You know how kids get a crush on someone, how for a time, their every thought and feeling is enlivened by the uncanny existence of the Object of Desire? Reluctantly, I admit this describes my intellectual life. I live for those moments when I discover a new mind, one that illuminates a facet of the world I have not previously been able to bring into focus. I read, I listen, I obsess over my new crush’s thoughts. I have the feeling that integrating them will change my mind, the way a new couch or table refocuses an entire room. I crave that change, and at the same time, I don’t want my new crush to displace the beloved old crushes lounging in the cozy armchairs of my awareness.
Meet Nassim Taleb, a thinker who just might clash with the furniture. Since I discovered him a few days ago, I’ve been downloading, ordering books and listening to podcasts. Go to EconTalk for the best podcast, Taleb’s Web site for links to most everything, and Wikipedia for an overview.
Here are all the caveats: this is a supremely confident (I forbear to say arrogant because I like his mind so much), elite personage whose interest in financial markets I don’t really share, whose politics appear to be of the Olympian-libertarian variety and whose grasp of the language of mathematics so far exceeds mine it might as well be Greek (or Lebanese, as he is by birth). But I promise you, the underlying ideas are well worth the journey.
What Taleb has already given me are much better reasons than my own instincts to do two things I’ve been advocating loud and long: distrust predictions and question theories. One of his main rhetorical devices is to imagine two realms.
Mediocristan is “the province dominated by the mediocre, with few extreme successes or failures. No single observation can meaningfully affect the aggregate. The bell curve is grounded in Mediocristan.” For example, concrete physical realities with limited ranges, like human height or weight, express Mediocristan. If you sample a thousand human beings, plotting their heights, you’ll get a result that looks very much like a bell curve, with most people clustered within a close range, and few that are markedly shorter or taller than that range. Within that sample, the presence of a few little people or basketball players won’t significantly affect the average, the median or the whole.
Extremistan is “the province where the total can be conceivably impacted by a single observation.” For example, there is no intrinsic limitation on income. Randomly choose a thousand humans from the poorest nation to the richest: if Bill Gates is included in the mix, he will significantly throw off the average, the median, and the whole. His presence creates a complexity very different from the regularity of Mediocristan.
Taleb argues convincingly that we treat far too much of our reality as if it were Mediocristan when in fact much of it often behaves like Extremistan, where there are occasional “black swans” (his name for the unexpected event and the title of his most recent book) among the white. So, for example, out of the many thousands of books, films and recordings released each year, a small number will account for the largest part of sales, and it is not possible to predict with certainty which of the many works released will find black swan-style success (or failure). Indeed, in any endeavor susceptible to notable, unpredictable exceptions, no amount of examining the past will enable us to foretell the future.
What’s going on here? Taleb discusses many factors contributing to our tendency to see our world as Mediocristan. There is the fact that our brains evolved long ago to deal with a world with many fewer variables, much less organized information, and a vastly smaller number of theories to explain them. The more complex any given situation, the larger number of examples you need to understand what is happening there. For instance, sampling the sales of a few dozen published books each year won’t tell you much about the prospects of the thousands of others not sampled. It’s just as likely as not that your sample would include one or more black swans—unexpectedly huge winners or losers—so anything you might conclude based on it would not be generalizable to the rest.
Yet it is plain to see that we have a powerful (one might say inbuilt) desire to figure things out, and we like it best when they fall into stable, understandable and predictable patterns. So over and over, we surrender to that desire, generalizing on the basis of too little information and coming up wrong.
If I place a few winning bets, I might conclude I am a skilled gambler, even though all that actually happened was a short run of luck. So many Hollywood careers have that trajectory: an early black swan of success is chased by financiers wanting to invest in the next blockbuster, only the second film is a plain old white swan and the one after that an ugly duckling, and all the investors are puzzled as to how they could have been mistaken…until the next black swan comes along.
I love what Taleb has to say about inventions, how almost all of the discoveries that have had tremendous impact on our culture were accidents in the sense that they were discovered while searching for something else. Because of hindsight bias, he says, histories of economic life and scientific discoveries are written with straightforward story lines: someone set out to do something and succeeded, it’s all about intention and design. But in truth, “most of what people were looking for, they did not find. Most of what they found they were not looking for.” Penicillin was just some mold inhibiting the growth of another lab culture; lasers at first had no application but were thought to be useful as a form of radar; the Internet was conceived as a military network; and despite massive National Cancer Institute-funded cancer research, the most potent treatment—chemotherapy—was discovered as a side-effect of mustard gas in warfare (people who were exposed to it had very low white blood cell counts). Look at today’s biggest medical moneymakers: Viagra was devised to treat heart disease and high blood pressure.
