unfailingly shows you a few pounds heavier or lighter than your true
weight, or a video camera that adds a few sizes to your waistline. This bias
has been rediscovered here and there throughout the past century across
disciplines, often to be rapidly forgotten (like Cicero's insight). As drowned
worshippers do not write histories of their experiences (it is better to be
alive for that), so it is with the losers in history, whether people or ideas.
Remarkably, historians and other scholars in the humanities who need to
understand silent evidence the most do not seem to have a name for it (and
I looked hard). As for journalists, fuhgedaboudit! They are industrial producers
of the distortion.
The term bias also indicates the condition's potentially quantifiable nature:
you may be able to calculate the distortion, and to correct for it by
taking into account both the dead and the living, instead of only the living.
Silent evidence is what events use to conceal their own randomness,
particularly the Black Swan type of randomness.
Sir Francis Bacon is an interesting and endearing fellow in many respects.
He harbored a deep-seated, skeptical, nonacademic, antidogmatic, and
obsessively empirical nature, which, to someone skeptical, nonacademic,
antidogmatic, and obsessively empirical, like this author, is a quality almost
impossible to find in the thinking business. (Anyone can be skeptical;
any scientist can be overly empirical—it is the rigor coming from the combination
of skepticism and empiricism that's hard to come by.) The problem
is that his empiricism wanted us to confirm, not disconfirm; thus he
introduced the problem of confirmation, that beastly corroboration that
generates the Black Swan.
THE CEMETERY OF LETTERS
The Phoenicians, we are often reminded, produced no literature, although
they allegedly invented the alphabet. Commentators discuss their philistinism
from the basis of this absence of a written legacy, asserting that by
race or culture, they were more interested in commerce than in the arts.
Accordingly, the Phoenician invention of the alphabet served the lower
purpose of commercial record keeping rather than the more noble purpose
GIACOMO CASANOVA'S UNFAILING LUCK 1 03
of literary production. (I remember finding on the shelves of a country
house I once rented a mildewed history book by Will and Ariel Durant describing
the Phoenicians as the "merchant race." I was tempted to throw
it in the fireplace.) Well, it now seems that the Phoenicians wrote quite a
bit, but using a perishable brand of papyrus that did not stand the
biodegradative assaults of time. Manuscripts had a high rate of extinction
before copyists and authors switched to parchment in the second or third
century. Those not copied during that period simply disappeared.
The neglect of silent evidence is endemic to the way we study comparative
talent, particularly in activities that are plagued with winner-take-all
attributes. We may enjoy what we see, but there is no point reading too
much into success stories because we do not see the full picture.
Recall the winner-take-all effect from Chapter 3: notice the large number
of people who call themselves writers but are (only "temporarily") operating
the shiny cappuccino machines at Starbucks. The inequity in this
field is larger than, say, medicine, since we rarely see medical doctors serving
hamburgers. I can thus infer that I can largely gauge the performance
of the latter profession's entire population from what sample is visible to
me. Likewise with plumbers, taxi drivers, prostitutes, and those in professions
devoid of superstar effects. Let us go beyond the discussion on
Extremistan and Mediocristan in Chapter 3. The consequence of the
superstar dynamic is that what we call "literary heritage" or "literary treasures"
is a minute proportion of what has been produced cumulatively.
This is the first point. How it invalidates the identification of talent can
be derived immediately from it: say you attribute the success of the
nineteenth-century novelist Honoré de Balzac to his superior "realism,"
"insights," "sensitivity," "treatment of characters," "ability to keep the
reader riveted," and so on. These may be deemed "superior" qualities that
lead to superior performance //, and only if, those who lack what we call
talent also lack these qualities. But what if there are dozens of comparable
literary masterpieces that happened to perish? And, following my logic, if
there are indeed many perished manuscripts with similar attributes, then,
I regret to say, your idol Balzac was just the beneficiary of disproportionate
luck compared to his peers. Furthermore, you may be committing an
injustice to others by favoring him.
My point, I will repeat, is not that Balzac is untalented, but that he is
less uniquely talented than we think. Just consider the thousands of writers
now completely vanished from consciousness: their record does not
1 0 4 UMBERTO E C O ' S A N T I U B R A RY
enter into analyses. We do not see the tons of rejected manuscripts because
these writers have never been published. The New Yorker alone rejects
close to a hundred manuscripts a day, so imagine the number of geniuses
that we will never hear about. In a country like France, where more people
write books while, sadly, fewer people read them, respectable literary
publishers accept one in ten thousand manuscripts they receive from firsttime
authors. Consider the number of actors who have never passed an
audition but would have done very well had they had that lucky break in
life.
The next time you visit a Frenchman of comfortable means, you will
likely spot the stern books from the collection Bibliothèque de la Pléiade,
which their owner will never, almost never, read, mostly on account of
their uncomfortable size and weight. Membership in the Pléiade means
membership in the literary canon. The tomes are expensive; they have the
distinctive smell of ultrathin India paper, compressing the equivalent of fifteen
hundred pages into the size of a drugstore paperback. They are supposed
to help you maximize the number of masterpieces per Parisian
square foot. The publisher Gallimard has been extremely selective in electing
writers into the Pléiade collection-only a few authors, such as the aesthete
and adventurer André Malraux, have made it in while still alive.
Dickens, Dostoyevsky, Hugo, and Stendhal are in, along with Mallarmé,
Sartre, Camus, and . . . Balzac. Yet if you follow Balzac's own ideas, which
I will examine next, you would accept that there is no ultimate justification
for such an official corpus.
