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Black swan under the sign of unpredictability description. Nassim Taleb - Black Swan

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.

<*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? A rapid decay 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;

Read another book by Nassim Taleb:

Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Black Swan. Under the sign of unpredictability. M.: Hummingbird, 2009. - 528 p.

Earlier, I introduced you to a book by this author -. Taleb's ideas are close to me, especially our inability to plan and the exaggeration of the importance of cause-and-effect relationships, so I read The Black Swan with pleasure. The book is written in good literary language [and well translated], reads in one breath. I recommend!

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Prologue. About bird plumage

The rare event - Black Swan - has three characteristics:

abnormal
Possesses great power
We come up with explanations after an event has happened, making an event that was first perceived as a surprise explainable and predictable.

The main point of the book is our blindness to chance, especially on a large scale. Black swans came into the world and shocked it precisely because no one expected them. ... The success of human undertakings, as a rule, is inversely proportional to the predictability of their results.

I disagree with the followers of Marx and Smith: the free market works because it allows everyone to "catch" luck in the way of gambling trial and error, and not to receive it as a reward for diligence and skill.

… we are hindered by the fact that we are too obsessed with the known, we tend to study the details, and not the big picture. …we don't learn. The problem is in the structure of our consciousness: we do not comprehend the rules, we comprehend the facts, and only the facts. We despise the abstract, and we despise it passionately.

Hidden Heroes. Who gets the reward - the head of the Central Bank, who did not allow a recession, or the one who "corrects" the mistakes of his predecessor, being in his place during the economic recovery? ... Everyone knows that prevention should be given more attention than therapy, but few people thank for prevention.

Platonism I call our tendency to take a map of a place for a place, to focus on clear "forms" to the detriment of understanding diversity [induction, simplification].

In this book, I stick my neck out and make a claim against many of our thinking habits, against the fact that our world is dominated by a disregard for the unknown, and the very improbable (incredible according to our current knowledge). And we spend all our time in measurements, focused on what we know and what repeats.

This implies the need to use the emergency case as a starting point and not treat it as an exception, which we will push aside.

I also make the bold (and even more annoying) claim that despite the growth of our knowledge, or even because of this growth, the future will be less and less predictable, while human nature and social "science" seem to are conspiring to hide this idea from us.

PartI. Antilibrary Umberto Eco, or about the search for evidence

Read books are far less important than unread ones. The library should contain as much of the unknown as your finances allow you to fit into it ...

Chapter 1

The human mind suffers from three diseases when it tries to embrace history, and I call them eclipse triad:

Illusion of understanding. That is, everyone thinks they know what's going on in the world, which is actually more complex (or random) than they think.
Retrospective distortion, or that we can evaluate events only after the fact. The story seems clearer and more organized in history books than in reality.
The tendency to exaggerate the significance of a fact, exacerbated by the harmful influence of scientists, especially when they create categories, that is, "platonize".

…our mind is an excellent explanatory machine that can find meaning in almost anything, interpret any phenomenon, but is completely unable to accept the idea of unpredictability.

History and societies don't crawl. They make jumps. They go from fracture to fracture. Between fractures, almost nothing happens in them. Yet we (and historians) like to believe in predictable, small, incremental changes. …you and I are nothing but an excellent flashback machine, and humans are great masters of self-deception.

Categorization always simplifies reality. Categorization is necessary for people, but it turns into a disaster when they begin to see the category as something final, excluding the fragility of boundaries - not to mention the revision of the categories themselves.

I was struck by the idea of the rationality of the market - the idea that there is no way to profit from the securities sold, since the price of them automatically includes all available information, that is, the market "knows" the true price of the shares. Public information is therefore useless, especially for a businessman, because the price already "includes" all such information, and the news that millions see does not give you any real advantage.