It’s interesting to think about this in career or relationship terms, realms full of complex human variables. Taleb points out that tons of books and gurus are based on asking the successful to explain how they got there. Typically, big winners in both business and love say it took good ideas and lots of hard work. But these are just stories people generate out of the need to explain, because many big losers also had good ideas and worked their butts off, with the opposite result. This is so commonsensical that it ought to be obvious, but as Taleb says, we suffer so badly from the “confirmation error” (looking for information to confirm a foregone conclusion or belief system), we are thrilled to the point of stupidity when someone publishes a book or otherwise propounds an idea that confirms our hunches.
Guilty as charged. There’s no denying that Taleb confirms some of my pet observations. For example, isn’t the following entry from his glossary delicious?
Empty-suit problem (or “expert problem”): Some professionals have no differential abilities from the rest of the population, but for some reason, and against their empirical records, are believed to be experts: clinical psychologists, academic economists, risk “experts,” statisticians, political analysts, financial “experts,” military analysts, CEOs, et cetera. They dress up their expertise in beautiful language, jargon, mathematics, and often wear expensive suits.
Many such experts have made their reputations by giving retrospective explanations for events, often delivered in the type of neat theoretical package that satisfies the desire for a story confirming our beliefs or reinforcing our sense of security. But being able to make up a good story after the fact is meaningless; the only thing that can count as true understanding, that can truly test a theory, is accurate prediction, and there we have fallen far short of success.
Mostly, I think, our theorizing is useless at best, dangerous at worst. How many times have you had the following experience? You become aware of two different physical symptoms at the same time, say a headache and a rash. In the privacy of your own head, you develop a hypothesis that links them: the same naughty bacterium is nibbling at your brain and your epidermis. Then you go to the doctor and are surprised (and relieved) to learn the rash is poison oak and the headache too much wine.
Just so in the news. Because we love things to make sense, because we are always on the lookout for correlations (and willing to settle for cleverly packaged coincidences in their place), any study that seems to satisfy these desires gets column-inches, but there’s no room to print the fact that a dozen other teams of researchers looked at the same phenomena without turning up a meaningful correlation. For every scientific experiment or medical study that produces a startling (if short-lived) conclusion that feeds our desire for orderly sense, there are countless studies that generate inconclusive or negative results.
Lately, I have been thinking about a problem that Taleb alludes to in even the bit of his thinking I’ve already read and heard. We are surrounded by a gargantuan news- and information-generating apparatus. Its appetite is enormous, as it must poop out vast quantities of airtime and newsprint every day. Consequently, we have story after story about results that turn out to be irreproducible (every week bringing its news flash of soon-to-be supplanted miracle cures and diets, instance) and a glut of theories as to why the economy works (or doesn’t), how to reduce crime, how to improve education, and so on. We broadcast a whole flock of black swans every evening—uncanny accidents, rare occurrences, terrible risks gone wrong—which normalizes them in our minds, so that our estimation of their likelihood is amazingly skewed. From what I can see, this glut is making us less and less able to cope.
Taleb’s sense of our problem is that we do not know how much we don’t know. He has a challenging task in drawing useful advice out of uncertainty. I’m looking forward to reading his books, but in the meantime, I am entertaining a few ideas his work seems to suggest:
- Since we can’t control unpredictable events, we should accept uncertainty and seek to maximize our exposure to serendipity, as by putting ourselves in the way of new ideas.
- Since there is such danger in accepting conclusions based on too little information simply because they confirm our beliefs, we should try to remain aware in the present of what we are doing, paying attention to what actually happens and refraining as far as possible from imposing theories on our experience.
- We should recognize our poor record as a species in predicting the future, that we are much better at doing than knowing. Some things are more predictable than others: we are safe enough in expecting tomorrow’s sunrise to plan on breakfast. We can start noticing which situations are most susceptible to black swans, and when we encounter them, remember how little we truly know so our ignorance doesn’t lead us around by the nose.
I hear my old crushes—Paul Goodman, Paulo Freire, Isaiah Berlin—grumbling a little at having to move their armchairs back to make room for this upstart. But really, he fits right in. Goodman wrote eloquently about the slavishness expressed in our devotion to experts; Berlin rejected most theorizing about human beings as “grotesque,” and Freire made us understand the disabling effects of allowing certain ideas about ourselves to dominate our minds. In truth, they seem very happy to meet Nassim Taleb, another uncolonized mind. And so am I.
