BOOK / NON FICTION / 480 PAGES / 2007 / NASSIM NICHOLAS TALEB
World War Two was one of the most important events of the 20th century. As a result, the U.S. And the USSR emerged as competing superpowers. These two former allies quickly turned on each other, and the world saw itself on the brink of another war the moment World War Two ended. The World War II veteran who stormed Omaha Beach during the D-Day invasion went on to break barriers as Ansonia's first black letter carrier. In 2014, he served as mayor for a day.
Nassim Nicholas Talebwrote in Black Swan an interesting analogy: “Consider a turkey that is fed every day. Every single feeding will firm up the bird’s belief that it is the general rule of life to be fed every day by friendly members of the human race “looking out for its best interests,” as a politician would say. On the afternoon of the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, something unexpected will happen to the turkey. It will incur a revision of belief.” Black Swans by Taleb’s definition are big improbable events with extreme impact like the Wall Street Crash of 1929, Hurricane Katrina in 2004 and the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster in 2011.
All these events have one thing in common: we didn’t see them coming. After such events with outliers that has an very high impact, we try to find reasons for it occurrence. Therefore, we have an illusion of understanding what happened in the past. What happen is that we fall in a retrospective distortion where we think that history is more clear than it is.
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When we look at the sequence of events that lead to World War II, we associate explanations and causes to them. The Treaty of Versailles is the perfect example of the narrative fallacy. It is often seen as an humilation of Germany and the direct cause of the Second World War. We look backward and it seem very simple. The reality is otherwise, nobody could have predict what would happen, Hitler was a Black Swan. In Taleb words, “The inability to predict outliers implies the inability to predict the course of history”.
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We tend to think of the past as something definitive of the future. We could argue that because a nuclear war never happened so far, that it won’t happen in the future. We have no way knowing. Perhaps it will never happen, but also we could wake up tomorrow in nuclear showdown between United States and Russia. We look for instance that confirm our story or vision. In other words, we think of tomorrow as another yesterday.
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As much as we would like to predict Black Swans, we need to understand that luck play a major role in life. No matter the mathematical models we will build, something out of our knowledge will always be under our radar. Our world is build on randomness and we tend to forget that our own existence are Black Swans.