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

The most important piece of advice [which later turned out to be bad] was from a sophomore at the Wharton School of Business. He recommended that I get scalable» a profession, in the sense that you are not paid for an hour of work, and thus you are not limited total number working time. It was the simplest way to separate one profession from another and thus summarize the differences between kinds of unpredictability, and this led me to the main philosophical problem– the problem of induction [the technical name of the Black Swan]. I drew a line between a person of "ideas" who sells an intellectual product in the form of a business operation or a product, and a person of "labor" who sells his own labor. In one category of professions, mediocrity, mediocrity, the golden mean dominate. Efficiency in them is achieved by mass. In the other, there are only giants and dwarfs - more precisely, a very small number of giants and a huge number of dwarfs. ... units get almost everything; the rest are crumbs.

Mediocristan [physical, etc. human characteristics]. When the sample population is large, no single case will make a significant difference to the mean or sum. Extremistan [social phenomena, for example, income]. One single example can give a disproportionately large increase in the sum or average. Extremistan gives rise to Black Swans, as only a handful of events have had a defining impact on history. This is the main idea of the book.

If you are dealing with Extremistan values, it is very difficult for you to get statistical averages from one sample or another, because a single observation can be decisive. That's the whole idea of the book - nothing complicated.

In the Middle East we have to endure the tyranny of the collective, the routine, the obvious and the predictable; in the extreme camp we are ruled by the tyranny of the singular, the accidental, the invisible and the unpredictable.

The table below summarizes the differences between the two types of dynamics:

Mediocristan	extremistan
Non-scalability	Scalability
Ordinary accident (type 1)	out of the ordinary (sometimes far reaching) randomness (type 2)
The most typical representative is the middle peasant	The most “typical” representative is a giant or a dwarf, that is, there are no typical ones at all
The winners get a small piece of the common pie	Winner takes almost everything
Example: An opera singer's audience before the invention of the gramophone	Today's audience of the artist
More common in the lives of our ancestors	More common in modern times
The Black Swan Threat Is Small	The threat of the Black Swan is very significant
Strict obedience to the laws of gravity	No physical limits
In the center (as a rule) - physical quantities, for example, growth	In the center are numbers, let's say income
Proximity to utopian equality (as far as reality allows)	extreme inequality
The outcome does not depend on a single case or observation	The result is determined by an insignificant number of extreme events
Observation over a limited period of time gives an idea of what is happening	It takes a long time to understand what's going on
The tyranny of the collective	The tyranny of the random
Based on the visible, it is easy to predict the invisible	Difficulty making predictions based on information already available
History creeps	History makes leaps
Events are distributed along the Gaussian curve or its variants (that is, the probability of various events can be calculated)	The distribution is carried out either by Mandelbrot's "gray" swans (scientifically controlled, for example, 80 / 20), or completely uncontrolled Black swans

Chapter 4

Induction Problem: how can we logically move from a particular assumption to a general conclusion? How do we know what we know? How do we know that what we have noticed due to given objects or events will be enough to allow us to figure out their other properties? Any knowledge obtained as a result of observations contains traps.

Rice. 1. A Thousand and One Days of History or the Turkey Effect

Turkey before and after Thanksgiving. The history of the process for more than 1000 days says nothing about what should happen. This naive projection of the past into the future is not good for anything.

We simply do not know how much information the past contains.

… erudition is important to me. It signals genuine intellectual curiosity. It accompanies an open mind and a desire to explore the ideas of others. First of all, the polymath may be dissatisfied with his own knowledge, and such dissatisfaction is a wonderful shield against Platonisms, five-minute manager simplifications, or philistinism.

I am often asked: "How do you, Taleb, cross the road with your extreme awareness of risk?" or even more silly: "You're asking us not to take risks." I'm not advocating risk phobia (we'll see that I favor the aggressive type of risk-taking): all I'm going to show you in this book is how to avoid blindfolded crossing the road.

... it is extremely convenient for us to assume that we live in Mediocristan. Why? Because it allows you to exclude the Black Swan! In this case, the Black Swan problem either does not exist at all or has little consequence.

There are other points that stem from our neglect of the Black Swan:

Chapter 5

While belief in evidence has become part of our habits and our consciousness, it can be dangerously fallacious.

Error-reversal. Substitution of the statement: “there is no evidence of the possibility of radical change” with “there is evidence of the impossibility of Black Swans”. Many people confuse the statement "almost all terrorists are Muslims" with "almost all Muslims are terrorists".

