My being here is a consequential low-probability occurrence, and I
tend to forget it.
Let us return to the touted recipes for becoming a millionaire in ten
steps. A successful person will try to convince you that his achievements
could not possibly be accidental, just as a gambler who wins at roulette
GIACOMO CASANOVA'S UNFAILING LUCK 1 1 9
seven times in a row will explain to you that the odds against such a streak
are one in several million, so you either have to believe some transcendental
intervention is in play or accept his skills and insight in picking the
winning numbers. But if you take into account the quantity of gamblers
out there, and the number of gambling sessions (several million episodes
in total), then it becomes obvious that such strokes of luck are bound to
happen. And if you are talking about them, they have happened to you.
The reference point argument is as follows: do not compute odds from
the vantage point of the winning gambler (or the lucky Casanova, or the
endlessly bouncing back New York City, or the invincible Carthage), but
from all those who started in the cohort. Consider once again the example
of the gambler. If you look at the population of beginning gamblers taken
as a whole, you can be close to certain that one of them (but you do not
know in advance which one) will show stellar results just by luck. So,
from the reference point of the beginning cohort, this is not a big deal.
But from the reference point of the winner (and, who does not, and this is
key, take the losers into account), a long string of wins will appear to be
too extraordinary an occurrence to be explained by luck. Note that a "history"
is just a series of numbers through time. The numbers can represent
degrees of wealth, fitness, weight, anything.
The Cosmetic Because
This in itself greatly weakens the notion of "because" that is often propounded
by scientists, and almost always misused by historians. We have
to accept the fuzziness of the familiar "because" no matter how queasy it
makes us feel (and it does makes us queasy to remove the analgesic illusion
of causality). I repeat that we are explanation-seeking animals who tend to
think that everything has an identifiable cause and grab the most apparent
one as the explanation. Yet there may not be a visible because; to the contrary,
frequently there is nothing, not even a spectrum of possible explanations.
But silent evidence masks this fact. Whenever our survival is in play,
the very notion of because is severely weakened. The condition of survival
drowns all possible explanations. The Aristotelian "because" is not there
to account for a solid link between two items, but rather, as we saw in
Chapter 6, to cater to our hidden weakness for imparting explanations.
Apply this reasoning to the following question: Why didn't the bubonic
plague kill more people? People will supply quantities of cosmetic expia1
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nations involving theories about the intensity of the plague and "scientific
models" of epidemics. Now, try the weakened causality argument that I
have just emphasized in this chapter: had the bubonic plague killed more
people, the observers (us) would not be here to observe. So it may not necessarily
be the property of diseases to spare us humans. Whenever your
survival is in play, don't immediately look for causes and effects. The
main identifiable reason for our survival of such diseases might simply be
inaccessible to us: we are here since, Casanova-style, the "rosy" scenario
played out, and if it seems too hard to understand it is because we are too
brainwashed by notions of causality and we think that it is smarter to say
because than to accept randomness.
My biggest problem with the educational system lies precisely in that it
forces students to squeeze explanations out of subject matters and shames
them for withholding judgment, for uttering the "I don't know." Why did
the Cold War end? Why did the Persians lose the battle of Salamis? Why
did Hannibal get his behind kicked? Why did Casanova bounce back from
hardship? In each of these examples, we are taking a condition, survival,
and looking for the explanations, instead of flipping the argument on its
head and stating that conditional on such survival, one cannot read that
much into the process, and should learn instead to invoke some measure
of randomness (randomness is what we don't know; to invoke randomness
is to plead ignorance). It is not just your college professor who gives
you bad habits. I showed in Chapter 6 how newspapers need to stuff their
texts with causal links to make you enjoy the narratives. But have the integrity
to deliver your "because" very sparingly; try to limit it to situations
where the "because" is derived from experiments, not backward-looking
history.
Note here that I am not saying causes do not exist; do not use this argument
to avoid trying to learn from history. All I am saying is that it is
not so simple; be suspicious of the "because" and handle it with care—
particularly in situations where you suspect silent evidence.
We have seen several varieties of the silent evidence that cause deformations
in our perception of empirical reality, making it appear more
explainable (and more stable) than it actually is. In addition to the confirmation
error and the narrative fallacy, the manifestations of silent evidence
further distort the role and importance of Black Swans. In fact, they
cause a gross overestimation at times (say, with literary success), and unGIACOMO
CASANOVA'S UNFAILING LUCK 1 21
derestimation at others (the stability of history; the stability of our human
species).
I said earlier that our perceptual system may not react to what does not
lie in front of our eyes, or what does not arouse our emotional attention.
We are made to be superficial, to heed what we see and not heed what
does not vividly come to mind. We wage a double war against silent evidence.
