‘The Black Swan’: Trying to Predict the Future Is a Mug’s Game
A review of ‘The Black Swan’, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Random House, 2007).
In his Satire VI, the Roman poet Juvenal describes the virtuous woman as ‘rara avis in terris nigroque simillima cygno’ (roughly, ‘a rare bird in the lands, and very like a black swan’). He was writing at a time when black swans were thought not to exist, or at least to be so rare as to be almost mythical. Juvenal, then, was exaggerating his scepticism. But if the Romans had ever reached Australia, he might have felt a bit silly. For black swans are not rare in Australia; the cygnus atratus is, in fact, rather common. A single visit to the right part of Australia would have proved the Romans, and anyone working on the basis that swans were white, wrong. For the only way to verify such a claim would be to observe every single swan in existence, which is impossible. To falsify the claim requires just a single glimpse of one black swan.
In The Black Swan, Nassim Nicholas Taleb describes how highly unlikely, unpredictable events have huge effects. With hindsight, we often explain away these ‘black swan’ events, which lie outside the realm of everyday expectations, as if they were predictable. And yet they keep taking place—in part, argues Taleb, because of the poverty of our forecasting tools and methods and our inability to grasp the natural complexity of the world. Those working in financial markets, governments and other systems fail over and over to predict Earth-shattering events and—which is more important—the massive impact of the highly unlikely. The rise of the internet, 9/11, the 2008 financial crash, the success of Google—nothing in the past can convincingly point to the possibility of any of these black swan events. We just persuade ourselves in retrospect that they were the logical next steps in a chain of cause and effect.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb describes how highly unlikely, unpredictable events have huge effects.
The technical challenge Taleb faces is getting across something that is quite counter-intuitive. Anyone with some familiarity with Popper or Oakeshott or Montaigne will be used to his way of thinking. But clearly many find him hard to understand. After all, he continues to be asked to predict the future, when a main theme of his book (and in fact his whole body of work) is that prediction is a mug’s game, and rather than concern ourselves with guessing what will happen, we should focus on making ourselves robust to events or, even better, ‘antifragile’—that is, able to benefit from black swan events.
He continues to be asked to predict the future, when a main theme of his book (and in fact his whole body of work) is that prediction is a mug’s game.
He writes in a refreshingly idiosyncratic style characterised by personal anecdotes, historical examples, ridiculous characters (such as ‘Nero Tulip’ and ‘Fat Tony’) and frequent attacks on a wide range of professions and fields he sees as hubristic and irresponsible for their unwillingness to accept the reality of black swan events—which is to say to accept their ignorance. (This, happily, is a habit that Taleb has kept up on The Platform Formerly Known as Twitter, where he spends much of his time sparring with whoever has managed to wind him up that day.) I happen to like Taleb’s meandering style, though I imagine some will dislike the lack of ‘structure’ and his frequent asides. You have the sense of being addressed person-to-person, which in my view is the mark of a good essayist.
At any rate, in my view The Black Swan is a highly entertaining and interesting book and one that is genuinely original and contrarian in the best possible way.
