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sense_of_history 's review for:
The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
It has been more than two months since I read this book and only now I succeed in writing a review about what this book can mean for a historian. That says something about how difficult it is to separate the problematic aspects of this book (the arrogant and polemical tone) from the real content. Because Taleb does have something to say for those who look at the past.
For the sake of clarity, firstly his definition of Black Swans: these are unexpected events, both negative and positive, with a huge impact, where no prior warnings exist for those who experience the event, but of which we post-factually are able to give explanations and thus have the impression that they were nevertheless predictable. That is already quite something to chew on. What Taleb offers is the paradoxical side of Black Swans: they come unexpectedly, but we can explain them perfectly afterwards. Some examples: the First World War had to break out if you see how recklessly in the decades before an arms race was under way and how the political leaders underestimated the enormous implications of their aggressive behavior; the fall of the Communist bloc in 1989 could have been predicted, because there were many indications that the economies of those countries were broke, that they were military-technological giants on clay feet, and that their populations only confessed to the official ideology for appearances; and so on, and so on.
Taleb sketches nothing less here, than the work historians do (and by extension of course also journalists and other categories): explaining why something happened. You could have the impression that he actually takes this as a child's play: every one could predict the outcome, given the right facts. But of course, Taleb is not that stupid. In his book there is one striking example that, in all its simplicity, explains the core problem of historical observation. Taleb quotes a scientific experiment: suppose you have an ice block of 1 cubic meter, and you put that in a heated room; by applying a number of scientific laws you can almost perfectly predict how quickly this ice block will melt and how large the pool of water eventually will be; but then think about the reverse experiment: you start with a large pool of water in a room; you can formulate dozens or even hundreds of explanations of how that pool came about, of which only one is that of the experiment with the ice block. In other words: it’s nearly impossible to find out exactly what happened.
When I read this, I was initially very impressed: indeed, the dense veil that hangs over the past makes it almost impossible for a historian to reconstruct what really happened. But after some thought, I have to admit that I felt badly deceived, or better, that I was angry with myself that I had not seen it at once. Because the experiment of Taleb is of such simplicity that it is not realistic: from the experience of a historian we know that there have to be a lot more clues in the room than the simple pool of water: maybe there were still people in white lab coats running around indicating a scientific experiment, perhaps there were heat-convectors in the immediate vicinity, maybe in the puddle there still was the wooden pallet on which the ice block was transported, perhaps scientific reports surfaced in which the experiment was literally described, or perhaps there was a cleaning crew present of which some people had seen everything happen, etc. To keep it short: a really perfect reconstruction may not be easy, but there are always enough traces that provide an approximative, plausible explanation. And just that last thing, and the methodology that comes with it, is the work of the historian.
Another interesting aspect in this book is that Taleb gives many explanations why we do not see Black Swans coming, and that is also relevant to the work of the historian, because it shows where the pitfalls lie, the classic "fallacies" of which one half century ago the American historian D.H. Fischer gave an almost exhaustive list in his seminal work [b:Historians' Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought|9037|Historians' Fallacies Toward a Logic of Historical Thought|David Hackett Fischer|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1348351606l/9037._SX50_.jpg|11926]. Taleb mainly focusses on psychological-mental aspects: our very human inclination, for example, to always assume that things will continue to go as they go now; we are mentally blind to the factor of change and chance in history. What is especially bad is that now we think we can predict the future better because of the flight science has taken and has brought more knowledge to the foreside. No wonder Taleb has a lot of criticism on econometrists and demographers who make predictions about economic growth, population trends and so on, which in retrospect almost always prove to be incorrect.
Now, Taleb blames this mainly on the use of wrong probability models (and the technicality of this makes the reading of the second half of this book so difficult). And that's where - according to me - he gets trapped in an own kind of contradiction. His book is full of historical examples of predictions and expectations that turned out to be wrong, and at the end of his book he argues for a form of stoicism because we cannot know which unexpected things can happen. But in other places he argues that we are able to demarcate an area (he calls it Mediocristan) where we are fairly safe, and thus also a very small area (Extremistan) where the Black Swans are active; and this knowledge, that demarcation, could protect us to a certain extent against huge mistakes.
I'm afraid that, in all its vagueness, with this Taleb once again opens the door to historians who imagine that, based on facts from the past, they can predict the future to some extent, and we are back to square one. The incomprehensible thing is that Taleb himself warnes against these kind of mistakes, mistakes that are inherent to mankind: "We do not spontaneously learn that we don’t learn that we don’t learn. The problem lies in the structure of our minds: we don’t learn rules, just facts, and only facts. Metarules (such as the rule that we have a tendency to not learn rules) we don’t seem to be good at getting. We scorn the abstract; we scorn it with passion "(pp xxvi). It is a lesson an historian should always remember.