Any rule can be tested either directly, looking at cases where it works, or indirectly, focusing on cases where it doesn't work. Refuting examples are much more important for establishing the truth. But you don't seem to know about it.

Chapter 6

Explanations combine facts with each other; help them remember give them more meaning. This is dangerous because it strengthens us in the illusion of understanding. …narrativity stems from an innate biological need to minimize multidimensionality. Information needs to be simplified.

In the previous chapter, speaking about the problem of induction, we made assumptions about the invisible, that is, what lies outside the information field. Here we will deal with the visible, what lies inside the information field, and we will understand the distortions that arise during its processing.

Small test. Read:

BETTER TITS IN
IN HANDS THAN A CRANE
IN THE SKY

Didn't notice anything? … the rejection of theorizing requires much more energy than theorizing! Theorizing occurs in us implicitly, automatically, without our conscious participation.

Our tendency to narration, that is, to build narrative chains, has a very deep psychological reason; it is related to the dependence of information storage and accessibility on order. Unfortunately, the same circumstance that forces us to simplify also makes us think that the world is less chaotic than it really is.

Assimilation (and imposing on the world) of narrativity and causality is a symptom of the fear of multidimensionality.

If the level of uncertainty in your business is high, if you constantly punish yourself for actions that led to undesirable consequences, start by keeping a journal.

We love to run around with certain and already familiar Black Swans, while the essence of randomness is in its abstractness.

Chapter 7

We believe that there is a causal relationship between the two variables. An increase in one value will necessarily entail an increase in another. The trouble is that the world is much less linear than we are used to thinking and what scientists would like to believe. …linear progress, dear to the Platonists, is not the norm.

Chapter 8

The Greek philosopher Diagoras, nicknamed the Godless, was shown images of people who prayed to the gods and were saved from a shipwreck. It was understood that prayer saves from death. Diagoras asked: “Where are the images of those who prayed, but still drowned?” I call this the hidden evidence problem. This is the basis of almost all superstitions - in astrology, dreams, beliefs, predictions ... Hiding evidence, events mask their randomness.

We disregard hidden evidence whenever it comes to comparing abilities, especially in the "winner takes all" fields. You can admire success stories, but you should not believe them unconditionally: we probably do not see the full picture. … if we want to study the nature and causes of success, then we must also study failure. Almost all books that aim to identify the skills an entrepreneur needs to thrive follow this pattern. The authors select several well-known millionaires and analyze their qualities. They look at what unites these "tough guys" - courage, willingness to take risks ... - and conclude: these traits allow them to succeed ... Now take a look at the cemetery. It's not easy, because losers don't write memoirs. The very idea of a biography is based on the assumption that there are causal relationships between certain personality traits and success. They share success and the cemetery one thing - luck. Ordinary luck.

In my opinion, the most non-charlatan book on finance is written by Paul and Moinigan and is called What I Learned from Losing a Million Dollars. The authors had to publish this book at their own expense.

Previously, I advised against choosing a scalable profession, because there are very few “lucky ones” in such professions. The cemetery of losers is huge: there are many more poor actors than poor accountants ...

We make decisions blindly, because the alternatives are hidden from us by a veil of fog. We see the obvious and visible consequences, and not those that are invisible and not so obvious. However, these invisible consequences are much more important.

Confirmation fallacy: Authorities are good at talking about what they have done, but not about what they have not done. In fact, they are engaged in ostentatious "philanthropy", that is, they help people in such a way that everyone can see and sympathize, forgetting about the hidden cemetery of invisible consequences.

Suppose a drug is invented that cures some serious illness, but in exceptional cases leads to the death of the patient, which is insignificant on a social scale. Will a doctor prescribe such a medicine to a patient? It's not in his interest. If a patient suffers side effects, his lawyers will harass the doctor as hunting dogs, and hardly anyone will remember the lives saved by the new medicine. Life saved is a statistic; an injured patient is a scandalous incident. The statistics are invisible; incidents are shouted at every corner. The threat of the Black Swan is also invisible.

Survival error: do not judge the probability from the high position of a lucky player, judge from the point of view of those who made up the original group.

