numbers are easy to process on computers. Studying historical data makes you conscious that history runs forward, not backward, and that it is messier than narrated accounts. Epistemology, the philosophy of history, and statistics aim at understanding truths, investigating the mechanisms that generate them, and separating regularity from the coincidental in historical matters. They all address the question of what one knows, except that they are all to be found in different buildings, so to speak.
That night, on October 19, 1987, I slept for twelve hours straight.
It was hard to tell my friends, all hurt in some manner by the crash, about this feeling of vindication. Bonuses at the time were a fraction of what they are today, but if my employer, First Boston, and the financial system survived until year-end, I would get the equivalent of a fellowship. This is sometimes called “f*** you money”, which, in spite of its coarseness, means that it allows you to act like a Victorian gentleman, free from slavery. It is a psychological buffer: the capital is not so large as to make you spoiled-rich, but large enough to give you the freedom to choose a new occupation without excessive consideration of the financial rewards. It shields you from prostituting your mind and frees you from outside authority – any outside authority. (Independence is person- specific: I have always been taken aback at the high number of people in whom an astonishingly high income led to additional sycophancy as they became more dependent on their clients and employers and more addicted to making even more money.) While not substantial by some standards, it literally cured me of all financial ambition – it made me feel ashamed whenever I diverted time away from study for the pursuit of material wealth. Note that the designation
These were the days when it was extremely common for traders to break phones when they lost money. Some resorted to destroying chairs, tables, or whatever would make noise. Once, in the Chicago pits, another trader tried to strangle me and it took four security guards to drag him away. He was irate because I was standing in what he deemed his “territory”. Who would want to leave such an environment? Compare it to lunches in a drab university cafeteria with gentle-mannered professors discussing the latest departmental intrigue. So I stayed in the quant and trading businesses (I’m still there), but organized myself to do minimal but intense (and entertaining) work, focus only on the most technical aspects, never attend business “meetings”, avoid the company of “achievers” and people in suits who don’t read books, and take a sabbatical year for every three on average to fill up gaps in my scientific and philosophical culture. To slowly distill my single idea, I wanted to become a flaneur, a professional meditator, sit in cafes, lounge, unglued to desks and organization structures, sleep as long as I needed, read voraciously, and not owe any explanation to anybody. I wanted to be left alone in order to build, small steps at a time, an entire system of thought based on my Black Swan idea.
The war in Lebanon and the crash of 1987 seemed identical phenomena. It became obvious to me that nearly everyone had a mental blindspot in acknowledging the role of such events: it was as if they were not able to see these mammoths, or that they rapidly forgot about them. The answer was looking straight at me: it was a psychological, perhaps even biological,
I end this autobiographical prelude with the following story. I had no defined specialty (outside of my day job), and wanted none. When people at cocktail parties asked me what I did for a living, I was tempted to answer, “I am a
Once, on a transatlantic flight, I found myself upgraded to first class next to an expensively dressed, high- powered lady dripping with gold and jewelry who continuously ate nuts (low-carb diet, perhaps), insisted on drinking only Evian, all the while reading the European edition of
Chapter Two: YEVGENIA’S BLACK SWAN
Pink glasses and success – How Yevgenia stops marrying philosophers – I told you so
Five years ago, Yevgenia Nikolayevna Krasnova was an obscure and unpublished novelist, with an unusual background. She was a neuroscientist with an interest in philosophy (her first three husbands had been philosophers), and she got it into her stubborn Franco-Russian head to express her research and ideas in literary form. She dressed up her theories as stories, and mixed them with all manner of autobiographical commentary. She avoided the journalistic prevarications of contemporary narrative nonfiction (“On a clear April morning, John Smith left his house. …”). Foreign dialogue was always written in the original language, with translations appended like movie subtitles. She refused to dub into bad English conversations that took place in bad Italian.[11]
No publisher would have given her the time of day, except that there was, at the time, some interest in those rare scientists who could manage to express themselves in semi-understandable sentences. A few publishers agreed to speak with her; they hoped that she would grow up and write a “popular science book on consciousness”. She received enough attention to get the courtesy of rejection letters and occasional insulting comments instead of the far more insulting and demeaning silence.
Publishers were confused by her manuscript. She could not even answer their first question: “Is this fiction or nonfiction?” Nor could she respond to the “Who is this book written for?” on the publishers’ book proposal forms. She was told, “You need to understand who your audience is” and “amateurs write for themselves, professionals write for others”. She was also told to conform to a precise genre because “bookstores do not like to be confused and need to know where to place a book on the shelves”. One editor protectively added, “This, my dear friend, will only sell ten copies, including those bought by your ex-husbands and family members”.
She had attended a famous writing workshop five years earlier and came out nauseated. “Writing well” seemed to mean obeying arbitrary rules that had grown into gospel, with the confirmatory reinforcement of what we call “experience”. The writers she met were learning to retrofit what was deemed successful: they all tried to imitate stories that had appeared in past issues of
Yegvenia ended up posting the entire manuscript of her main book,
It took five years for Yevgenia to graduate from the “egomaniac without anything to justify it, stubborn and difficult to deal with” category to “persevering, resolute, painstaking, and fiercely independent”. For her book slowly caught fire, becoming one of the great and strange successes in literary history, selling millions of copies and drawing so-called critical acclaim. The start-up house has since become a big corporation, with a (polite) receptionist to greet visitors as they enter the main office. Her book has been translated into forty languages (even French). You see her picture everywhere. She is said to be a pioneer of something called the Consilient School. Publishers now have a theory that “truck drivers who read books do not read books written for truck drivers” and hold that “readers despise writers who pander to them”. A scientific paper, it is now understood, can hide trivialities or irrelevance with equations and jargon; consilient prose, by exposing an idea in raw form, allows it to be judged
