superstition, whether in astrology, dreams, omens, divine judgments, or the like”, wrote Bacon in his Novum Organum. The problem, of course, is that unless they are drilled into us systematically, or integrated into our way of thinking, these great observations are rapidly forgotten.
Silent evidence pervades everything connected to the notion of history. By history, I don’t just mean those learned-but-dull books in the history section (with Renaissance paintings on their cover to attract buyers). History, I will repeat, is any succession of events seen with the effect of posteriority.
This bias extends to the ascription of factors in the success of ideas and religions, to the illusion of skill in many professions, to success in artistic occupations, to the nature versus nurture debate, to mistakes in using evidence in the court of law, to illusions about the “logic” of history – and of course, most severely, in our perception of the nature of extreme events.
You are in a classroom listening to someone self-important, dignified, and ponderous (but dull), wearing a tweed jacket (white shirt, polka-dot tie), pontificating for two hours on the theories of history. You are too paralyzed by boredom to understand what on earth he is talking about, but you hear the names of big guns: Hegel, Fichte, Marx, Proudhon, Plato, Herodotus, Ibn Khaldoun, Toynbee, Spengler, Michelet, Carr, Bloch, Fukuyama, Schmukuyama, Trukuyama. He seems deep and knowledgeable, making sure that no attention lapse will make you forget that his approach is “post-Marxist”, “postdialectical”, or post-something, whatever that means. Then you realize that a large part of what he is saying reposes on a simple optical illusion! But this will not make a difference: he is so invested in it that if you questioned his method he would react by throwing even more names at you.
It is so easy to avoid looking at the cemetery while concocting historical theories. But this is not just a problem with history. It is a problem with the way we construct samples and gather evidence in every domain. We shall call this distortion a bias, i.e., the difference between what you see and what is there. By bias I mean a systematic error consistently showing a more positive, or negative, effect from the phenomenon, like a scale that unfailingly shows you a few pounds heavier or lighter than your true weight, or a video camera that adds a few sizes to your waistline. This bias has been rediscovered here and there throughout the past century across disciplines, often to be rapidly forgotten (like Cicero’s insight). As drowned worshippers do not write histories of their experiences (it is better to be alive for that), so it is with the losers in history, whether people or ideas. Remarkably, historians and other scholars in the humanities who need to understand silent evidence the most do not seem to have a name for it (and I looked hard). As for journalists, fuhgedaboudit! They are industrial producers of the distortion.
The term bias also indicates the condition’s potentially quantifiable nature: you may be able to calculate the distortion, and to correct for it by taking into account both the dead and the living, instead of only the living.
Silent evidence is what events use to conceal their own randomness, particularly the Black Swan type of randomness.
Sir Francis Bacon is an interesting and endearing fellow in many respects.
He harbored a deep-seated, skeptical, nonacademic, antidogmatic, and obsessively empirical nature, which, to someone skeptical, nonacademic, antidogmatic, and obsessively empirical, like this author, is a quality almost impossible to find in the thinking business. (Anyone can be skeptical; any scientist can be overly empirical – it is the rigor coming from the combination of skepticism and empiricism that’s hard to come by.) The problem is that his empiricism wanted us to confirm, not disconfirm; thus he introduced the problem of confirmation, that beastly corroboration that generates the Black Swan.
The Phoenicians, we are often reminded, produced no literature, although they allegedly invented the alphabet. Commentators discuss their philistinism from the basis of this absence of a written legacy, asserting that by race or culture, they were more interested in commerce than in the arts. Accordingly, the Phoenician invention of the alphabet served the lower purpose of commercial record keeping rather than the more noble purpose of literary production. (I remember finding on the shelves of a country house I once rented a mildewed history book by Will and Ariel Durant describing the Phoenicians as the “merchant race”. I was tempted to throw it in the fireplace.) Well, it now seems that the Phoenicians wrote quite a bit, but using a perishable brand of papyrus that did not stand the biodegradative assaults of time. Manuscripts had a high rate of extinction before copyists and authors switched to parchment in the second or third century. Those not copied during that period simply disappeared.
The neglect of silent evidence is endemic to the way we study comparative talent, particularly in activities that are plagued with winner-take-all attributes. We may enjoy what we see, but there is no point reading too much into success stories because we do not see the full picture.
Recall the winner-take-all effect from Chapter 3: notice the large number of people who call themselves writers but are (only “temporarily”) operating the shiny cappuccino machines at Starbucks. The inequity in this field is larger than, say, medicine, since we rarely see medical doctors serving hamburgers. I can thus infer that I can largely gauge the performance of the latter profession’s entire population from what sample is visible to me. Likewise with plumbers, taxi drivers, prostitutes, and those in professions devoid of superstar effects. Let us go beyond the discussion on Extremistan and Mediocristan in Chapter 3. The consequence of the superstar dynamic is that what we call “literary heritage” or “literary treasures” is a minute proportion of what has been produced cumulatively. This is the first point. How it invalidates the identification of talent can be derived immediately from it: say you attribute the success of the nineteenth-century novelist Honore de Balzac to his superior “realism”, “insights”, “sensitivity”, “treatment of characters”, “ability to keep the reader riveted”, and so on. These may be deemed “superior” qualities that lead to superior performance if, and only if, those who lack what we call talent also lack these qualities. But what if there are dozens of comparable literary masterpieces that happened to perish? And, following my logic, if there are indeed many perished manuscripts with similar attributes, then, I regret to say, your idol Balzac was just the beneficiary of disproportionate luck compared to his peers. Furthermore, you may be committing an injustice to others by favoring him.
My point, I will repeat, is not that Balzac is untalented, but that he is less uniquely talented than we think. Just consider the thousands of writers now completely vanished from consciousness: their record does not enter into analyses. We do not see the tons of rejected manuscripts because these writers have never been published. The New Yorker alone rejects close to a hundred manuscripts a day, so imagine the number of geniuses that we will never hear about. In a country like France, where more people write books while, sadly, fewer people read them, respectable literary publishers accept one in ten thousand manuscripts they receive from first-time authors. Consider the number of actors who have never passed an audition but would have done very well had they had that lucky break in life.
The next time you visit a Frenchman of comfortable means, you will likely spot the stern books from the collection Bibliotheque de la Pleiade, which their owner will never, almost never, read, mostly on account of their uncomfortable size and weight. Membership in the Pleiade means membership in the literary canon. The tomes are expensive; they have the distinctive smell of ultrathin India paper, compressing the equivalent of fifteen hundred pages into the size of a drugstore paperback. They are supposed to help you maximize the number of masterpieces per Parisian square foot. The publisher Gallimard has been extremely selective in electing writers into the Pleiade collection – only a few authors, such as the aesthete and adventurer Andre Malraux, have made it in while still alive. Dickens, Dostoyevsky, Hugo, and Stendhal are in, along with Mallarme, Sartre, Camus, and … Balzac. Yet if you follow Balzac’s own ideas, which I will examine next, you would accept that there is no ultimate justification for such an official corpus.
Balzac outlined the entire business of silent evidence in his novel Lost Illusions. Lucien de Rubempre (alias of Lucien Chardon), the penurious provincial genius, “goes up” to Paris to start a literary career. We are told that he is talented – actually he is told that he is talented by the semiaristocratic set in Angouleme. But it is difficult to figure out whether this is due to his good looks or to the literary quality of his works – or even whether literary quality is visible, or, as Balzac seems to wonder, if it has
