
One interesting sidebar that arises from reading this book is that Taleb’s theory allows for the possibility of unique and highly improbably events like Jesus’ resurrection to significantly impact the world. Let’s face it: the resurrection is a “highly improbable consequential event.” It lies “outside our tunnel of possibilities” (213). Though Taleb’s skeptical empiricism will not allow him to embrace this Black Swan, his theory leaves it open as a possibility – and a deeply impactful one, at that.
In summary, Taleb urges us to be skeptical of the ordinary, embrace the improbable, and realize that there is likely no overall meaning or significance to anything. This may allow one to survive in this world, but it hardly equips one to truly live. We are left feeling a little bit like the turkey fattened for slaughter, wondering if anything we experience possesses any significance beyond the moment. This may be all the human intellect can provide, but it does not satisfy the human heart.
This causes me to question Taleb’s summum bonum, that is, his highest good. Is it true, as Taleb argues, “that understanding how to act under conditions of incomplete information is the highest and most urgent human pursuit”? Or could it be that understanding how to derive meaning, significance, and fulfillment from all the “normal” experiences of life is the highest and most urgent human pursuit?
One final note: As a hopeless and incurable bibliophile, I love Taleb’s comments on reading. He writes, “Let me insist that erudition is important to me. It signals genuine intellectual curiosity. It accompanies an open mind and the desire to probe the ideas of others. Above all, an erudite can be dissatisfied with his own knowledge, and such dissatisfaction is a wonderful shield against Platonicity, the simplifications of the five-minute manager, or the philistinism of the overspecialized scholar. Indeed, scholarship without erudition can lead to disasters” (48).
Quotes excerpted from The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
© Richard J. Vincent, 2007
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