Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

Black Swan. Under the sign of unpredictability (collection)

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 been a big surprise to ornithologists (and indeed anyone who is in any way sensitive to the color of a bird's feathers), but the story is important for another reason. It shows within what strict boundaries of observation or experience our learning occurs and how relative our knowledge is. A single observation can negate an axiom that has been developed over several millennia, when people admired only white swans. To refute it, one (and, they say, rather ugly) black bird was enough 1
The proliferation of cell phone cameras has led to readers sending me images of black swans in large quantities. Last Christmas I also received a case of Black Swan wine (so-so), a video (I don't watch videos), and two books. Pictures are better. (Hereinafter, except where otherwise noted, – approx. author.)

I go beyond this logical-philosophical question into the realm of empirical reality, which has interested me since childhood. What we will call a Black Swan (with a capital B) is an event that has the following three characteristics.

Firstly, it abnormal, because nothing in the past foreshadowed it. Secondly, it has enormous impact. Third, human nature forces us to come up with explanations for what happened after of how it happened, making an event initially perceived as a surprise understandable and predictable.

Let's stop and analyze this triad: exclusivity, impact and retrospective (but not forward) predictability 2
Expected no event- also a Black Swan. Please note that according to the laws of symmetry, an extremely improbable event is the equivalent of the absence of an extremely 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 intense 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 we read from the newspapers - went off the beaten path.

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 fool yourself by remembering what your boring school teachers filled your head with.) For example, could you have foreseen Hitler's rise to power and a world war? And the rapid collapse of the Soviet bloc? And the outbreak of Muslim fundamentalism? What about 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 any significance.

The combination of low predictability and power of impact turns the Black Swan into a mystery, but that’s not what our book is about. It's mainly about our reluctance to admit that it exists! And I don’t mean just you, your cousin Joe and me, but almost all representatives of the so-called social sciences, which for more than a century have been flattering themselves with the false hope that their methods can measure uncertainty. Applying vague science to real world problems has a ridiculous effect. I have seen this happen in economics and finance. Ask your “portfolio manager” how he calculates risks. He will almost certainly call you exclusion criterion Black Swan probability - that is, one that can be used to predict risks with about the same success as astrology (we will see how intellectual fraud is dressed up in mathematical clothes). And so it is in all humanitarian spheres.

The main point this book makes is our blindness to randomness, 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 rather than the possible big events, despite their very obvious gigantic impact? And - if you have not yet missed the thread of my reasoning - why reading a newspaper reduces our knowledge of the world?

It is easy to understand that life is determined by the cumulative effect of a series of significant shocks. You can become aware of the role of Black Swans without leaving your chair (or bar stool). Here's a simple exercise for you. Take your own life. List significant events and technological improvements that have occurred since you were born, and compare them with how they were seen in the future. How many of them arrived on schedule? Look at your personal life, at the choice of profession or meetings with loved ones, at leaving your homeland, at the betrayals you had to face, at sudden enrichment or impoverishment. How often did these events go as planned?

What you don't know

Black Swan logic does what you don't know much more important than what you know. After all, if you think about it, many Black Swans came into the world and shook it precisely because no one was waiting for them.

Take the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001: if this kind of danger could foresee On September 10, nothing would have happened. Fighter planes would have been patrolling around the World Trade Center towers, interlocking bulletproof doors would have been installed on 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 should not have happened? How to protect yourself from this? If you know something (for example, that New York is an attractive target for terrorists) - your knowledge is invalidated if the enemy knows that you know it. It's strange that in a strategy game like this, what you know may not matter at all.

This applies to any activity. Take, for example, the “secret recipe” for phenomenal success in the restaurant business. If it were known and obvious, someone would have already invented it and it would have become something trivial. To get ahead of everyone, you need to come up with an idea that is unlikely to occur to the current generation of restaurateurs. It should 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 business or the book business - or, in fact, to any business. The same applies to scientific theories - no one is interested in listening to platitudes. The success of human endeavors, as a rule, is inversely proportional to the predictability of their results.

Remember the 2004 Pacific tsunami. If it had been expected, it would not have caused such damage. The affected areas would have been evacuated and an early warning system would have been activated. Forewarned is forearmed.

Experts and “empty 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 behave 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 thirty years out, not realizing that we cannot know what they will be next summer. The cumulative errors in political and economic forecasts are so enormous that when I look at the list of them, I want to pinch myself to make sure I'm not dreaming. What is surprising is not the scale of our incorrect forecasts, but the fact that we are unaware of it. This is especially troubling when we get involved in deadly conflicts: wars are unpredictable by their very nature (and we don't know that). Because of this lack of understanding of the cause-and-effect relationship between provocation and action, we can easily provoke the appearance of a Black Swan with our aggressive ignorance - like a child playing with a set of chemical reagents.

