into a Platonified, reductive statement. I am amazed that the "empirics,"
skeptical about links between anatomy and function, had such insight—
no wonder their school played a very small part in intellectual history. As
a skeptical empiricist I prefer the experiments of empirical psychology to
the theories-based MRI scans of neurobiologists, even if the former appear
less "scientific" to the public.
How to Avert the Narrative Faliacy
I'll conclude by saying that our misunderstanding of the Black Swan
can be largely attributed to our using System 1, i.e., narratives, and the
sensational—as well as the emotional—which imposes on us a wrong map
of the likelihood of events. On a day-to-day basis, we are not introspective
enough to realize that we understand what is going on a little less than
warranted from a dispassionate observation of our experiences. We also
tend to forget about the notion of Black Swans immediately after one
occurs—since they are too abstract for us—focusing, rather, on the precise
and vivid events that easily come to our minds. We do worry about Black
Swans, just the wrong ones.
Let me bring Mediocristan into this. In Mediocristan, narratives seem
to work—the past is likely to yield to our inquisition. But not in Extremistan,
where you do not have repetition, and where you need to remain
suspicious of the sneaky past and avoid the easy and obvious narrative.
Given that I have lived largely deprived of information, I've often felt
that I inhabit a different planet than my peers, which can sometimes be ex8
4 UMBERTO E C O ' S A N T I U B R A RY
tremely painful. It's like they have a virus controlling their brains that prevents
them from seeing things going forward—the Black Swan around the
corner.
The way to avoid the ills of the narrative fallacy is to favor experimentation
over storytelling, experience over history, and clinical knowledge
over theories. Certainly the newspaper cannot perform an experiment, but
it can choose one report over another—there is plenty of empirical research
to present and interpret from—as I am doing in this book. Being
empirical does not mean running a laboratory in one's basement: it is just
a mind-set that favors a certain class of knowledge over others. I do not
forbid myself from using the word cause, but the causes I discuss are either
bold speculations (presented as such) or the result of experiments, not stories.
Another approach is to predict and keep a tally of the predictions.
Finally, there may be a way to use a narrative—but for a good purpose.
Only a diamond can cut a diamond; we can use our ability to convince
with a story that conveys the right message—what storytellers seem to do.
So far we have discussed two internal mechanisms behind our blindness to
Black Swans, the confirmation bias and the narrative fallacy. The next
chapters will look into an external mechanism: a defect in the way we receive
and interpret recorded events, and a defect in the way we act on
them.
Chapter Seven
LIVING IN THE
ANTECHAMBER OF HOPE
How to avoid watercoolers—Select your brother-in-law—Yevgenia's favorite
book—What deserts can and cannot deliver—On the avoidance of hope—
El desierto de los tartaros—The virtues of slow motion
Assume that, like Yevgenia, your activities depend on a Black Swan
surprise—i.e., you are a reverse turkey. Intellectual, scientific, and artistic
activities belong to the province of Extremistan, where there is a severe
concentration of success, with a very small number of winners claiming a
large share of the pot. This seems to apply to all professional activities I
find nondull and "interesting" (I am still looking for a single counterexample,
a nondull activity that belongs to Mediocristan).
Acknowledging the role of this concentration of success, and acting
accordingly, causes us to be punished twice: we live in a society where the
reward mechanism is based on the illusion of the regular; our hormonal
reward system also needs tangible and steady results. It too thinks that the
world is steady and well behaved—it falls for the confirmation error. The
world has changed too fast for our genetic makeup. We are alienated from
our environment.
8 6 UMBERTO E C O ' S A N T I L I B R A RY
PEER CRUELTY
Every morning you leave your cramped apartment in Manhattan's East
Village to go to your laboratory at the Rockefeller University in the East
Sixties. You return in the late evening, and people in your social network
ask you if you had a good day, just to be polite. At the laboratory, people
are more tactful. Of course you did not have a good day; you found nothing.
You are not a watch repairman. Your finding nothing is very valuable,
since it is part of the process of discovery—hey, you know where not to
look. Other researchers, knowing your results, would avoid trying your
special experiment, provided a journal is thoughtful enough to consider
your "found nothing" as information and publish it.
Meanwhile your brother-in-law is a salesman for a Wall Street firm,
and keeps getting large commissions—large and steady commissions. "He
is doing very well," you hear, particularly from your father-in-law, with a
small pensive nanosecond of silence after the utterance—which makes you
realize that he just made a comparison. It was involuntary, but he made
one.
Holidays can be terrible. You run into your brother-in-law at family reunions
and, invariably, detect unmistakable signs of frustration on the
part of your wife, who, briefly, fears that she married a loser, before remembering
the logic of your profession. But she has to fight her first impulse.
Her sister will not stop talking about their renovations, their new
wallpaper. Your wife will be a little more silent than usual on the drive
home. This sulking will be made slightly worse because the car you are
driving is rented, since you cannot afford to garage a car in Manhattan.
What should you do? Move to Australia and thereby make family reunions
less frequent, or switch brothers-in-laws by marrying someone
with a less "successful" brother?
Or should you dress like a hippie and become defiant? That may work
for an artist, but not so easily for a scientist or a businessman. You are
trapped.
You work on a project that does not deliver immediate or steady results;
all the while, people around you work on projects that do. You are
in trouble. Such is the lot of scientists, artists, and researchers lost in society
rather than living in an insulated community or an artist colony.
Positive lumpy outcomes, for which we either collect big or get nothing,
prevail in numerous occupations, those invested with a sense of mission,
LIVING IN T H E A N T E C H A M B E R OF HOPE 87
such as doggedly pursuing (in a smelly laboratory) the elusive cure for cancer,
writing a book that will change the way people view the world (while
living hand to mouth), making music, or painting miniature icons on subway
trains and considering it a higher form of art despite the diatribes of
the antiquated "scholar" Harold Bloom.
