The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

voracious, if unsteady, reader, but I spent the first phase of the war in a basement, diving body and soul into all manner of books. School was closed and it was raining mortar shells. It is dreadfully boring to be in basements. My initial worries were mostly about how to fight boredom and what to read next[6] – though being forced to read for lack of other activities is not as enjoyable as reading out of one’s own volition. I wanted to be a philosopher (I still do), so I felt that I needed to make an investment by forcibly studying others’ ideas. Circumstances motivated me to study theoretical and general accounts of wars and conflicts, trying to get into the guts of History, to get into the workings of that big machine that generates events.

Surprisingly, the book that influenced me was not written by someone in the thinking business but by a journalist: William Shirer’s Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent, 1934- 1941. Shirer was a radio correspondent, famous for his book The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. It occurred to me that the Journal offered an unusual perspective. I had already read (or read about) the works of Hegel, Marx, Toynbee, Aron, and Fichte on the philosophy of history and its properties and thought that I had a vague idea of the notions of dialectics, to the extent that there was something to understand in these theories. I did not grasp much, except that history had some logic and that things developed through contradiction (or opposites) in a way that elevated mankind into higher forms of society – that kind of thing. This sounded awfully similar to the theorizing around me about the war in Lebanon. To this day I surprise people who put the ludicrous question to me about what books “shaped my thinking” by telling them that this book taught me (albeit inadvertently) the most about philosophy and theoretical history – and, we will see, about science as well, since I learned the difference between forward and backward processes.

How? Simply, the diary purported to describe the events as they were taking place, not after. I was in a basement with history audibly unfolding above me (the sound of mortar shells kept me up all night). I was a teenager attending the funerals of classmates. I was experiencing a nontheoretical unfolding of History and I was reading about someone apparently experiencing history as it went along. I made efforts to mentally produce a movielike representation of the future and realized it was not so obvious. I realized that if I were to start writing about the events later they would seem more … historical. There was a difference between the before and the after.

The journal was purportedly written without Shirer knowing what was going to happen next, when the information available to him was not corrupted by the subsequent outcomes. Some comments here and there were quite illuminating, particularly those concerning the French belief that Hitler was a transitory phenomenon, which explained their lack of preparation and subsequent rapid capitulation. At no time was the extent of the ultimate devastation deemed possible.

While we have a highly unstable memory, a diary provides indelible facts recorded more or less immediately; it thus allows the fixation of an unrevised perception and enables us to later study events in their own context. Again, it is the purported method of description of the event, not its execution, that was important. In fact, it is likely that Shirer and his editors did some cheating, since the book was published in 1941 and publishers, I am told, are in the business of delivering texts to the general public instead of providing faithful depictions of the authors’ mind-sets stripped of retrospective distortions. (By “cheating”, I mean removing at the time of publication elements that did not turn out to be relevant to what happened, thus enhancing those that may interest the public. Indeed the editing process can be severely distorting, particularly when the author is assigned what is called a “good editor”.) Still, encountering Shirer’s book provided me with an intuition about the workings of history. One would suppose that people living through the beginning of WWII had an inkling that something momentous was taking place. Not at all.[7]

Shirer’s diary turned out to be a training program in the dynamics of uncertainty. I wanted to be a philosopher, not knowing at the time what most professional philosophers did for a living. The idea led me to adventure (rather to the adventurous practice of uncertainty) and also to mathematical and scientific pursuits instead.

Education in a Taxicab

I will introduce the third element of the triplet, the curse of learning, as follows. I closely watched my grandfather, who was minister of defense, and later minister of the interior and deputy prime minister in the early days of the war, before the fading of his political role. In spite of his position he did not seem to know what was going to happen any more than did his driver, Mikhail. But unlike my grandfather, Mikhail used to repeat “God knows” as his main commentary on events, transferring the task of understanding higher up.

I noticed that very intelligent and informed persons were at no advantage over cabdrivers in their predictions, but there was a crucial difference. Cabdrivers did not believe that they understood as much as learned people – really, they were not the experts and they knew it. Nobody knew anything, but elite thinkers thought that they knew more than the rest because they were elite thinkers, and if you’re a member of the elite, you automatically know more than the nonelite.

It is not just knowledge but information that can be of dubious value. It came to my notice that almost everybody was acquainted with current events in their smallest details. The overlap between newspapers was so large that you would get less and less information the more you read. Yet everyone was so eager to become familiar with every fact that they read every freshly printed document and listened to every radio station as if the great answer was going to be revealed to them in the next bulletin. People became encyclopedias of who had met with whom and which politician said what to which other politician (and with what tone of voice: “Was he more friendly than usual?”). Yet to no avail.

CLUSTERS

I also noticed during the Lebanese war that journalists tended to cluster not necessarily around the same opinions but frequently around the same framework of analyses. They assign the same importance to the same sets of circumstances and cut reality into the same categories – once again the manifestation of Platonicity, the desire to cut reality into crisp shapes. What Robert Fisk calls “hotel journalism” further increased the mental contagion. While Lebanon in earlier journalism was part of the Levant, i.e., the eastern Mediterranean, it now suddenly became part of the Middle East, as if someone had managed to transport it closer to the sands of Saudi Arabia. The island of Cyprus, around sixty miles from my village in northern Lebanon, and with almost identical food, churches, and habits, suddenly became part of Europe (of course the natives on both sides became subsequently conditioned). While in the past a distinction had been drawn between Mediterranean and non-Mediterranean (i.e., between the olive oil and the butter), in the 1970s the distinction suddenly became that between Europe and non-Europe. Islam being the wedge between the two, one does not know where to place the indigenous Arabic-speaking Christians (or Jews) in that story. Categorizing is necessary for humans, but it becomes pathological when the category is seen as definitive, preventing people from considering the fuzziness of boundaries, let alone revising their categories. Contagion was the culprit. If you selected one hundred independent-minded journalists capable of seeing factors in isolation from one another, you would get one hundred different opinions. But the process of having these people report in lockstep caused the dimensionality of the opinion set to shrink considerably – they converged on opinions and used the same items as causes. For instance, to depart from Lebanon for a moment, all reporters now refer to the “roaring eighties”, assuming that there was something particularly distinct about that exact decade. And during the Internet bubble of the late 1990s, journalists agreed on crazy indicators as explanatory of the quality of worthless companies that everyone wanted very badly.[8]

If you want to see what I mean by the arbitrariness of categories, check the situation of polarized politics. The next time a Martian visits earth, try to explain to him why those who favor allowing the elimination of a fetus in the mother’s womb also oppose capital punishment. Or try to explain to him why those who accept abortion are supposed to be favorable to high taxation but against a strong military. Why do those who prefer sexual freedom need to be against individual economic liberty?

I noticed the absurdity of clustering when I was quite young. By some farcical turn of events, in that civil war of Lebanon, Christians became pro-free market and the capitalistic system – i.e., what a journalist would call “the Right” – and the Islamists became socialists, getting support from Communist regimes