Our inability to forecast in an environment infested with Black Swans, coupled with a general lack of understanding of this state of affairs, means that some professionals who consider themselves experts, in fact, are not. If you look at their track record, it becomes clear that they understand their field no better than the person on the street, only they are much better at talking about it or - more dangerously - clouding our brains with mathematical models. They also mostly wear a tie.

Because Black Swans are unpredictable, we should adapt 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 don’t 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 fields - such as scientific research or venture capital investing - betting on the unknown is extremely profitable because, as a rule, when you lose, the losses are small, but when you win, the profits are huge. We will see that, contrary to the claims of social scientists, almost all important discoveries and technological 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 opportunity. I disagree with the followers of Marx and Adam Smith: the free market works because it allows a person to “catch” luck through gambling trial and error, and not to receive it as a reward for diligence and skill. That is, my advice to you: experiment as much as possible, trying to catch as many Black Swans as possible.

Learning to learn

On the other hand, what hinders us is that we are too focused on what is known, we tend to study details rather than the big picture.

What lesson have people learned from 9/11? Did they understand that there are events that, by the force of their internal dynamics, are pushed beyond the limits of the predictable? No. Have they realized that traditional knowledge is fundamentally flawed? No. What have they learned? They follow a strict rule: stay away from potential Muslim terrorists and tall buildings. I am often reminded that it is important to take practical steps rather than “theorize” about the nature of knowledge. The story of the Maginot Line well illustrates 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 went around it without difficulty. The French turned out to be too diligent students of history. Concerned about their own safety, they went too far with specific measures.

Teaching what we don't learn what we don't learn, doesn't 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. Metarules (for example, the rule that we tend not to comprehend rules) are poorly learned 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 on its head and demonstrate how inapplicable it is to our current, complex and increasingly recursive 3
Under recursiveness What I mean here is that in our world there are more and more reaction 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 result that gives everything to the winner. 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 tuned to an environment with simpler cause-and-effect relationships and slower transmission of information.) This kind of accident was rare in the Pleistocene era, since the structure of socio-economic life was primitive.

Wednesday.

But here's a more serious question: what are our brains for? It feels like we were given the wrong instruction manual. Our brains don't seem designed to think and analyze. If they were programmed for this, we would not have such a hard time in our century. Or rather, we would all simply have died out by now, and I certainly wouldn’t be talking about anything right now: my impractical, introspective, brooding ancestor would have been eaten by a lion, while his narrow-minded but quick-reacting relative was carried 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 during the short period when we used our brains, we occupied them with such unimportant things that they were of little use. Experience shows that we do not think as much as we think - of course, except when we think about it.

A new kind of ingratitude

It's always sad to think about people who have been treated unfairly by history. Take, for example, “damned poets” like Edgar Allan Poe or Arthur Rimbaud: during their lifetime, society shunned them, and then they were turned into icons and their poems began to be forcibly shoved into unfortunate schoolchildren. (There are even schools named after poor students.) Unfortunately, recognition has come at a time when it does not give the poet either joy or the attention of ladies. But there are heroes whom fate has treated even more unfairly - these are those unfortunate people whose heroism we have no idea about, although they saved our lives 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 fought an unknown struggle - most often precisely because they achieved success. Our ingratitude towards the “damned poets” is nothing compared to this black ingratitude. She makes our unnoticed hero feel worthless. I will illustrate this point with a thought experiment.

Imagine that a legislator with courage, influence, intelligence, vision and tenacity manages to pass a law that comes into force and is implemented without question on September 10, 2001; By law, every pilot's cabin must be equipped with a securely locked, bulletproof door (the airlines, already struggling to make ends meet, fought back desperately but were defeated). The law is being introduced in case terrorists decide to use planes to attack the World Trade Center in New York. I understand that my fantasy is bordering on delirium, but this is just a thought experiment (I also realize that legislators with courage, intelligence, foresight and tenacity most likely do not exist; I repeat, the experiment is a thought experiment). The law is unpopular with airline employees because it makes their lives more difficult. But he certainly would have prevented September 11th.