If you are a researcher, you will have to publish inconsequential articles
in "prestigious" publications so that others say hello to you once in a
while when you run into them at conferences.
If you run a public-corporation, things were great for you before you
had shareholders, when you and your partners were the sole owners,
along with savvy venture capitalists who understood uneven results and
the lumpy nature of economic life. But now you have a slow-thinking
thirty-year-old security analyst at a downtown Manhattan firm who
"judges" your results and reads too much into them. He likes routine rewards,
and the last thing you can deliver are routine rewards.
Many people labor in life under the impression that they are doing
something right, yet they may not show solid results for a long time. They
need a capacity for continuously adjourned gratification to survive a
steady diet of peer cruelty without becoming demoralized. They look like
idiots to their cousins, they look like idiots to their peers, they need
courage to continue. No confirmation comes to them, no validation, no
fawning students, no Nobel, no Shnobel. "How was your year?" brings
them a small but containable spasm of pain deep inside, since almost all of
their years will seem wasted to someone looking at their life from the outside.
Then bang, the lumpy event comes that brings the grand vindication.
Or it may never come.
Believe me, it is tough to deal with the social consequences of the appearance
of continuous failure. We are social animals; hell is other people.
Where the Relevant Is the Sensational
Our intuitions are not cut out for nonlinearities. Consider our life in a
primitive environment where process and result are closely connected.
You are thirsty; drinking brings you adequate satisfaction. Or even in a
not-so-primitive environment, when you engage in building, say, a bridge
or a stone house, more work will lead to more apparent results, so your
mood is propped up by visible continuous feedback.
In a primitive environment, the relevant is the sensational. This applies
to our knowledge. When we try to collect information about the world
8 8 UMBERTO E C O ' S A N T I U B R A RY
around us, we tend to be guided by our biology, and our attention flows
effortlessly toward the sensational—not the relevant so much as the sensational.
Somehow the guidance system has gone wrong in the process of
our coevolution with our habitat—it was transplanted into a world in
which the relevant is often boring, nonsensational.
Furthermore, we think that if, say, two variables are causally linked,
then a steady input in one variable should always yield a result in the other
one. Our emotional apparatus is designed for linear causality. For instance,
if you study every day, you expect to learn something in proportion
to your studies. If you feel that you are not going anywhere, your
emotions will cause you to become demoralized. But modern reality rarely
gives us the privilege of a satisfying, linear, positive progression: you may
think about a problem for a year and learn nothing; then, unless you are
disheartened by the emptiness of the results and give up, something will
come to you in a flash.
Researchers spent some time dealing with this notion of gratification;
neurology has been enlightening us about the tension between the notions
of immediate rewards and delayed ones. Would you like a massage today,
or two next week? Well, the news is that the logical part of our mind, that
"higher" one, which distinguishes us from animals, can override our animal
instinct, which asks for immediate rewards. So we are a little better
than animals, after all—but perhaps not by much. And not all of the time.
Nonlinearities
The situation can get a little more tragic—the world is more nonlinear
than we think, and than scientists would like to think.
With linearities, relationships between variables are clear, crisp, and
constant, therefore Platonically easy to grasp in a single sentence, such as
"A 10 percent increase in money in the bank corresponds to a 10 percent
increase in interest income and a 5 percent increase in obsequiousness on
the part of the personal banker." If you have more money in the bank, you
get more interest. Nonlinear relationships can vary; perhaps the best way
to describe them is to say that they cannot be expressed verbally in a way
that does justice to them. Take the relationship between pleasure and
drinking water. If you are in a state of painful thirst, then a bottle of water
increases your well-being significantly. More water means more pleasure.
But what if I gave you a cistern of water? Clearly your well-being becomes
LIVING IN T H E A N T E C H A M B E R OF HOPE 8 9
rapidly insensitive to further quantities. As a matter of fact, if I gave you
the choice between a bottle or a cistern you would prefer the bottle—so
your enjoyment declines with additional quantities.
These nonlinear relationships are ubiquitous in life. Linear relationships
are truly the exception; we only focus on them in classrooms and
textbooks because they are easier to understand. Yesterday afternoon I
tried to take a fresh look around me to catalog what I could see during my
day that was linear. I could not find anything, no more than someone
hunting for squares or triangles could find them in the rain forest—or, as
we will see in Part Three, any more than someone looking for bell-shape
randomness finding it in socioeconomic phenomena.
You play tennis every day with no improvement, then suddenly you
start beating the pro.
Your child does not seem to have a learning impediment, but he does
not seem to want to speak. The schoolmaster pressures you to start considering
"other options," namely therapy. You argue with her to no avail
(she is supposed to be the "expert"). Then, suddenly, the child starts composing
elaborate sentences, perhaps a bit too elaborate for his age group.
I will repeat that linear progression, a Platonic idea, is not the norm.
Process over Results
We favor the sensational and the extremely visible. This affects the way we
judge heroes. There is little room in our consciousness for heroes who do
not deliver visible results—or those heroes who focus on process rather
than results.
However, those who claim that they value process over result are not
telling the whole truth, assuming of course that they are members of the
human species. We often hear the semi-lie that writers do not write for
glory, that artists create for the sake of art, because the activity is "its own
reward." True, these activities can generate a steady flow of autosatisfaction.
But this does not mean that artists do not crave some form of attention,
or that they would not be better off if they got some publicity; it does
not mean that writers do not wake up early Saturday morning to check if
The New York Times Book Review has featured their work, even if it is a