Balzac outlined the entire business of silent evidence in his novel Lost
Illusions. Lucien de Rubempré (alias of Lucien Chardon), the penurious
provincial genius, "goes up" to Paris to start a literary career. We are told
that he is talented—actually he is told that he is talented by the semiaristocratic
set in Angoulême. But it is difficult to figure out whether this is
due to his good looks or to the literary quality of his works—or even
whether literary quality is visible, or, as Balzac seems to wonder, if it has
much to do with anything. Success is presented cynically, as the product of
wile and promotion or the lucky surge of interest for reasons completely
external to the works themselves. Lucien discovers the existence of the immense
cemetery inhabited by what Balzac calls "nightingales."
Lucien was told that this designation "nightingale" was given by
bookstores to those works residing on the shelves in the solitary depths
of their shops.
GIACOMO CASANOVA'S UNFAILING LUCK 1 0 5
Balzac presents to us the sorry state of contemporary literature when
Lucien's manuscript is rejected by a publisher who has never read it; later
on, when Lucien's reputation has developed, the very same manuscript is
accepted by another publisher who did not read it either! The work itself
was a secondary consideration.
In another example of silent evidence, the book's characters keep bemoaning
that things are no longer as they were before, implying that literary
fairness prevailed in more ancient times—as if there was no cemetery
before. They fail to take into account the nightingales among the ancients'
work! Notice that close to two centuries ago people had an idealized opinion
of their own past, just as we have an idealized opinion of today's past.
I mentioned earlier that to understand successes and analyze what
caused them, we need to study the traits present in failures. It is to a more
general version of this point that I turn next.
How to Become a Millionaire in Ten Steps
Numerous studies of millionaires aimed at figuring out the skills required
for hotshotness follow the following methodology. They take a population
of hotshots, those with big titles and big jobs, and study their attributes.
They look at what those big guns have in common: courage, risk
taking, optimism, and so on, and infer that these traits, most notably risk
taking, help you to become successful. You would also probably get the
same impression if you read CEOs' ghostwritten autobiographies or attended
their presentations to fawning MBA students.
Now take a look at the cemetery. It is quite difficult to do so because
people who fail do not seem to write memoirs, and, if they did, those business
publishers I know would not even consider giving them the courtesy
of a returned phone call (as to returned e-mail, fuhgedit). Readers would
not pay $26.95 for a story of failure, even if you convinced them that
it had more useful tricks than a story of success.* The entire notion of
biography is grounded in the arbitrary ascription of a causal relation between
specified traits and subsequent events. Now consider the cemetery.
The graveyard of failed persons will be full of people who shared the
following traits: courage, risk taking, optimism, et cetera. Just like the
population of millionaires. There may be some differences in skills, but
* The best noncharlatanic finance book I know is called What I Learned Losing a Million
Dollars, by D. Paul and B. Moynihan. The authors had to self-publish the book.
1 0 6 UMBERTO E C O ' S A N T I U B R A RY
* Doctors are rightfully and vigorously skeptical of anecdotal results, and require
that studies of drug efficacy probe into the cemetery of silent evidence. However,
the same doctors fall for the bias elsewhere! Where? In their personal lives, or in
their investment activities. At the cost of being repetitive, I have to once again state
my amazement at the aspect of human nature that allows us to mix the most rigorous
skepticism and the most acute gullibility.
what truly separates the two is for the most part a single factor: luck. Plain
luck.
You do not need a lot of empiricism to figure this out: a simple thought
experiment suffices. The fund-management industry claims that some people
are extremely skilled, since year after year they have outperformed the
market. They will identify these "geniuses" and convince you of their abilities.
My approach has been to manufacture cohorts of purely random
investors and, by simple computer simulation, show how it would be impossible
to not have these geniuses produced just by luck. Every year you
fire the losers, leaving only the winners, and thus end up with long-term
steady winners. Since you do not observe the cemetery of failed investors,
you will think that it is a good business, and that some operators are considerably
better than others. Of course an explanation will be readily provided
for the success of the lucky survivors: "He eats tofu," "She works
late; just the other day I called her office at eight P . M . . . . " Or of course,
"She is naturally lazy. People with that type of laziness can see things
clearly." By the mechanism of retrospective determinism we will find the
"cause"—actually, we need to see the cause. I call these simulations of hypothetical
cohorts, often done by computer, an engine of computational
epistemology. Your thought experiments can be run on a computer. You
just simulate an alternative world, plain random, and verify that it looks
similar to the one in which we live. Not getting lucky billionaires in these
experiments would be the exception.*
Recall the distinction between Mediocristan and Extremistan in Chapter
3.1 said that taking a "scalable" profession is not a good idea, simply
because there are far too few winners in these professions. Well, these professions
produce a large cemetery: the pool of starving actors is larger than
the one of starving accountants, even if you assume that, on average, they
earn the same income.
GIACOMO CASANOVA'S UNFAILING LUCK 1 07
A HEALTH CLUB FOR RATS
The second, and more vicious, variety of the problem of silent evidence is
as follows. When I was in my early twenties and still read the newspaper,
and thought that steadily reading the newspapers was something useful to
me, I came across an article discussing the mounting threat of the Russian
Mafia in the United States and its displacement of the traditional Louie
and Tony in some neighborhoods of Brooklyn. The article explained their
toughness and brutality as a result of their being hardened by their Gulag
experiences. The Gulag was a network of labor camps in Siberia where
criminals and dissidents were routinely deported. Sending people to Siberia
was one of the purification methods initially used by the czarist regimes
and later continued and perfected by the Soviets. Many deportees did not
survive these labor camps.
Hardened by the Gulag? The sentence jumped out at me as both profoundly
flawed (and a reasonable inference). It took me a while to figure
out the nonsense in it since it was protected by cosmetic wrapping; the following
thought experiment will give the intuition. Assume that you're able
to find a large, assorted population of rats: fat, thin, sickly, strong, wellproportioned,