The man who introduced mandatory locks on cockpit doors will not be honored with a bust in the city square, and even his obituary will not write: “Joe Smith, who prevented the disaster of September 11, died of cirrhosis of the liver.” Since the measure apparently turned out to be completely unnecessary, and a lot of money was spent, voters, with the strong support of the pilots, will probably remove him from office. Vox clamantis in deserto 4
The voice of one crying in the wilderness (Isa. 40).

He will resign, become depressed, and consider himself a failure. He will die in full confidence that he has done nothing useful in his 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 claims that he doesn’t care about recognition, that he separates work from the fruits of labor, even he reacts to praise with a release of serotonin. You see what a reward is destined for our unnoticed hero - even his own hormonal system will not pamper him.

Let's think again about the events of September 11th. When the smoke cleared, whose good deeds were thanked? Those people you saw on TV - those who committed heroic deeds, and those who before 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 salaries). To do this, all he had to do was ring the bell in front of the television cameras, announcing the start of trading (television, as we will see, is a carrier of injustice and one of the most important reasons for our blindness to everything related to Black Swans).

Who gets the reward – the head of the Central Bank who prevented a recession, or the one who “corrects” the mistakes of his predecessor by being in his place during the economic recovery? Who is ranked higher - the politician who manages to avoid war, or the one who starts it (and is lucky enough to win)?

This is the same twisted logic that we have already seen when discussing the value of the unknown. Everyone knows that prevention should be given more attention than therapy, but few give thanks for prevention. We extol those whose names appear on the pages of history books - at the expense of those whose achievements have passed historians by. We humans are not only 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 poses equal sign between uncertainty and an out-of-the-ordinary event. It may seem like overkill to say that we must study rare and extreme events to understand ordinary ones, but I'm willing to explain myself. There are two possible approaches to any phenomenon. The first is to exclude the extraordinary and concentrate on the normal. The researcher ignores anomalies and deals with ordinary cases. The second approach is to think that to understand a phenomenon we must look at extreme cases; especially if, like Black Swans, they have a huge cumulative impact.

I'm not very interested in the “ordinary”. If you want to get an idea of ​​your friend's temperament, moral principles and breeding, you must see him in exceptional circumstances, and not in the rosy light of everyday life. Can you assess the danger a criminal poses by observing his behavior over a period of time? 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 results from rare but related shocks and jumps, and yet almost all sociologists study the “norm”, basing their conclusions on bell curves 5
The normal distribution curve, or “Gaussian curve,” which is the basis of all statistics, is a bell-shaped curve whose maximum occurs at the average value. It is based on measuring average values ​​and deviations from them. (Approx. Transl.)

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

Plato and the “nerds”

The main impetus for the Jewish revolt in the 1st century AD was the Roman demand for a statue of 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 in common with the anthropomorphic, all-too-human image that arose in the minds of the Romans when they uttered the word deus. The most important point: the Jewish god did not fit into the framework of a specific symbol. In the same way, for me, what is usually labeled “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 extremeness) of knowledge. This is the antithesis of knowledge. Let's unlearn the use of terms related to knowledge to describe a phenomenon that is polar to it.

Platonism- after the philosophy (and personality) of Plato - I call our tendency to mistake a map for a terrain, to concentrate on clear and clearly delineated “forms”, be they objects like triangles or social concepts like utopias (societies built according to the idea of ​​a certain “ rationality”) or even nationalities. When such ideas and orderly constructions are imprinted on our minds, they eclipse for us less elegant objects with a 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 actually do. However, I do not claim that Platonic forms do not exist at all. Models and constructs—intellectual 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) mistakes are fraught with serious consequences. These models are akin to drugs that cause rare but extremely severe side effects.

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

Nassim Nicholas Taleb's book “The Black Swan” belongs to the category of economic books on business psychology. However, this is not a textbook, as it may seem. These are rather the author’s thoughts, which are nevertheless a good guide.

In the 17th century, it was believed that swans were only white. When black swans were discovered in Australia, it was completely unexpected and surprised people. This is where the title of the book comes from. Only Taleb uses the concept of a black swan to describe any significant event in the life of society or the economy. He uses this term for everything large-scale and unexpected. These could be wars, attacks, breakthroughs in science, economic crises, the discovery of new planets, space flight and everything like that.

Nicholas Taleb believes that these events are the most important in the history and development of society. Because the smaller the event, the less impact it has. And large-scale events influence the course of history. They happen rarely, they can be both bad and good, but their influence is undeniable. And that's okay. This is how development should happen, the author believes. At the same time, he notes that after a while, humanity can see that the prerequisites for this incident existed, but became noticeable only later. From this the conclusion is drawn that society does not know how to make predictions about the future.

