G I A C O M O C A S A N O V A ' S U N F A I L I N G L U C K 1 13
Giacomo Casanova a.k.a. Jacques,
Chevalier de Seingalt. Some readers
might be surprised that the legendary
seducer did not look quite
like James Bond.
seems to have had a Teflon-style trait that would cause envy on the part
of the most resilient of Mafia dons: misfortune did not stick to him.
Casanova, while known for his seductions, viewed himself as some sort of
a scholar. He aimed at literary fame with his twelve-volume History of My
Life, written in bad (charmingly bad) French. In addition to the extremely
useful lessons on how to become a seducer, the History provides an engrossing
account of a succession of reversals of fortune. Casanova felt that
every time he got into difficulties, his lucky star, his étoile, would pull him
out of trouble. After things got bad for him, they somehow recovered by
some invisible hand, and he was led to believe that it was his intrinsic
property to recover from hardships by running every time into a new opportunity.
He would somehow meet someone in extremis who offered him
a financial transaction, a new patron that he had not betrayed in the past,
or someone generous enough and with a weak enough memory to forget
past betrayals. Could Casanova have been selected by destiny to bounce
back from all hardships?
Not necessarily. Consider the following: of all the colorful adventurers
who have lived on our planet, many were occasionally crushed, and a few
did bounce back repeatedly. It is those who survive who will tend to be1
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lieve that they are indestructible; they will have a long and interesting
enough experience to write books about it. Until, of course . . .
Actually, adventurers who feel singled out by destiny abound, simply
because there are plenty of adventurers, and we do not hear the stories of
those down on their luck. As I started writing this chapter, I recalled a conversation
with a woman about her flamboyant fiancé, the son of a civil
servant, who managed through a few financial transactions to catapult
himself into the life of a character in a novel, with handmade shoes,
Cuban cigars, collectible cars, and so on. The French have a word for this,
flambeur, which means a mixture of extravagant bon vivant, wild speculator,
and risk taker, all the while bearing considerable personal charm; a
word that does not seem to be available in Anglo-Saxon cultures. The fiancé
was spending his money very quickly, and as we were having the conversation
about his fate (she was going to marry him, after all), she
explained to me that he was undergoing slightly difficult times, but that
there was no need to worry since he always came back with a vengeance.
That was a few years ago. Out of curiosity, I have just tracked him down
(trying to do so tactfully): he has not recovered (yet) from his latest blow
of fortune. He also dropped out of the scene and is no longer to be found
among other flambeurs.
How does this relate to the dynamics of history? Consider what is generally
called the resilience of New York City. For seemingly transcendental
reasons, every time it gets close to the brink of disaster, the city
manages to pull back and recover. Some people truly believe that this is an
internal property of New York City. The following quote is from a New
York Times article:
Which is why New York still needs Samuel M. E. An economist who
turns 77 today, Mr. E. studied New York City through half a century
of booms and busts. . . . "We have a record of going through tough
times and coming back stronger than ever," he said.
Now run the idea in reverse: think of cities as little Giacomo Casanovas,
or as rats in my laboratory. As we put the thousands of rats
through a very dangerous process, let's put a collection of cities in a simulator
of history: Rome, Athens, Carthage, Byzantium, Tyre, Catal Hyuk
(located in modern-day Turkey, it is one of the first known human settlements),
Jericho, Peoria, and, of course, New York City. Some cities will
survive the harsh conditions of the simulator. As to others, we know that
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history might not be too kind. I am sure that Carthage, Tyre, and Jericho
had their local, no less eloquent, Samuel M. E., saying, "Our enemies have
tried to destroy us many times; but we always came back more resilient
than before. We are now invincible."
This bias causes the survivor to be an unqualified witness of the
process. Unsettling? The fact that you survived is a condition that may
weaken your interpretation of the properties of the survival, including the
shallow notion of "cause."
You can do a lot with the above statement. Replace the retired economist
Samuel E. with a CEO discussing his corporation's ability to recover
from past problems. How about the taunted "resilience of the financial
system"? How about a general who has had a good run?
The reader can now see why I use Casanova's unfailing luck as a generalized
framework for the analysis of history, all histories. I generate artificial
histories featuring, say, millions of Giacomo Casanovas, and observe
the difference between the attributes of the successful Casanovas (because
you generate them, you know their exact properties) and those an observer
of the result would obtain. From that perspective, it is not a good
idea to be a Casanova.
"/ Am a Risk Taker"
Consider the restaurant business in a competitive place like New York
City. One has indeed to be foolish to open one, owing to the enormous
risks involved and the harrying quantity of work to get anywhere in the
business, not counting the finicky fashion-minded clients. The cemetery of
failed restaurants is very silent: walk around Midtown Manhattan and
you will see these warm patron-filled restaurants with limos waiting outside
for the diners to come out with their second, trophy, spouses. The
owner is overworked but happy to have all these important people patronize
his eatery. Does this mean that it makes sense to open a restaurant
in such a competitive neighborhood? Certainly not, yet people do it out of
the foolish risk-taking trait that pushes us to jump into such adventures
blinded by the outcome.
Clearly there is an element of the surviving Casanovas in us, that of the
risk-taking genes, which encourages us to take blind risks, unaware of
the variability in the possible outcomes. We inherited the taste for uncalculated
risk taking. Should we encourage such behavior?
In fact, economic growth comes from such risk taking. But some fool
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might argue the following: if someone followed reasoning such as mine,
we would not have had the spectacular growth we experienced in the past.
This is exactly like someone playing Russian roulette and finding it a good
idea because he survived and pocketed the money.
