| The most “typical” is either giant or dwarf, i.e., there is no typical member | |
| Winners get a small segment of the total pie | Winner-take-almost-all effects |
| Example: audience of an opera singer before the gramophone | Today’s audience for an artist |
| More likely to be found in our ancestral environment | More likely to be found in our modern environment |
| Impervious to the Black Swan | Vulnerable to the Black Swan |
| Subject to gravity | There are no physical constraints on what a number can be |
| Corresponds (generally) to physical quantities, i.e., height | Corresponds to numbers, say, wealth |
| As close to Utopian equality as reality can spontaneously deliver | Dominated by extreme winner-take-all inequality |
| Total is not determined by a single instance or observation | Total will be determined by a small number of extreme events |
| When you observe for a while you can get to know what’s going on | It takes a long time to know what’s going on |
| Tyranny of the collective | Tyranny of the accidental |
| Easy to predict from what you see and extend to what you do not see | Hard to predict from past information |
| History crawls | History makes jumps |
| Events are distributed[14] according to the “bell curve” (the GIF) or its variations | The distribution is either Mandelbrotian “gray” Swans (tractable scientifically) or totally intractable Black Swans |
This framework, showing that Extremistan is where most of the Black Swan action is, is only a rough approximation – please do not Platonify it; don’t simplify it beyond what’s necessary.
Extremistan does not always imply Black Swans. Some events can be rare and consequential, but somewhat predictable, particularly to those who are prepared for them and have the tools to understand them (instead of listening to statisticians, economists, and charlatans of the bell-curve variety). They are near-Black Swans. They are somewhat tractable scientifically – knowing about their incidence should lower your surprise; these events are rare but expected. I call this special case of “gray” swans Mandelbrotian randomness. This category encompasses the randomness that produces phenomena commonly known by terms such as
You can still experience severe Black Swans in Mediocristan, though not easily. How? You may forget that something is random, think that it is deterministic, then have a surprise. Or you can tunnel and miss on a source of uncertainty, whether mild or wild, owing to lack of imagination – most Black Swans result from this “tunneling” disease, which I will discuss in Chapter 9.
This has been a “literary” overview of the central distinction of this book, offering a trick to distinguish between what can belong in Mediocristan and what belongs in Extremistan. I said that I will get into a more thorough examination in Part Three, so let us focus on epistemology for now and see how the distinction affects our knowledge.
Chapter Four: ONE THOUSAND AND ONE DAYS, OR HOW NOT TO BE A SUCKER
Surprise, surprise – Sophisticated methods for learning from the future – Sextus was always ahead – The main idea is not to be a sucker – Let us move to Mediocristan, if we can find it
Which brings us to the Black Swan Problem in its original form.
Imagine someone of authority and rank, operating in a place where rank matters – say, a government agency or a large corporation. He could be a verbose political commentator on Fox News stuck in front of you at the health club (impossible to avoid looking at the screen), the chairman of a company discussing the “bright future ahead”, a Platonic medical doctor who has categorically ruled out the utility of mother’s milk (because he did not see anything special in it), or a Harvard Business School professor who does not laugh at your jokes. He takes what he knows a little too seriously.
Say that a prankster surprises him one day by surreptitiously sliding a thin feather up his nose during a moment of relaxation. How would his dignified pompousness fare after the surprise? Contrast his authoritative demeanor with the shock of being hit by something totally unexpected that he does not understand. For a brief moment, before he regains his bearings, you will see disarray in his face.