Taleb believes that it is important to know how to use these events to your advantage, how to handle them. What might seem like a disaster to everyone is an opportunity to him. Many critics rejected this idea of ​​his. However, using the example of his company, he proved that he was right: they earned half a billion dollars for investors during the crisis!

N. N. Taleb’s book “The Black Swan” will make it clear that there is always an opportunity, you just need to know how to behave and learn to see it.

On our website you can download the book “The Black Swan” by Nassim Nicholas Taleb for free and without registration in fb2, rtf, epub, pdf, txt format, read the book online or buy the book in the online store.

This book is written in a very brash, arrogant, informal style. Well, I’m not at all against it, but the book is read very cheerfully and naturally. Thanks to emotions, a book is remembered better. He himself makes a lot of references to Taleb and mentions his book. He reports that some of his views were formed thanks to it.

About what:

The book is about statistics, but not really. A book about immeasurably rare, unpredictable, unpredictable events of enormous significance.

Why Black Swan?

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 greatly surprised ornithologists.

Black Swan is an event that has the following three characteristics:
1. It is anomalous because nothing predicted it before.
2. It has enormous impact.
3. Human nature forces us to come up with explanations for what happened after an unpredictable event has occurred, making the event (in people's minds) perceived as a surprise natural and predictable.

Examples of Black Swans:

• The September 11th terrorist attack;


• financial crisis of 1987;


• Internet distribution;


• The Second World War;


• the rapid collapse of the Soviet Union.

Mediocristan is an environment in which the extreme values ​​in the sample do not differ much from the average value (for example, the height of the tallest person in the city or the weight of the heaviest person in the city cannot be so large that they account for 99% of the weight of the entire sample).

Extremistan- this is an environment in which the extreme values ​​in the sample are not limited in any way and can differ by orders of magnitude from the average value (for example, the funds of city residents. Bill Gates may have 99.6% of the entire money supply of the city).

Problems voiced:

1. Application of the Gaussian normal distribution curve in all cases, while it is applicable only in “Central Stan”, but not applicable in any way in “Extreme Stan”.

We teach people the methods of “Central”, and then release them to “Extremistan”. This is the same as looking at the height of the blades of grass in a clearing, but ignoring the presence of trees on it (Rare, but huge. One tree will weigh more than all the blades of grass combined).

That is, the author does not criticize sigma itself (standard deviation), but the incorrect choice of application boundaries (in particular, in economics). If the world followed a Gaussian distribution, an episode like the 1987 market crash (more than twenty standard deviations) would occur no more often than once every few billion lifetimes of the universe.

2. Excessive attention to “what happened” and losing sight of “what could happen,” even though this has never happened before.

The turkey is fed every day so that it can be turned into a treat before Thanksgiving. But from the point of view of the turkey, every day of feeding strengthens her in the belief that she will continue to be fed, because... this is fully confirmed by previous experience, i.e. Nothing bad had ever happened before. The longer she is fed, the more confident she is that at this particular time they also want to feed her. And on the very last day her confidence is at its highest, but this point coincides with the day when the farmer decides to stab her.

3. Confusion of the concepts “there is no evidence of possibility” with “there is evidence of impossibility.”

The same example with black swans. Just because black swans were never seen (before 1697) is not proof that their existence is impossible. Thousands of white swans do not prove the absence of black swans in the world.

4. The accumulation of confirmatory knowledge does not increase our knowledge.

Look for something that might disprove your theory rather than confirm it.

5. The "nerd" mistake.

Consideration of statistics using gambling as an example. This is an overly refined environment where all contingencies are known and calculated in advance. In real life, everything is much more unpredictable.

6. The problem of hidden evidence.

The Greek philosopher Diagoras, nicknamed the atheist, 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?

7. It is fundamentally impossible to predict history.

Because this is impossible without predicting the invention of new technologies. But it's impossible to come up with a new technology until someone actually comes up with it. Let's remember the wheel. Let's say you're a Stone Age historian tasked with predicting the future for your tribe's planning department. In this case, you will of course have to predict the invention of the wheel, otherwise you will miss the point. But since you can foresee the invention of the wheel, then you already know what it looks like, and, accordingly, you already know how to make a wheel, so you have already invented it. Future inventions are incredibly difficult to predict. In 1899, the head of the UK Patent Office resigned because he believed there was nothing more to discover.

8. Many other problems

The note:

And what to do with all these problems?

1. Try as many different things as possible.

2. Focus on the consequences of a particular choice, rather than on the probabilities of pros and cons (since probabilities cannot be adequately assessed, but consequences can).