All of the above devalues the notion of “cause” to the extreme…almost always misapplied by historians…it’s easier for us to say “because” than to acknowledge the power of chance…don’t put too much trust in causes – especially when there is the possibility of significant hidden evidence.

Chapter 9

"Nerd" - a person whose thinking is utterly squeezed by the frames. Have you ever wondered why so many straight A students do not achieve anything in life, and those who trail behind in school are raking in money? ..

Game error: the kind of risks that casinos deal with are almost non-existent behind the walls of this building, and studying it is of little use in reality.

Man is predisposed to certainty. It is necessary to learn the art of doubt, the art of staying on the edge between doubt and faith.

“Cosmetic”, platonic, light always floats on the surface… we are interested in what has already happened, and not what can still happen… we become victims of the problem of induction… sadly, the current version of man is not designed to understand abstract matters She cares too much about context. Randomness and uncertainty are abstract. We rush about what happened, ignoring what could have happened.

PART II. We are not allowed to foresee

Trying to look into the future, we "tunnel" - we imagine it to be ordinary, free from Black Swans, but in the future there is nothing ordinary! This is not a Platonic category. ... focus on the ordinary (ordinary), Platonization make us predict according to a pattern. Companies do not need precise plans, but the development of adaptive skills. The great baseball coach Yogi Berra said, "It's not easy to predict, especially the future."

Chapter 10

Forecasting without a margin for error reveals three misconceptions, generated by the same misunderstanding of the nature of uncertainty:

The degree of uncertainty is not that important. At the same time, the errors are so large that they are more significant than the assumptions themselves.
Misunderstanding that the longer the time period, the more difficult it is to give an accurate forecast.
Underestimation of the random nature of the predicted variables

When choosing a strategy, the extreme limit of risk is extremely important - it is much more important to know the worst option than the overall forecast.

Chapter 11

So, we have previously verified that

We are prone to "tunneling" (limiting ourselves to frames, viewing the future as a continuation of the past) and narrow thinking (epistemic arrogance)
The success of our predictions is greatly overestimated.

In this chapter, we will try to understand what is not customary to advertise: the structural limitations of our ability to predict.

Poincaré introduced the concept of non-linearity: small events can lead to serious consequences. Nonlinearity, according to Poincaré, is a serious argument that limits the limits of predictability.

In the 1960s, meteorologist Edward Lawrence made a discovery later called the "butterfly effect". He simulated the weather and re-introduced the same values as input data, but with a different rounding ...

Platonists are characterized by a “top-down” view, stereotyping and narrowness of thinking, obsession with their own interests, and impersonality. Non-Platonists tend to be bottom-up, open-minded, skeptical, and empirical.

The past can be confusing, moreover, there are many degrees of freedom in our interpretations of past events. Look at a row of dots representing changes in a number over time (Figure 2a). A series showing the apparent growth in the bacterial population (or sales figures, or the amount of feed eaten by a turkey from Chapter 4(a). Easy to fit into a trend (b): there is one, and only one, linear model that fits this data. You can extend it into the future. Looking ahead on a larger scale (c), other models are also suitable. The actual "generating process" (d) is extremely simple, but has nothing to do with the linear model! Only some parts of the curve seem to be linear, and we fall into the trap of extrapolating them as a straight line.

These graphs illustrate a statistical version of the narrative error—you find a pattern that fits the past. You can look at the linear part of the curve and brag about a high R-squared [trendline parameter], supposedly indicating that your model fits the data well and has great predictive power. All this is nonsense: it is only suitable for the linear segment. Remember that R-square is not good for Extremistan.

Rice. 2. An example of a narrative error if the pattern is non-linear.

Chapter 12

The one who Not is distinguished by epistemic arrogance, as a rule, is not very noticeable to everyone. It is not customary for us to respect modest people who are not in a hurry with judgments. They have epistemic modesty.

… in theory, randomness is an inherent property of events, but in practice, randomness is incomplete information, what I call the impenetrability of history.

Chapter 13

The recommendation for every day is this: stay human. Come to terms with the fact that you are human, and in all your endeavors there is an element of epistemic arrogance. Do not forbid yourself to judge and evaluate. What should be avoided is unnecessary dependence on destructive large-scale forecasts. Most importantly: be prepared! Remember how the magic of numbers intoxicates. Be prepared for any possible contingency.

