Black Swans

Black Swans:

An interview with Nassim Nicholas Taleb, at The Times of London. He is one of those deeply eccentric people who demonstrates that eccentricity can be a mark of a very clear sight, and a willingness to see the world for what it is.

For the non-mathematician, probability is an indecipherably complex field. But Taleb makes it easy by proving all the mathematics wrong. Let me introduce you to Brooklyn-born Fat Tony and academically inclined Dr John, two of Taleb’s creations. You toss a coin 40 times and it comes up heads every time. What is the chance of it coming up heads the 41st time? Dr John gives the answer drummed into the heads of every statistic student: 50/50. Fat Tony shakes his head and says the chances are no more than 1%. “You are either full of crap,” he says, “or a pure sucker to buy that 50% business. The coin gotta be loaded.”

The chances of a coin coming up heads 41 times are so small as to be effectively impossible in this universe. It is far, far more likely that somebody is cheating. Fat Tony wins. Dr John is the sucker. And the one thing that drives Taleb more than anything else is the determination not to be a sucker. Dr John is the economist or banker who thinks he can manage risk through mathematics. Fat Tony relies only on what happens in the real world.

Mathematics is the most certain of the sciences; it is the one of the sciences where you can be sure you have the right answer. What people forget, however, is why that is so.

The reason there is a right answer is that mathematics is a science of models that approximate reality. It is not reality itself. When you move into reality as it is, even the hardest science -- physics, say -- becomes an exercise in probability at best.

I say, "at best," because there is also the problem of the Black Swan: of something in reality you've never encountered before. It can't figure into your calculations, because you have no way to know it exists. There are such things in the world as we have never imagined, waiting in the dark.

They are also Christian – Greek Orthodox. Startlingly, this great sceptic, this non-guru who believes in nothing, is still a practising Christian. He regards with some contempt the militant atheism movement led by Richard Dawkins.

“Scientists don’t know what they are talking about when they talk about religion. Religion has nothing to do with belief, and I don’t believe it has any negative impact on people’s lives outside of intolerance. Why do I go to church? It’s like asking, why did you marry that woman? You make up reasons, but it’s probably just smell. I love the smell of candles. It’s an aesthetic thing.”

Take away religion, he says, and people start believing in nationalism, which has killed far more people. Religion is also a good way of handling uncertainty. It lowers blood pressure. He’s convinced that religious people take fewer financial risks.

He was educated at a French school. Three traditions formed him: Greek Orthodox, French Catholic and Arab. They also taught him to disbelieve conventional wisdom. Each tradition had a different history of the crusades, utterly different. This led him to disbelieve historians almost as much as he does bankers.

The ideal thing to do is to learn each of the three histories of the Crusades, and sort out as best you can what is most likely to have happened. The fact of the three histories, though, is something to keep in mind.

The way to visualize these three histories is with the events they all three experienced as a point in the center of a diagram. Stretching out from this point are three separate fields, each of which is full of additional data. There are things that the Greeks do not know about that the French thought were very important to the story. There are things that the Levantines found central that never entered the consciousness of the French knights.

If what you want to do is sort out a 'most likely course' of what happened, you can probably do that by learning the three cultures and, therefore, the contents of each of the three backfields. Then, you can compare the accounts and triangulate the "truth position" of any given claim located in that center point, the Crusades themselves. You'll be able to do this with greater accuracy than if you had known only one tradition.

You are still doing probability work. You must always keep in front of your eyes that you aren't really right. You've only sorted out what is most likely.

As Fat Tony would say, "most likely" is the way to bet. Just understand that you can still lose, once in a while, on what seems like a sure thing.