The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

Do you see anything unusual? Try again.[22]

The Sydney-based brain scientist Alan Snyder (who has a Philadelphia accent) made the following discovery. If you inhibit the left hemisphere of a right-handed person (more technically, by directing low-frequency magnetic pulses into the left frontotemporal lobes), you lower his rate of error in reading the above caption. Our propensity to impose meaning and concepts blocks our awareness of the details making up the concept. However, if you zap people’s left hemispheres, they become more realistic – they can draw better and with more verisimilitude. Their minds become better at seeing the objects themselves, cleared of theories, narratives, and prejudice.

Why is it hard to avoid interpretation? It is key that, as we saw with the vignette of the Italian scholar, brain functions often operate outside our awareness. You interpret pretty much as you perform other activities deemed automatic and outside your control, like breathing.

What makes nontheorizing cost you so much more energy than theorizing? First, there is the impenetrability of the activity. I said that much of it takes place outside of our awareness: if you don’t know that you are making the inference, how can you stop yourself unless you stay in a continuous state of alert? And if you need to be continuously on the watch, doesn’t that cause fatigue? Try it for an afternoon and see.

A Little More Dopamine

In addition to the story of the left-brain interpreter, we have more physiological evidence of our ingrained pattern seeking, thanks to our growing knowledge of the role of neurotransmitters, the chemicals that are assumed to transport signals between different parts of the brain. It appears that pattern perception increases along with the concentration in the brain of the chemical dopamine. Dopamine also regulates moods and supplies an internal reward system in the brain (not surprisingly, it is found in slightly higher concentrations in the left side of the brains of right-handed persons than on the right side). A higher concentration of dopamine appears to lower skepticism and result in greater vulnerability to pattern detection; an injection of L-dopa, a substance used to treat patients with Parkinson’s disease, seems to increase such activity and lowers one’s suspension of belief. The person becomes vulnerable to all manner of fads, such as astrology, superstitions, economics, and tarot-card reading.

Actually, as I am writing this, there is news of a pending lawsuit by a patient going after his doctor for more than $200,000 – an amount he allegedly lost while gambling. The patient claims that the treatment of his Parkinson’s disease caused him to go on wild betting sprees in casinos. It turns out that one of the side effects of L-dopa is that a small but significant minority of patients become compulsive gamblers. Since such gambling is associated with their seeing what they believe to be clear patterns in random numbers, this illustrates the relation between knowledge and randomness. It also shows that some aspects of what we call “knowledge” (and what I call narrative) are an ailment.

Once again, I warn the reader that I am not focusing on dopamine as the reason for our overinterpreting; rather, my point is that there is a physical and neural correlate to such operation and that our minds are largely victims of our physical embodiment. Our minds are like inmates, captive to our biology, unless we manage a cunning escape. It is the lack of our control of such inferences that I am stressing. Tomorrow, someone may discover another chemical or organic basis for our perception of patterns, or counter what I said about the left-brain interpreter by showing the role of a more complex structure; but it would not negate the idea that perception of causation has a biological foundation.

Andrey Nikolayevich’s Rule

There is another, even deeper reason for our inclination to narrate, and it is not psychological. It has to do with the effect of order on information storage and retrieval in any system, and it’s worth explaining here because of what I consider the central problems of probability and information theory.

The first problem is that information is costly to obtain.

The second problem is that information is also costly to store – like real estate in New York. The more orderly, less random, patterned, and narratized a series of words or symbols, the easier it is to store that series in one’s mind or jot it down in a book so your grandchildren can read it someday.

Finally, information is costly to manipulate and retrieve.

With so many brain cells – one hundred billion (and counting) – the attic is quite large, so the difficulties probably do not arise from storage-capacity limitations, but may be just indexing problems. Your conscious, or working, memory, the one you are using to read these lines and make sense of their meaning, is considerably smaller than the attic. Consider that your working memory has difficulty holding a mere phone number longer than seven digits. Change metaphors slightly and imagine that your consciousness is a desk in the Library of Congress: no matter how many books the library holds, and makes available for retrieval, the size of your desk sets some processing limitations. Compression is vital to the performance of conscious work.

Consider a collection of words glued together to constitute a 500-page book. If the words are purely random, picked up from the dictionary in a totally unpredictable way, you will not be able to summarize, transfer, or reduce the dimensions of that book without losing something significant from it. You need 100,000 words to carry the exact message of a random 100,000 words with you on your next trip to Siberia. Now consider the opposite: a book filled with the repetition of the following sentence: “The chairman of [insert here your company name] is a lucky fellow who happened to be in the right place at the right time and claims credit for the company’s success, without making a single allowance for luck”, running ten times per page for 500 pages. The entire book can be accurately compressed, as I have just done, into 34 words (out of 100,000); you could reproduce it with total fidelity out of such a kernel. By finding the pattern, the logic of the series, you no longer need to memorize it all. You just store the pattern. And, as we can see here, a pattern is obviously more compact than raw information. You looked into the book and found a rule. It is along these lines that the great probabilist Andrey Nikolayevich Kolmogorov defined the degree of randomness; it is called “Kolmogorov complexity”.

We, members of the human variety of primates, have a hunger for rules because we need to reduce the dimension of matters so they can get into our heads. Or, rather, sadly, so we can squeeze them into our heads. The more random information is, the greater the dimensionality, and thus the more difficult to summarize. The more you summarize, the more order you put in, the less randomness. Hence the same condition that makes us simplify pushes us to think that the world is less random than it actually is.

And the Black Swan is what we leave out of simplification. Both the artistic and scientific enterprises are the product of our need to reduce dimensions and inflict some order on things. Think of the world around you, laden with trillions of details. Try to describe it and you will find yourself tempted to weave a thread into what you are saying. A novel, a story, a myth, or a tale, all have the same function: they spare us from the complexity of the world and shield us from its randomness. Myths impart order to the disorder of human perception and the perceived “chaos of human experience”.[23]

Indeed, many severe psychological disorders accompany the feeling of loss of control of – being able to “make sense” of – one’s environment.

Platonicity affects us here once again. The very same desire for order, interestingly, applies to scientific pursuits – it is just that, unlike art, the (stated) purpose of science is to get to the truth, not to give you a feeling of organization or make you feel better. We tend to use knowledge as therapy. 

A Better Way to Die

To view the potency of narrative, consider the following statement: “The king died and the queen died”. Compare it to “The king died, and then the queen died of grief”. This exercise, presented by the novelist E. M. Forster, shows the distinction between mere succession of information and a plot. But notice the hitch here: although we added information to the second statement, we effectively reduced the dimension of the total. The second sentence is, in a way, much lighter to carry and easier to remember; we now have one single piece of information in place of two. As we can remember it with less effort, we can also sell it to others, that is, market it better as a packaged idea. This, in a nutshell, is the definition and function of a narrative.

To see how the narrative can lead to a mistake in the assessment of the odds, do the following experiment. Give someone a well-written detective story – say, an Agatha Christie novel with a handful of characters who can all be plausibly deemed guilty. Now question your subject about the probabilities of each character’s being the murderer. Unless she writes down the percentages to keep an exact tally of them, they should add up to well over 100 percent (even well over 200 percent for a good novel). The better the detective writer, the higher that