3. Do not put your thinking and perception into a framework.

Funny moments:

1. It has been found that statisticians have a habit of leaving their brains in the classroom and making the most trivial logical errors outside the classroom. In 1971, psychologists Danny Kahneman and Amos Tversky decided to torment statistics professors with questions that were not framed as statistical questions. These professors would fail the exams that they themselves take (an example of a problem is given later in the book)

2. Comparison of the personalities “practitioner businessman” and “doctor of statistics”, differences in ways of thinking and in answers to the same statistical problems.

Suppose we have an absolutely fair (perfectly shaped) coin, that is, the probability of heads and tails falling out is the same for it. I tossed it ninety-nine times in a row and got heads every time. What is the probability that the hundredth time it will be heads?

Doctor of Statistics:
- Well, of course, 50%, if we proceed from the absolute equality of chances and the independence of a single throw from all others

Businessman:
- I don’t believe that a coin that lands on heads 99 times is perfectly balanced. They are trying to deceive me. No more than 1% per eagle.

Powerful excerpt:

Black Swan logic makes what you don't know much more important than what you do know. After all, if you think about it, many Black Swans came into the world and shook it precisely because no one was expecting them.

Take the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001: if this kind of danger could have been foreseen on September 10, nothing would have happened. Fighter planes would have been patrolling around the World Trade Center towers, interlocking bulletproof doors would have been installed on the planes, and the attack would not have taken place.

A new kind of ingratitude

It's always sad to think about people who have been treated unfairly by history. Take, for example, “damned poets” like Edgar Allan Poe or Arthur Rimbaud: during their lifetime, society shunned them, and then they were turned into icons and their poems began to be forcibly shoved into unfortunate schoolchildren. (There are even schools named after poor students.) Unfortunately, recognition has come at a time when it does not give the poet either joy or the attention of ladies. But there are heroes whom fate treated even more unfairly - these are those unfortunate people whose heroism we have no idea about, although they saved our lives 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 fought an unknown struggle - most often precisely because they achieved success. This ingratitude makes our unsung hero feel worthless. I will illustrate this point with a thought experiment.

Imagine that a legislator with courage, influence, intelligence, vision and tenacity manages to pass a law that comes into force and is implemented without question on September 10, 2001; By law, every pilot's cabin must be equipped with a securely locked, bulletproof door (the airlines, already struggling to make ends meet, fought back desperately but were defeated). The law is being introduced in case terrorists decide to use planes to attack the World Trade Center in New York. I understand that my fantasy is bordering on delirium, but this is just a thought experiment. The law is unpopular with airline employees because it makes their lives more difficult. But he certainly would have prevented September 11th.

The man who introduced mandatory locks on cockpit doors will not be honored with a bust in the city square, and even his obituary will not write: “Joe Smith, who prevented the disaster of September 11, died of cirrhosis of the liver.” Since the measure apparently turned out to be completely unnecessary, and a lot of money was spent, voters, with the strong support of the pilots, will probably remove him from office. He will resign, become depressed, and consider himself a failure. He will die in full confidence that he has done nothing useful in his 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 claims that he doesn’t care about recognition, that he separates work from the fruits of labor, even he reacts to praise with a release of serotonin. You see what a reward is destined for our unnoticed hero - even his own hormonal system will not pamper him.

Let's think again about the events of September 11th. When the smoke cleared, whose good deeds were thanked? Those people you saw on TV - those who committed heroic deeds, and those who before your eyes tried to pretend that they were performing 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 thousand average salaries). To do this, all he had to do was ring the bell in front of the television cameras, announcing the start of trading (television, as we will see, is a carrier of injustice and one of the most important reasons for our blindness to everything related to Black Swans).

Who gets the reward - the head of the Central Bank who prevented a recession, or the one who “corrects” the mistakes of his predecessor by being in his place during the economic recovery? Who is ranked higher - the politician who managed to avoid war, or the one who starts it (and is lucky enough to win)?

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

How the book could be useful to any reader:

The book contains a lot of information about the intuitive perception of statistics by humans. That something that happened recently and “before your eyes” is perceived as a more frequent occurrence than it actually is. It also describes the tendency of people to overestimate their capabilities, competence, qualifications, etc. All this is shown using examples of experiments carried out, the information is given in numbers.
At the very least, the book can strengthen your persuasion skills, as well as the skill of resisting what they are trying to do to fool you. Increases the degree of critical thinking. In this regard, it resembles the book “The Psychology of Influence” by Robert Cialdini.