Taleb’s book seeks to analyze the Nagual once presented by Carlos Casteneda. In doing so, he Tonalizes it. Castaneda does the same thing, using narrative, but with a different (and perhaps more fitting) style.
I am much more interested in the fact that this is the second new book on epistemology that I’ve read this month. The other one was ‘The Only Three Questions That Count’. Both seek to know the unknown, both make extensive use of anecdote and trendy current events and both include the inevitable millennial tip list that is automatically obselete once published. These authors should form a lecture circuit with Phil Town and the other pundits.
Benoit Mandelbrot, a mathematician that Taleb mentions in his book, has written extensively on the numerical side of this issue.
FYI: The ‘unknown unknown’ and the ‘unknowable unknown’ are both alive and well in the disorganized shelves at your local Dollar General store.
Also, while I’m thinking about it, and you heard it here last, the Universe is not a three or four sphere, but a fractal pine cone. It is important to remember, by analogy, that natural pine cones do not expand as much as they become open and closed.
[…] Arlene Goldbard likes the new Nassim Taleb book, The Black Swan, very much. She has an exhaustive review on her site. I get the feeling that the definitive nature of Taleb’s assertions will drive to some areas of deep disagreement, but it’s going to be fun getting to that point. I guess I need to put that book in the queue soon. […]
Sometimes I try to justify myself now why I never believed in the theory of stochastic varaibles and probablility. It sucks I’m again trying to have me fit myself into a pattern that satisfies my desire.
I appreciate your approach to this writer. I heard him on an interview, but couldn’t quite get the gist of his ideas even after podcasting and listening twice. And his solution, if you can call it that, is still a bit fuzzy. Thanks for helping me move forward on his ideas. I keep reading since my hunch is that he’s saying something meaningful.
Nice page, too!
[…] Nassim Taleb, whose views on randomness are having quite an influence on my own thinking, has noted that Of the five hundred largest U.S. companies in 1957, only seventy-four were still part of that select group, the Standard and Poor’s 500, forty years later. Only a few had disappeared in mergers; the rest either shrank or went bust. […]
[…] is up in our faces, ignoring what observation and reason can tell us about its real significance. Nassim Taleb has written a lot about this. One example that always floors me is a study he mentioned in The […]
Hi, Arlene,
Late getting to this (yes, yes, I know – more than a year is VERY late!), yet found an analogy that fits with Taleb’s “Empty Suit” concept. Ambrose Bierce, in his description of a barometer, beautifully illustrates the Empty Suits:
Barometer, n.: An ingenious instrument which indicates what kind of weather we are having.
The Devil’s Dictionary, Ambrose Bierce, (1842 – 1914)
I shall instigate a prediction league table immediately, and ask prominent “experts” to give us their views. And then see if they are right.
JW
Arlene,
What a wonderful piece!
I confess that I already liked Taleb before reading your commentary, but now, doing a bit of research here for a book I’m up to, I have discovered one Arlene person, another similar, deep companion who will also clash with the furniture and the drapes.
Taleb quickly joined my old companion Korzybski, who started me thinking hard about categorical constructs, – and we over here in psychiatry-land are awash in descriptive labels and drowning in the Gaussian Curve of tiny n numbers with limited variables. I do hope there is a place somewhere on the map between Med and Ext.
Time is the categorical variable… time does wash away constructs. Those that last over time, regardless of the suited ones, – they are the deal.
I loved your fresh perspective, will list your site over at mine for those with the courage to dance to improbable tunes.
Thanks,
Chuck
[…] My new crush, por Arlene Golbard […]
[…] Update:Arlene Goldarb sees Taleb’s sense of our problem is that we do not know how much we don’t know. “What Taleb has already given me are much better reasons than my own instincts to do two things I’ve been advocating loud and long: distrust predictions and question theories.” Thinking about how we look at our historical achievements, she notices Taleb’s assertion that ‘… almost all of the discoveries that have had tremendous impact on our culture were accidents in the sense that they were discovered while searching for something else. He’s said, “most of what people were looking for, they did not find. Most of what they found they were not looking for.” […]
[…] Update:Arlene Goldarb sees Taleb’s sense of our problem is that we do not know how much we don’t know. “What Taleb has already given me are much better reasons than my own instincts to do two things I’ve been advocating loud and long: distrust predictions and question theories.” Thinking about how we look at our historical achievements, she notices Taleb’s assertion that ‘… almost all of the discoveries that have had tremendous impact on our culture were accidents in the sense that they were discovered while searching for something else. He’s said, “most of what people were looking for, they did not find. Most of what they found they were not looking for.” […]
[…] Arlene Goldarb says that Taleb’s sense of our problem is that we do not know how much we don’t know. “What Taleb has already given me are much better reasons than my own instincts to do two things I’ve been advocating loud and long: distrust predictions and question theories.” Thinking about how we look at our historical achievements, she repeats Taleb’s assertion that ‘… almost all of the discoveries that have had tremendous impact on our culture were accidents in the sense that they were discovered while searching for something else. He’s said, “most of what people were looking for, they did not find. Most of what they found they were not looking for.” […]
There’s a mathematical treatment of randomness that Gregory Chaitin has researched, which suggests that randomness is inherent in mathematics and much more fundamental than we would care to admit. He, Taleb and others have seeded a renewed interest in combining randomness, fractal processes, and information theory to speculate on everything from Cosmology to baking bread. Who knows what kind of new science will come out of these concepts?