Know how to distinguish "good" accidents from bad ones, do not chase after accuracy and specificity, grab at any opportunity or anything that looks like an opportunity, beware of elaborate government plans, do not waste time fighting forecasters.

“There are people who can’t explain anything if they haven’t understood it yet,” Yogi Berra once said.

The essence of asymmetric outcomes: I will never know the unknown. But at the same time, I can guess how it will affect me, bad or good, and make decisions based on my own guesses and conclusions. To make decisions, you must focus on the consequences (which you can know) and not on the probability of an event (the extent of which you cannot know) - this is the main rule of uncertainty. On this foundation one can build general theory decision making.

The reasons for our inability to understand what is happening: epistemic arrogance, Platonic desire to cram everything into categories - in other words, people willingly believe simplified models, poor methods for constructing conclusions, especially those that completely do not take into account the appearance of the Black Swan, methods from Mediocristan.

PART III. Gray swans of Extremistan

Chapter 14

Matthew effect (money to money) or cumulative advantage.

Chapter 15

The basic principle of the Gaussian curve is a sharp increase in the rate of decline of chances with distance from the center, that is, from the average. There are two and only two paradigms: non-scalable (like Gaussian) and another (like Mandelbrot randomness). It is enough to get rid of the application of a non-scalable paradigm to get rid of a narrow view of the world.

The 80/20 rule is just a metaphor; is not general rule, especially - not a strict law; e.g. 50/1.

With an increase in the size of the Middle Stan sample, its median component will look less and less dispersed - the distribution will narrow (Fig. 3). That's how, in fact, everything works in statistical theory. Uncertainty in Mediocristan disappears with averaging. This is an illustration of the hackneyed "law of large numbers."

Rice. 3. Gaussian

The Gaussian family is the only class of distributions for which the standard deviation and the mean are sufficient. Nothing else is needed. The Gaussian curve is a godsend for lovers of simplification.

The omnipresence of the Gaussian is not a property of the world, but a problem that exists in our minds and stems from our view of the world.

Chapter 16

A fractal (lat. fractus - crushed, broken, broken) is a complex geometric figure that has the property of self-similarity, that is, it is composed of several parts, each of which is similar to the entire figure as a whole.

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 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 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 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

Black Swan. Under the sign of unpredictability (compilation)

Black Swan. Under the sign of unpredictability

Dedicated to Benoit Mandelbrot, a Greek among the Romans

Prologue. 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. 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. 1
The proliferation of cameras in mobile phones has led readers to send me pictures of black swans in huge numbers. Last Christmas I also got a box of Black Swan wine (so-so), a videotape (I don't watch videos) and two books. Pictures are better. (Hereinafter, except where noted otherwise, – approx. author.)

Let's stop and analyze this triad: exclusivity, power of impact and retrospective (but not prospective) predictability. 2
expected no event Also 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.

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 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.

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

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.

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 catching 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, and 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.

learning learning

On the other hand, we are hindered by the fact that we are too obsessed with the known, we tend to study the details, and not the whole picture.

What lesson did people learn from the events of 9/11? Did they understand that there are events that are pushed beyond the predictable by the force of their internal dynamics? No. Have you realized that traditional knowledge is fundamentally flawed? No. What have they learned? They follow a hard rule: stay away from potential Muslim terrorists and tall buildings. I am often reminded that it is important to take some practical steps, and not “theorize” about the nature of knowledge. The story of the Maginot line is a good illustration of the correctness of our theory. After World War I, the French built a wall of fortifications along the German front line to prevent another invasion; Hitler easily rounded it. The French turned out to be too diligent students of history. Out of concern for their own safety, they overdid it with specific measures.

Teaching what we don't learn what we don't learn, does not happen by itself. The problem is in the structure of our consciousness: we do not comprehend the rules, we comprehend the facts, and only the facts. Meta-rules (for example, the rule that we tend not to comprehend the rules) are poorly assimilated by us. We despise the abstract, and we despise it passionately.