Fly in the ointment:

What I learned:

Somewhat more critical thinking. Calculation of some cognitive biases. The ability to switch from “nerd” mode to “businessman” mode and back to look at phenomena from different points of view.

Ratings:

Improvement of general horizons: 5/5

Practical use: 2/5

Drive while reading: 5/5

More books from this author:

I read another book by Nassim Taleb:

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

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

Download a short summary in format, examples in format

Prologue. About bird plumage

A rare event, a Black Swan, has three characteristics:

• Abnormally
• Has enormous impact power
• We come up with explanations after an event has happened, making an event that was initially perceived as a surprise explainable and predictable.

The main thing the book talks about is our blindness to randomness, especially on a large scale. Black swans appeared in the world and shocked it precisely because no one was expecting them. …The success of human endeavors, 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 through gambling trial and error, and not to receive it as a reward for diligence and skill.

...what hinders us is that we are too focused on what is known, we tend to study details rather than the big picture. ...we don't train. 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 prevented a recession, or the one who “corrects” the mistakes of his predecessor by being in his place during the economic recovery? ...Everyone knows that prevention should be given more attention than therapy, but few people give thanks for prevention.

Platonism I call our tendency to mistake the map for the terrain, to concentrate on clear “forms” at the expense of understanding diversity [induction, simplification].

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

This implies the need to use the emergency as a starting point and not view it as an exception that 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 secretly plotting to hide this idea from us.

PartI. The Anti-Library of Umberto Eco, or the Search for Evidence

Books read are much less important than books not read. The library should contain as much unknown as your finances allow you to fit into it...

Chapter 1. Years of teaching as an empiricist-skeptic

The human mind suffers from three diseases when it tries to grasp history, and I call them Triad of eclipse:

1. The illusion of understanding. That is, everyone thinks they know what's going on in a world that is actually more complex (or random) than they think.
2. Retrospective bias, or the fact that we can only evaluate events after the fact. History seems clearer and more organized in history books than in reality.
3. The tendency to exaggerate the significance of a fact, aggravated 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 do not crawl. They make leaps. They go from fracture to fracture. Between fractures, almost nothing happens in them. Yet we (and historians) like to believe in predictable, small, gradual changes. ...you and I are nothing more than an excellent retrospection machine, and people are great masters of self-deception.

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

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

Chapter 2. Eugenia's Black Swan

Chapter 3. Speculator and prostitute

The most important advice [that later turned out to be bad] I received from a second-year student at the Wharton School of Business. He recommended that I get " scalable» profession, in the sense that you are not paid per hour of work, and thus you are not limited to the total number of hours you work. This was the simplest way to separate one profession from another and thus generalize the differences between types of unpredictability, and it led me to a fundamental philosophical problem - the problem of induction [the technical name of the Black Swan]. I drew a line between a man of “ideas,” who sells an intellectual product in the form of a business transaction or a work, and a man of “labor,” who sells his own labor. In one category of professions, mediocrity, mediocrity, and the golden mean dominate. Efficiency in them is achieved by mass. In the other there are only giants and dwarfs - or rather, a very small number of giants and a huge number of dwarfs. ...a few get almost everything; the rest are crumbs.

Mediocristan [physical, etc. characteristics of a person]. When the sample population is large, no single incident will make a significant difference to the mean or total. Extremistan [social phenomena, e.g. income]. A single example may add a disproportionately large amount to the total or average. Extremistan produces Black Swans because 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 extreme values, it is very difficult to get an average from a given sample, because a single observation may be decisive. That's the whole idea of ​​the book - nothing complicated.

In the average country we are forced to endure the tyranny of the collective, the routine, the obvious and the predictable; in extremity we are ruled by the tyranny of the individual, the random, 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)	An out-of-the-ordinary (sometimes far-out) accident (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 overall pie	The winner takes almost all
Example: the audience of an opera singer before the invention of the gramophone	Today's artist audience
More common in the lives of our ancestors	More common in modern times
Black Swan threat is low	The Black Swan threat is very significant
Strict obedience to the laws of gravity	No physical limits
In the center (usually) are physical quantities, for example, height	In the center are numbers, say income
Closeness to utopian equality (as far as reality allows)	Extreme inequality
The outcome does not depend on a single incident 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 is happening
Tyranny of the collective	Tyranny of the Random
Based on the visible, it is easy to predict the invisible	It is difficult to make predictions based on existing information
History creeps	History takes leaps
Events are distributed along a 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 by completely uncontrolled Black Swans

Chapter 4. A thousand and one days, or how not to be a sucker

Induction Problem: How can we logically move from a particular assumption to general conclusions? How do we know what we know? How do we know that something we notice about given objects or events is enough to allow us to figure out their other properties? Any knowledge gained from observation contains pitfalls.