Me too. I have just finished “Fooled by Randomness” and am plowing through “Black Swan.” Furthermore, I am looking everywhere for material on Black Swan theory—and, true to the spirit of embracing the suspension of belief that Taleb advocates, I am also looking for any refutations I that can find—which are few, far between. I am always a little reticent of any idea that has no real challengers. So far, I haven’t found any rebuttals of substance. But that won’t stop me from looking.
What is interesting for me in his writings is that he is a great killer of sacred cattle, from the newspeak babble geeks, to the babble generated by our own self-satisfied minds. As to the latter, Taleb seems to ascribe our will-to-meaning to our need to mnemonically condense information. What troubles me though, is that there is often a telling meaning in our mental constructions. Take geometry for instance. It is safe to say that the sum of the squares of a right triangle equals that of the hypotenuse. This fact alone evinces the presence of an order in the universe that, while Taleb does not refute the fact, (in fact he affirms an overarching, though mentally unfathomable universal order). He nevertheless does, (at least within the emotional apparatus of my mind) seem to downplay the importance of this order.
I tend to straddle the fence on the issue of order vs disorder in the universe. I see no conflict between the idea of God and that of a Darwinian evolution—and, I do not need to embrace the ideas of Lamarck, and his ilk, in order to hold such an opinion. The thing is, I am old alchemist by spiritual nature. One thing I know to be true is that we are all sitting on an epistemological fence, and what is refreshing about Taleb’s work is that he is helping us to admit it. None of us has the final answers, and none of us ever will.
What blindsides financial markets is the fact that too many people come to the table with more of a need for confirmation than understanding.
Posted by Bill Churchill (20100716, 14:32)
Hi, Bill. I feel very much the same way. Taleb is a terrible snob, of course: nobody’s perfect. But he’s had a huge influence on my thinking, in terms of questioning assumptions and conventional pieties, and noticing how often the confirmation bias and other cognitive biases distort our thinking. On the question of order in the universe, my issue is whether we can discern it: to say that geometry is somehow intrinsic to the nature of being still doesn’t tell us what the nature of being wants of us, or even how to align ourselves with its trajectory. I really agree that Taleb is a breath of fresh air when it comes to admitting the impact of randomness, of not-knowing, in a time that values so many false certainties.
Hi Arlene. To me, it seems that our inner romantic sense of wonder itself is the objective of the “universal is,” whatever He/She/It is, (no disrespect to God intended—but I can’t presume to know who “God” is—my mind is too small). Romantic wonder is itself the beginning of an antidote to the things that are not quite what they “should be” according to our way of thinking—such as the existence of poverty, disease, ignorance and all of the other “big problems.” A sense of wonder can cause us to expand our notions of what drives these issues and how we may be able to solve them. Now a sense of romantic wonder may not be sufficient, but, I believe it is certainly necessary to fully grasp reality—at least that healthy form of reality that sees possibilities more than insurmountable problems.
The thing about Taleb is that he is killing a sacred epistemological cow—namely, the “limit” of what we think is “possible.” An understanding of the fact of Randomness, (true randomness qua randomness), crushes the “Ludic Fallacy,” (the idea that life conforms to a “game theory” that can be fully vetted in some final manner). It renders the “bell curves” of “possibility” a little less final and ugly than we have led ourselves to believe.
We need to expand our minds beyond where they are at in the present time—to see beyond the contours of our present boxes. Randomness itself reveals the underlying order of the universe.
Posted by Bill Churchill (2010720, 10:53)
Hi, Bill. I agree re: Taleb. But my confidence in seeing the underlying order seems to have leaked away. Instead, I have the desire to keep seeing, and seeing, and seeing. I like to change the epigram on my email from time to time. Here’s the current one, from Paul Valéry: “To see is to forget the name of the thing one sees.”