We are often told that we humans have an optimistic bent, and that it
is supposed to be good for us. This argument appears to justify general
risk taking as a positive enterprise, and one that is glorified in the common
culture. Hey, look, our ancestors took the challenges—while you, NNT,
are encouraging us to do nothing (I am not).
We have enough evidence to confirm that, indeed, we humans are an
extremely lucky species, and that we got the genes of the risk takers. The
foolish risk takers, that is. In fact, the Casanovas who survived.
Once again, I am not dismissing the idea of risk taking, having been involved
in it myself. I am only critical of the encouragement of uninformed
risk taking. The uberpsychologist Danny Kahneman has given us evidence
that we generally take risks not out of bravado but out of ignorance and
blindness to probability! The next few chapters will show in more depth
how we tend to dismiss outliers and adverse outcomes when projecting the
future. But I insist on the following: that we got here by accident does not
mean that we should continue to take the same risks. We are mature
enough a race to realize this point, enjoy our blessings, and try to preserve,
by becoming more conservative, what we got by luck. We have been playing
Russian roulette; now let's stop and get a real job.
I have two further points to make on this subject. First, justification of
overoptimism on grounds that "it brought us here" arises from a far more
serious mistake about human nature: the belief that we are built to understand
nature and our own nature and that our decisions are, and have
been, the result of our own choices. I beg to disagree. So many instincts
drive us.
Second, a little more worrisome than the first point: evolutionary fitness
is something that is continuously touted and aggrandized by the
crowd who takes it as gospel. The more unfamiliar someone is with the
wild Black Swan-generating randomness, the more he or she believes in
the optimal working of evolution. Silent evidence is not present in their
theories. Evolution is a series of flukes, some good, many bad. You only
see the good. But, in the short term, it is not obvious which traits are really
good for you, particularly if you are in the Black Swan-generating enGIACOMO
CASANOVA'S UNFAILING LUCK 1 1 7
vironment of Extremistan. This is like looking at rich gamblers coming
out of the casino and claiming that a taste for gambling is good for the
species because gambling makes you rich! Risk taking made many species
head for extinction!
This idea that we are here, that this is the best of all possible worlds,
and that evolution did a great job seems rather bogus in the light of the
silent-evidence effect. The fools, the Casanovas, and the blind risk takers
are often the ones who win in the short term. Worse, in a Black Swan environment,
where one single but rare event can come shake up a species
after a very long run of "fitness," the foolish risk takers can also win in the
long term! I will revisit this idea in Part Three, where I show how Extremistan
worsens the silent-evidence effect.
But there is another manifestation that merits a mention.
I AM A BLACK SWAN: THE ANTHROPIC BIAS
I want to stay closer to earth and avoid bringing higher-up metaphysical
or cosmological arguments into this discussion—there are so many significant
dangers to worry about down here on planet earth and it would be a
good idea to postpone the metaphysical philosophizing for later. But it
would be useful to take a peek (not more) at what is called the anthropic
cosmological argument, as it points out the gravity of our misunderstanding
of historical stability.
A recent wave of philosophers and physicists (and people combining
the two categories) has been examining the self-sampling assumption,
which is a generalization of the principle of the Casanova bias to our own
existence.
Consider our own fates. Some people reason that the odds of any of us
being in existence are so low that our being here cannot be attributed to
an accident of fate. Think of the odds of the parameters being exactly
where they need to be to induce our existence (any deviation from the optimal
calibration would have made our world explode, collapse, or simply
not come into existence). It is often said that the world seems to have been
built to the specifications that would make our existence possible. According
to such an argument, it could not come from luck.
However, our presence in the sample completely vitiates the computation
of the odds. Again, the story of Casanova can make the point quite
simple—much simpler than in its usual formulation. Think again of all the
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possible worlds as little Casanovas following their own fates. The one
who is still kicking (by accident) will feel that, given that he cannot be so
lucky, there had to be some transcendental force guiding him and supervising
his destiny: "Hey, otherwise the odds would be too low to get here
just by luck." For someone who observes all adventurers, the odds of finding
a Casanova are not low at all: there so many adventurers, and someone
is bound to win the lottery ticket.
The problem here with the universe and the human race is that we
are the surviving Casanovas. When you start with many adventurous
Casanovas, there is bound to be a survivor, and guess what: if you are here
talking about it, you are likely to be that particular one (notice the "condition":
you survived to talk about it). So we can no longer naively compute
odds without considering that the condition that we are in existence
imposes restrictions on the process that led us here.
Assume that history delivers either "bleak" (i.e., unfavorable) or
"rosy" (i.e., favorable) scenarios. The bleak scenarios lead to extinction.
Clearly, if I am now writing these lines, it is certainly because history delivered
a "rosy" scenario, one that allowed me to be here, a historical
route in which my forebears avoided massacre by the many invaders who
roamed the Levant. Add to that beneficial scenarios free of meteorite collisions,
nuclear war, and other large-scale terminal epidemics. But I do not
have to look at humanity as a whole. Whenever I probe into my own biography
I am alarmed at how tenuous my life has been so far. Once when
I returned to Lebanon during the war, at the age of eighteen, I felt episodes
of extraordinary fatigue and cold chills in spite of the summer heat. It was
typhoid fever. Had it not been for the discovery of antibiotics, only a few
decades earlier, I would not be here today. I was also later "cured" of another
severe disease that would have left me for dead, thanks to a treatment
that depends on another recent medical technology. As a human
being alive here in the age of the Internet, capable of writing and reaching
an audience, I have also benefited from society's luck and the remarkable
absence of recent large-scale war. In addition, I am the result of the rise of
the human race, itself an accidental event.