Why? It is necessary here - since this is the main goal of my entire book - to turn traditional logic upside down and demonstrate how inapplicable it is to our current, complex and increasingly recursive 3
Under recursiveness what I mean by this is that in our world there are more and more reactive springs that cause events to cause other events (for example, people buy a book, because other people bought it), causing a snowball effect and giving a random and unpredictable outcome that gives the winner everything. We live in an environment where information spreads too quickly, increasing the scope of such epidemics. By the same logic, events can happen because they shouldn't happen. (Our intuition is attuned to an environment with simpler causal relationships and slower information transfer.) This kind of accident was rare in the Pleistocene era, because the structure of socio-economic life was distinguished by its primitiveness.

Wednesday.

But here's a bigger question: What are our brains for? It feels like we were given the wrong instruction manual. Our brains don't seem to be designed to think and analyze. If they had been programmed to do so, we would not have had such a hard time in our age. Or rather, we would all just die out by now, and I certainly wouldn’t talk about anything right now: my impractical, introspective, pensive ancestor would be eaten by a lion, while his narrow-minded, but quick-reacting relative would carry away legs. The thought process takes a lot of time and a lot of energy. Our ancestors spent more than a hundred million years in an unconscious animal state, and in the shortest period when we used our brains, we occupied them with such insignificant things that there was almost no use from it. Experience shows that we do not think as much as we think, except, of course, when we think about it.

A new kind of ingratitude

It is always sad to think of people who have been treated unfairly by history. Take, for example, the “accursed poets” like Edgar Allan Poe or Arthur Rimbaud: during their lifetime, society shunned them, and then they were turned into icons and their poems were forcibly shoved into unfortunate schoolchildren. (There are even schools named after losers.) Unfortunately, recognition has already come when it does not give the poet either joy or the attention of ladies. But there are heroes with whom fate has treated even more unfairly - these are those unfortunate ones whose heroism we have no idea, although they saved our life or prevented a catastrophe. They left no traces, and they themselves did not know what their merit was. We remember the martyrs who died for some famous cause, but we do not know about those who waged a struggle unknown to us - most often precisely because they achieved success. Our ingratitude towards the "damned poets" is nothing compared to this black ingratitude. It makes our inconspicuous hero feel his own worthlessness. I will illustrate this thesis with a thought experiment.

Imagine that a legislator with courage, influence, intelligence, foresight and perseverance manages to pass a law that comes into force and is unquestioningly implemented from September 10, 2001; by law, each cockpit is equipped with a securely lockable bulletproof door (the airlines, which already barely make ends meet, fought back desperately, but were defeated). The law is introduced in case terrorists decide to use planes to attack the World Trade Center in New York. I understand that my fantasy is on the verge of delirium, but this is just thought experiment(I also realize that legislators with courage, intelligence, foresight and perseverance most likely do not exist; I repeat, the experiment is a thought). The law is unpopular with airline employees because it makes life difficult for them. But he certainly would have prevented 9/11.

The man who enforced mandatory locks on cockpit doors would not be honored with a bust in the town square, and even his obituary would not say: "Joe Smith, who prevented the 9/11 disaster, died of cirrhosis of the liver." Since the measure, apparently, turned out to be completely unnecessary, and a lot of money was spent, the voters, with the stormy support of the pilots, will probably still remove him from office. Vox clamantis in deserto 4
The voice of one crying in the wilderness (Isaiah 40).

He will retire, sink into depression, consider himself a failure. He will die in full confidence that he has done nothing useful in life. I would definitely go to his funeral, but, reader, I can't find him! But recognition can have such a beneficial effect! Believe me, even someone who sincerely says that he does not care about recognition that he separates labor from the fruits of labor - even he reacts to praise with a release of serotonin. See what a reward is destined for our inconspicuous hero - he will not be pampered even by his own hormonal system.

Let's revisit the events of 9/11. When the smoke cleared, whose good deeds were thanked? Those people that you saw on TV - those who did heroic deeds, and those who, in front of your eyes, tried to pretend that they were doing heroic deeds. The second category includes figures like the chairman of the New York Stock Exchange, Richard Grasso, who “saved the stock exchange” and received a colossal bonus for his services (equal to several thousands average wages). To do this, all he needed was to ring the bell in front of the TV cameras, announcing the beginning of the auction (television, as we will see, is the bearer of injustice and one of the main reasons for our blindness to everything related to the Black Swans).