On wonder, if you haven’t read Abraham Joshua Heschel, you owe it to yourself to at least google a deeply kindred perspective to your own. His core concept is “radical amazement.” “We may doubt anything,” he wrote in Man Is Not Alone, “except that we are struck with amazement. When in doubt, we raise questions; when in wonder, we do not even know how to ask a question. Doubts may be resolved, radical amazement can never be erased. There is no answer in the world to man’s radical wonder. Under the running sea of our theories and scientific explanations lies the aboriginal abyss of radical amazement.
Feel free to write me at arlene@arlenegoldbard.com if you’d like to be pointed to some more on that, or schmooze about Taleb, or whatever.
[…] how useful I’ve found it to think of online dating’s challenges in terms borrowed from Nassim Taleb, the self-described “epistemologist of randomness” who wrote The Black Swan, a book I […]
In response to your post of 2010/07/20:
Sorry I haven’t been back in a while.
Though I’ve been in and out of many religions, (prior to the last 20 years or so), I’ve been a spiritual fence sitter for the last 20 years or so with regard to religious commitment. I can’t even decide to be an atheist, agnostic or some form of “transcendentalist.” I believe in God, but I can’t claim to know much more than that. The connected-to-God thing is always there in my emotional back-story. I think the subtle God experience I feel from time to time is to my spirit like what music is to my heart: the ever present sense of the sound and warmth of my early psychic impression of my mother’s heartbeat—an archetype that never leaves the inner nature of sensitive persons—which is why a robot can never really appreciate music and a cool rationalist can never admit of any existence of love and God.
The problem with AJ Heschel, and other brand loyalists is that they are brand loyalists. They have a shtick—a profession to uphold. They can never publically acknowledge that they just don’t know all they are “supposed to” know. They have to tow a “party line” in order to keep their flocks and the income those flocks provide. They must sell “truth” in order to peak the interest of their flocks. They will never leave their walled kingdoms to experience God for themselves and allow other to do the same. They can’t–it’s their little red wagon.
No one really knows God in the sense that things “known” can be known. This is because knowledge implies communicability of said “knowledge.” To communicate your God to someone is like communicating your early babyhood experience of your mother’s closeness—Its ludicrous to think that you could communicate such a thing. Conceptually, such notions can be loosely referred to—but not known in the fullest sense of the idea of “knowledge.” “Communicating” it would be like trying to explain romantic love or the wonder of an autumn day—just can’t be done. Poets have tried for ages and will never get it right–though they come closer than other scientists in explaining it.
I am quite comfortable sitting on the fence of spiritual indecision. After all, it’s all really just a question of being able to admit that no one can ever truly settle on where the line on the horizon of paradox actually is. No one can cleave ultimate reality. I have no trouble with such ambiguity—After all, God can fight his/her/its own battles. If God is so subtle and patient, what else can I do? I am not equivocating—I just plain don’t know enough to say “I know the way.”
Posted by Bill Churchill (20101006, 16:50)
Regarding my statements about AJ Heschel in my prior post, (of 20101006, 16:50):
I have reconsidered my position and have concluded that my previous post is based on my limited initial skimming through of an article about Heschel in Wikipedia. Though Wikipedia is a good resource, my skimming through the article led me to form an inaccurate picture of the man’s teachings which I wish to revise. Having read the article more closely, I wish to change my opinion.
Given my limited knowledge of Heschel, my characterizing of him as a mere self-interested purveyor of a yet another self-serving religious “party line” is an unfair ad homonym attack of the sort that I do not like making without having a basis for doing so. I do not like making hasty critical judgments about anything or anyone without all the facts, and am not proud of having done so in this case. Furthermore, I understand from a re-reading of the article (and from reading a couple of other brief biographies), that Heschel has done considerable good in the world, having stood for social justice in our age when too few others stand in the breech for the oppressed. Heschel is NOT among those I still refer to when I speak of the self-serving “Party Line” pushers of narrow religious doctrines.
Sometimes I let my passion against injustice create injustice—even the very form of injustice I am passionate against. Then again, we are all trapped from time to time in our own worlds—we bounce off the walls of the castles of misunderstandings that we have built for ourselves. This is no excuse—but the fact that it happened will serve to make me more cautious about jumping to conclusions in the future.
Posted by Bill Churchill (20101008, 13:10)
[…] Arlene Goldarb says that Taleb’s sense of our problem is that we do not know how much we don’t know. “What Taleb has already given me are much better reasons than my own instincts to do two things I’ve been advocating loud and long: distrust predictions and question theories.” […]
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