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

Turkey before and after Thanksgiving. The history of the process for more than 1000 days says nothing about what is about to happen. This naive projection of the past into the future is of no use.

We simply don't 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, a polymath may not be satisfied with his own knowledge, and such dissatisfaction is a wonderful shield against Platonism, the simplifications of the five-minute manager, or philistinism.

I am often asked: “How do you, Taleb, cross the road with your extreme awareness of risk?” or even more stupid: “You are asking us not to take risks.” I'm not advocating risk phobia (we'll see that I'm endorsing the aggressive type of risk taking): all I'll be showing you in this book is how to avoid crossing the road while blindfolded.

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

There are other points that arise from our lack of attention to the Black Swan:

Chapter 5. Smack proof!

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

Flaw-shifter. Replacing 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, by looking at cases in which it works, or indirectly, by focusing on cases in which it does not work. Refuting examples are much more important in establishing the truth. But you don’t seem to know about this.

Chapter 6: Narrative Distortion

Explanations connect facts to each other; help you remember them; give them more meaning. This is dangerous because it strengthens us in the illusion of understanding. …narrativeness stems from an innate biological need to minimize multidimensionality. Information requires being 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, with what lies inside the information field, and we will understand the distortions that arise during its processing.

A little test. Read:

BETTER TIT IN
IN THE HANDS THAN A CRANE
IN THE SKY

Did you notice anything? …refusal to theorizing requires much more energy than theorizing! Theorizing occurs in us latently, automatically, without our conscious participation.

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

The assimilation (and imposition on the world) of narrative 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 diary.

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

Chapter 7. Life on the Threshold of Hope

We believe that there is a cause-and-effect 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 used to think and than scientists would like to believe. … linear progress, dear to platonists, is not the norm.

Chapter 8. Fortune's favorite Giacomo Casanova: the problem of hidden evidence

The Greek philosopher Diagoras, nicknamed the Atheist, 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... By hiding evidence, events mask their randomness.

We neglect implicit evidence whenever it comes to comparing abilities, especially in winner-take-all fields. We can admire success stories, but we shouldn’t believe them unconditionally: we probably don’t 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 the following pattern. The authors select several famous 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 achieve success... Now 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 is a cause-and-effect relationship between certain personality traits and success. Success and the cemetery share one thing - luck. Ordinary luck.

The most non-charlatan book on finance, in my opinion, was written by Paul and Moynihan 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” people in such professions. The cemetery of losers is huge: there are many more poor actors than poor accountants...

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

Confirmation bias: Authorities are good at saying what they did, but not what they didn't do. In reality, they are engaged in ostentatious “philanthropy”, that is, they help people so that everyone can see and sympathize, forgetting about the hidden cemetery of invisible consequences.

Suppose a medicine is invented that cures some serious illness, but in exceptional cases leads to the death of the patient, which is not significant on a social scale. Will the doctor prescribe this medicine to the patient? It's not in his best interest. If a patient suffers from side effects, his lawyers will hound the doctor like hunting dogs, and hardly anyone will remember the lives saved by the new drug. A life saved is a statistic; an injured patient is a scandalous incident. Statistics are invisible; incidents are being shouted about on every corner. The threat of the Black Swan is also invisible.

Survival bug: Don't judge the probability from the high vantage point of a lucky player, judge from the perspective of those who made up the original group.

All of the above completely devalues ​​the concept of “cause”... almost always misapplied by historians... it is easier for us to say “because” than to recognize the power of chance... do not put too much faith in reasons - especially when there is the possibility of significant hidden evidence.

Chapter 9. Game error, or “nerd” uncertainty

A “nerd” is a person whose thinking is extremely limited. Have you ever wondered why so many straight-A students achieve nothing in life, while those who lagged behind at school are raking in money?..

Game error: the type of risks that the casino deals with are almost never found outside the walls of this building and studying it is of little use in reality.

Humans are predisposed to certainty. It is necessary to learn the art of doubt, the art of remaining on the line between doubt and faith.