Who gets the reward - the head of the Central Bank, who did not allow a recession, or the one who "corrects" the mistakes of his predecessor, being in his place during the economic recovery? Who is ranked higher - the politician who managed to avoid the war, or the one who starts it (and is lucky enough to win)?

This is the same perverse logic that we have already observed when discussing the value of the unknown. Everyone knows that prevention should be given more attention than therapy, but few people give thanks for prevention. We praise those whose names have made it into the pages of the history books at the expense of those whose accomplishments have passed historians by. We humans are not just extremely superficial (this could still be corrected somehow) - we are very unfair.

Life is so strange

This book is about uncertainty, that is, its author puts equal sign between uncertainty and out of the ordinary event. To say that we must study rare and extreme events in order to understand ordinary ones may seem like overkill, but I'm ready to explain myself. There are two possible approaches to any phenomena. The first is to eliminate the extraordinary and focus on the normal. The researcher ignores anomalies and deals with ordinary cases. The second approach is to think that in order to understand the phenomenon one has to consider edge cases; especially if, like the Black Swans, they have a huge cumulative impact.

I'm not very interested in "ordinary". If you want to get an idea of temperament, moral principles and good manners of your friend, you must see him in exceptional circumstances, and not in the rosy light of everyday life. Can you assess the danger posed by a criminal by observing his behavior for ordinary day? Can we understand what health is by turning a blind eye to terrible diseases and epidemics? The norm is often not important at all.

Almost everything in social life springs from rare but interconnected upheavals and leaps, while almost all sociologists are engaged in the study of the “norm”, basing their conclusions on bell curves. 5
The normal distribution curve, or "Gaussian curve", which underlies any statistics, is a bell-shaped curve, the maximum of which falls on the average value. It is based on the measurement of average values and deviations from them. (Approx. transl.)

Who don't talk about much. Why? Because no normal distribution curve reflects - fails to reflect - significant deviations, but at the same time gives us false confidence in the victory over uncertainty. In this book, she will appear under the nickname GIO - the Great Intellectual Deception.

Plato and "botanists"

The main impetus for the Jewish uprising in the 1st century AD was the demand of the Romans to install a statue of the emperor Caligula in the Jerusalem temple in exchange for the installation of a statue of the Jewish god Yahweh in Roman temples. The Romans did not understand what the Jews (and later Levantine monotheists) meant by god something abstract, all-encompassing, having nothing to do with the anthropomorphic, all too human image that arose in the minds of the Romans, pronouncing the word deus. The most important moment: the Jewish god did not fit into the framework of a certain symbol. Likewise, for me, what is usually labeled as “unknown”, “incredible” or “uncertain”, is something fundamentally different. This is by no means a specific and precise category of knowledge, not a territory mastered by "nerds", but its complete opposite - the absence (and limit) of knowledge. This is the opposite of knowledge. Let's unlearn the use of terms related to knowledge to describe its polar phenomenon.

Platonism– after the philosophy (and personality) of Plato – I call our tendency to mistake a map for terrain, to focus on clear and well-defined “shapes”, whether they are things like triangles or social concepts like utopias (societies built according to some kind of “rationality”) or even nationalities. When such ideas and slender constructions are imprinted in our minds, they overshadow for us less elegant objects with more amorphous and more indefinite structure (I will return to this idea many times throughout the book).

Platonism makes us think we understand more than we really do. However, I do not claim that Platonic forms do not exist at all. Models and constructions—mind maps of reality—are not always wrong; they just don't apply to everything. The problem is that a) you don't know in advance (only after the fact), for what the map is not applicable, and b) errors are fraught with serious consequences. These models are like drugs that cause rare but extremely severe side effects.

Platonic fold- this is an explosive edge, where the Platonic way of thinking comes into contact with a chaotic reality and where the gap between what you know and what you supposedly known becomes ominously obvious. This is where the Black Swan is born.