For the sake of clarity, firstly his definition of Black Swans: these are unexpected events, both negative and positive, with a huge impact, where no prior warnings exist for those who experience the event, but of which we post-factually are able to give explanations and thus have the impression that they were nevertheless predictable. That is already quite something to chew on. What Taleb offers is the paradoxical side of Black Swans: they come unexpectedly, but we can explain them perfectly afterwards. Some examples: the First World War had to break out if you see how recklessly in the decades before an arms race was under way and how the political leaders underestimated the enormous implications of their aggressive behavior; the fall of the Communist bloc in 1989 could have been predicted, because there were many indications that the economies of those countries were broke, that they were military-technological giants on clay feet, and that their populations only confessed to the official ideology for appearances; and so on, and so on.
Taleb sketches nothing less here, than the work historians do (and by extension of course also journalists and other categories): explaining why something happened. You could have the impression that he actually takes this as a child's play: every one could predict the outcome, given the right facts. But of course, Taleb is not that stupid. In his book there is one striking example that, in all its simplicity, explains the core problem of historical observation. Taleb quotes a scientific experiment: suppose you have an ice block of 1 cubic meter, and you put that in a heated room; by applying a number of scientific laws you can almost perfectly predict how quickly this ice block will melt and how large the pool of water eventually will be; but then think about the reverse experiment: you start with a large pool of water in a room; you can formulate dozens or even hundreds of explanations of how that pool came about, of which only one is that of the experiment with the ice block. In other words: it’s nearly impossible to find out exactly what happened.
When I read this, I was initially very impressed: indeed, the dense veil that hangs over the past makes it almost impossible for a historian to reconstruct what really happened. But after some thought, I have to admit that I felt badly deceived, or better, that I was angry with myself that I had not seen it at once. Because the experiment of Taleb is of such simplicity that it is not realistic: from the experience of a historian we know that there have to be a lot more clues in the room than the simple pool of water: maybe there were still people in white lab coats running around indicating a scientific experiment, perhaps there were heat-convectors in the immediate vicinity, maybe in the puddle there still was the wooden pallet on which the ice block was transported, perhaps scientific reports surfaced in which the experiment was literally described, or perhaps there was a cleaning crew present of which some people had seen everything happen, etc. To keep it short: a really perfect reconstruction may not be easy, but there are always enough traces that provide an approximative, plausible explanation. And just that last thing, and the methodology that comes with it, is the work of the historian.
Another interesting aspect in this book is that Taleb gives many explanations why we do not see Black Swans coming, and that is also relevant to the work of the historian, because it shows where the pitfalls lie, the classic "fallacies" of which one half century ago the American historian D.H. Fischer gave an almost exhaustive list in his seminal work [b:Historians' Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought|9037|Historians' Fallacies Toward a Logic of Historical Thought|David Hackett Fischer|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1348351606l/9037._SX50_.jpg|11926]. Taleb mainly focusses on psychological-mental aspects: our very human inclination, for example, to always assume that things will continue to go as they go now; we are mentally blind to the factor of change and chance in history. What is especially bad is that now we think we can predict the future better because of the flight science has taken and has brought more knowledge to the foreside. No wonder Taleb has a lot of criticism on econometrists and demographers who make predictions about economic growth, population trends and so on, which in retrospect almost always prove to be incorrect.
Now, Taleb blames this mainly on the use of wrong probability models (and the technicality of this makes the reading of the second half of this book so difficult). And that's where - according to me - he gets trapped in an own kind of contradiction. His book is full of historical examples of predictions and expectations that turned out to be wrong, and at the end of his book he argues for a form of stoicism because we cannot know which unexpected things can happen. But in other places he argues that we are able to demarcate an area (he calls it Mediocristan) where we are fairly safe, and thus also a very small area (Extremistan) where the Black Swans are active; and this knowledge, that demarcation, could protect us to a certain extent against huge mistakes.
I'm afraid that, in all its vagueness, with this Taleb once again opens the door to historians who imagine that, based on facts from the past, they can predict the future to some extent, and we are back to square one. The incomprehensible thing is that Taleb himself warnes against these kind of mistakes, mistakes that are inherent to mankind: "We do not spontaneously learn that we don’t learn that we don’t learn. The problem lies in the structure of our minds: we don’t learn rules, just facts, and only facts. Metarules (such as the rule that we have a tendency to not learn rules) we don’t seem to be good at getting. We scorn the abstract; we scorn it with passion "(pp xxvi). It is a lesson an historian should always remember.