The “cosmetic”, the platonic, the light always floats on the surface... we are occupied with what has already happened, and not with what can yet happen... we become victims of the problem of induction... sadly, the current version of man is not created to understand abstract matters – Context is too important to her. And randomness and uncertainty are abstract. We rush around with 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 as ordinary, free from Black Swans, but there is nothing ordinary in the future! This is not a Platonic category. ...the focus on the ordinary (ordinary), platonization force us to predict according to a template. What companies need is not precise plans, but the development of adaptation skills. The great baseball coach Yogi Berra said, “It’s not an easy thing to predict, especially the future.”

Chapter 10. Predictive Paradox

Forecasting without 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.
• Failure to understand that the longer the time period, the more difficult it is to make an accurate forecast.
• Underestimation of the random nature of predicted variables

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

Chapter 11. Discovery based on bird droppings

So, earlier we made sure that

• We are prone to tunneling (limiting ourselves to boundaries, 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 something that is not usually advertised: the structural limitations of our ability to predict.

Poincaré introduced the concept of nonlinearity: 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-entered the same values ​​as input, but with different rounding...

Platonists are characterized by a “top-down” view, stereotypical and narrow thinking, fixation on their own interests, and impersonality. Non-Platonists are characterized by a bottom-up view, open-mindedness, skepticism and an empirical mindset.

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

These graphs illustrate the statistical version of the narrative fallacy—you find a pattern that fits the past. You can look at the linear part of the curve and brag about the high R-squared [trend line 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-squared is not good for Extremistan.

Rice. 2. An example of a narrative error if the pattern is nonlinear.

Chapter 12. Epistemocracy, a dream

The one who Not is distinguished by epistemic arrogance and, as a rule, is not very noticeable to everyone. It is not customary for us to respect modest people who do not rush to judgment. 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 painter Apelles, or How to live in conditions of unpredictability

The recommendation for every day is this: remain human. Accept that you are human, and in all your endeavors there is a share of epistemic arrogance. Don't forbid yourself to judge and evaluate. What should be avoided is unnecessary dependence on disastrous large-scale forecasts. The main thing: be prepared! Remember how intoxicating the magic of numbers is. Be prepared for any possible contingencies.

Know how to distinguish “good” accidents from bad ones, do not strive for accuracy and specificity, grab any opportunity or anything that looks like an opportunity, beware of developed government plans, do not waste time fighting with forecasters.

“There are people to whom you can’t explain anything if they haven’t already understood it,” Yogi Berra once said.

The essence of the asymmetry of 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) rather than on the probability of an event (the extent of which you cannot know) - this is the main rule of uncertainty. On this foundation, a general theory of decision making can be built.

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

PART III. Gray swans of Extremistan

Chapter 14. From Mediocristan to Extremistan and back

Matthew effect (money to money) or cumulative advantage.

Chapter 15. The Bell Curve, the Great Intellectual Hoax

The basic principle of the Gaussian curve is a sharp increase in the rate at which chances decrease with distance from the center, that is, from the average. There are two and only two paradigms: one that is not scalable (like Gaussian) and another (like Mandelbrot randomness). It is enough to get rid of the use of a non-scalable paradigm to get rid of a narrow view of the world.

The 80/20 rule is just a metaphor; This is not a general rule, much less a strict law; for example, 50/1.

As the size of the Srednestanskaya sample increases, its median component will look less and less dispersed - the distribution will narrow (Fig. 3). This is how everything actually works in statistical theory. Uncertainty in Mediocristan disappears when averaging. This is an illustration of the well-worn “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 to describe it. Nothing more is needed. The Gaussian curve is a godsend for those who like simplifications.

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

Chapter 16. Aesthetics of chance

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

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Pages: 391

Estimated reading time: 5 hours

Year of publication: 2009

Russian language

Started reading: 6288

Description:

"Black Swan" is not an economics textbook. These are the thoughts of a very extraordinary person about life and how to find your place in it.
Over the last decade alone, humanity has experienced a number of severe shocks: September 11, 2001, the war in Ossetia, the global financial crisis. All these events, which seem natural to us now, seemed absolutely impossible until they happened. Forty-nine-year-old Lebanese, Sorbonne graduate and New York financial guru Nassim Taleb calls such unpredictable events Black Swans. He is convinced that it is they who give impetus to both history as a whole and the existence of each individual person. And to succeed, you need to know how to handle them. Immediately after the publication of this book, the author brilliantly demonstrated his “non-theory” in practice: against the backdrop of the financial crisis, Taleb’s company earned (not lost!) half a billion dollars for investors.
From Wall Street's leading heretic who stood alone against a legion of futurists and analysts, Nassim Taleb has emerged as a figure whose influence extends far beyond the financial world.