The Black Swan Problem. Håkan Jankensgård
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is mentioned as another Black Swan event. A dominant Christianity would no doubt have appeared like an absurd proposition to someone living around the time of the birth of Jesus. Its consequences were certainly immense, so it meets this criterion too. It also took centuries to gain a foothold and start making its impact felt. The rise of the internet and social media were mentioned earlier as examples of technology‐driven Black Swans. They too emerged gradually over many years, infiltrating our lives one small step after the other. Therefore, from the viewpoint of a decision‐maker in the real world (which is the perspective that Taleb urges us to take) they were not instantaneous.
The fact that monumental changes can take a long time in gestation adds to the relativity of Black Swans. Those that are less wedded to specific ideas and more open to rewriting the story they tell themselves come around quicker to change. This introduces a strategic dimension to Black Swans, massive agents of change as they are. The observation to make is that when others refuse or are unable to see a changing reality, the value of being a non‐conformist increases. The sucker status of those that you interact with competitively is a variable of interest, a theme we will come back to many times in this book.
Apart from the biases that shape our thinking, the relativity of Black Swans is also a matter of information and knowledge in the more traditional sense. The more we invest in high‐quality information and capabilities for processing it, the wider our frame of reference will be, and the fewer Black Swans we will experience. Take Donald Trump's ascendancy to president as an example, which was a Black Swan to those who kept discounting him heavily. As his candidacy was first announced, many took it as a joke, and went on to seriously underestimate him throughout the race. The general assumption was that America would somehow come to its senses and see him for what he was, which, in their view, included being wholly unfit for office. However, those who had had their ears on the tracks and picked up on the dark undercurrents of American society knew better. In their eyes, the arrival of Trump was the culmination of a process that had been long in coming. They had realized that a substantial number of people had come to resent the system and thought it was rigged against them, feeling that nobody stood up for them except Trump. Out of spite, they were prepared to vote for someone who promised to shake the system up. This undercurrent unleashed the mindboggling Trump presidency, which culminated in the Capitol Hill insurrection. What a Black Swan, to all those who had not noticed the sentiment that had developed among broad layers of the US population.
For students of Swanology, the #1222 episode of the Joe Rogan Experience podcast is a gem. It illuminates several of the mechanisms involved in turning some (most) of us into suckers, and highlights the enormous differences in expectations that can arise even when we are looking at the same set of facts. The topic of conversation is about the mother of all Black Swans, the wiping away of the existing world order by way of an asteroid impact. According to Rogan's guests, Graham Hancock and Randall Carlson, there is compelling evidence to suggest that there have been repeated cosmic impacts during the 180,000 years or so that anatomically modern humans have existed. Besides transforming the geography of the Earth, these events may have erased civilizations existing at the time so thoroughly that no archaeological evidence of them can be found today. Hancock and Carlson, labelled ‘catastrophists’ by some, argue that human civilization did not begin to stir around 12,000 years ago, which is the conventional view, but that it was rebooted following a near‐complete destruction caused by an asteroid that smashed into Earth a number of centuries before. The asteroid impact they refer to was followed by extreme shifts in the global climate. One consequence was a near‐instantaneous melting of the ice sheets and the flooding that resulted completely overwhelmed humans living at the time. (Fascinatingly, if true, this could explain the enduring myths handed down to us from deep history regarding an epic flooding.)
Mainstream science, however, adheres to a view referred to as ‘gradualism’, which holds that we can extrapolate backward in time from processes we are able to observe today. In this view, everything we see in the landscapes today are the result of gradual processes that have been going on for eons. As a result of the vested interest in this narrative by academics who have built a career on it, they have put up quite a resistance to the ideas put forth by Hancock and Carlson. This resistance takes us into Black Swan territory with respect to the civilization‐destroying potential of cosmic impact. Below are some excerpts from their conversation. We do not have to take any sides with respect to the facts being discussed to enjoy the insights it brings about the Black Swan formation process.
| GH: | Whenever you propose a cataclysm and present evidence for it … you can be sure that you will be descended upon by a crowd of furious critics. |
| JR: | As a species, we have amnesia. |
| JR: | Why would they try to ignore something like that? |
| GH: | When new information emerges that contradicts established theories … when you get very committed to a model or idea … you start to connect your personality to it, and any attack on it becomes an existential attack on you. |
| GH: | Again and again, what we see is new facts being dismissed because they don't fit into the existing theory … this is a problem in the whole history of science. I've come to view archeology and history as more ideology, really, than science. |
| GH: | There is an ideological view of how civilization developed, that there is this long, slow, gradual, politically correct rise … and here we are, the apex and pinnacle of this story, and gosh, we are so proud of ourselves and our achievements. |
| GH: | They are in a state of denial and just don't want to recognize it. |
| JR: | It is so sad. You count on these people to distribute the information but their ego gets involved in things … if you have an absolutely established narrative that you teach and you are unwilling to look at any possible deviation from that, you are saying, almost from an authority position, ‘we know what happened and we know where we are going’. |
| RC: | We're kind of in this mode now where there's a very large and growing political agenda around the idea that humans are the sole cause of global change … now we come along and say, no, there's actually been forces unleashed on this planet that utterly dwarfs anything we've done yet. What does that do to that paradigm? |
| GH: | … south of Minnesota you [had] a heavily vegetated area covered with primal forest and that is what goes on fire and the reason it goes on fire is because when these impacts come in they generate huge amounts of heat … and it [sets] the world on fire. |
| JR: | Oh that gives me goosebumps … a single afternoon all over the world and everything changes forever and it's [ruined] for a thousand years. |
| GH: | We all need to know about this … this is our background, this is where we come from, the present order of the world has descended from that moment. |
The conversation points to several biases at work that lull us into a state of ignorant bliss highly conducive to Black Swans. There is scientific dogma, which is a kind of confirmation bias in which incoming evidence is fitted to the received models of explanation.