The unconscious part of our inferential mechanism (and there is
one) will ignore the cemetery, even if we are intellectually aware of the
need to take it into account. Out of sight, out of mind: we harbor a natural,
even physical, scorn of the abstract.
This will be further illustrated in the next chapter.
Chapter Nine
THE LUDIC FALLACY,
OR THE UNCERTAINTY OF THE NERD
Lunch at Lake Como (west)—The military as philosophers—Plato's randomness
FAT TONY
"Fat Tony" is one of Nero's friends who irritates Yevgenia Krasnova beyond
measure. We should perhaps more thoughtfully style him "Horizontally-
challenged Tony," since he is not as objectively overweight as his
nickname indicates; it is just that his body shape makes whatever he wears
seem ill-fitted. He wears only tailored suits, many of them cut for him in
Rome, but they look as if he bought them from a Web catalog. He has
thick hands, hairy fingers, wears a gold wrist chain, and reeks of licorice
candies that he devours in industrial quantities as a substitute for an old
smoking habit. He doesn't usually mind people calling him Fat Tony, but
he much prefers to be called just Tony. Nero calls him, more politely,
"Brooklyn Tony," because of his accent and his Brooklyn way of thinking,
though Tony is one of the prosperous Brooklyn people who moved to
New Jersey twenty years ago.
Tony is a successful nonnerd with a happy disposition. He leads a gregarious
existence. His sole visible problem seems to be his weight and the
corresponding nagging by his family, remote cousins, and friends, who
THE LUDIC FALLACY, OR T H E U N C E R T A I N T Y OF T H E N E R D 1 23
keep warning him about that premature heart attack. Nothing seems to
work; Tony often goes to a fat farm in Arizona to not eat, lose a few
pounds, then gain almost all of them back in his first-class seat on the
flight back. It is remarkable how his self-control and personal discipline,
otherwise admirable, fail to apply to his waistline.
He started as a clerk in the back office of a New York bank in the early
1980s, in the letter-of-credit department. He pushed papers and did some
grunt work. Later he grew into giving small business loans and figured out
the game of how you can get financing from the monster banks, how their
bureaucracies operate, and what they like to see on paper. All the while an
employee, he started acquiring property in bankruptcy proceedings, buying
it from financial institutions. His big insight is that bank employees
who sell you a house that's not theirs just don't care as much as the owners;
Tony knew very rapidly how to talk to them and maneuver. Later, he
also learned to buy and sell gas stations with money borrowed from small
neighborhood bankers.
Tony has this remarkable habit of trying to make a buck effortlessly,
just for entertainment, without straining, without office work, without
meeting, just by melding his deals into his private life. Tony's motto is
"Finding who the sucker is." Obviously, they are often the banks: "The
clerks don't care about nothing." Finding these suckers is second nature to
him. If you took walks around the block with Tony you would feel considerably
more informed about the texture of the world just "tawking" to
him.
Tony is remarkably gifted at getting unlisted phone numbers, first-class
seats on airlines for no additional money, or your car in a garage that is officially
full, either through connections or his forceful charm.
Non-Brooklyn John
I found the perfect non-Brooklyn in someone I will call Dr. John. He is a
former engineer currently working as an actuary for an insurance company.
He is thin, wiry, and wears glasses and a dark suit. He lives in New
Jersey not far from Fat Tony but certainly they rarely run into each other.
Tony never takes the train, and, actually, never commutes (he drives a
Cadillac, and sometimes his wife's Italian convertible, and jokes that he is
more visible than the rest of the car). Dr. John is a master of the schedule;
he is as predictable as a clock. He quietly and efficiently reads the newspaper
on the train to Manhattan, then neatly folds it for the lunchtime con1
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tinuation. While Tony makes restaurant owners rich (they beam when
they see him coming and exchange noisy hugs with him), John meticulously
packs his sandwich every morning, fruit salad in a plastic container.
As for his clothing, he also wears a suit that looks like it came from a Web
catalog, except that it is quite likely that it actually did.
Dr. John is a painstaking, reasoned, and gentle fellow. He takes his
work seriously, so seriously that, unlike Tony, you can see a line in the
sand between his working time and his leisure activities. He has a PhD in
electrical engineering from the University of Texas at Austin. Since he
knows both computers and statistics, he was hired by an insurance company
to do computer simulations; he enjoys the business. Much of what he
does consists of running computer programs for "risk management."
I know that it is rare for Fat Tony and Dr. John to breathe the same air,
let alone find themselves at the same bar, so consider this a pure thought
exercise. I will ask each of them a question and compare their answers.
NNT (that is, me): Assume that a coin is fair, i.e., has an equal probability
of coming up heads or tails when flipped. I flip it ninety-nine times and get
heads each time. What are the odds of my getting tails on my next throw?
Dr. John: Trivial question. One half, of course, since you are assuming
50 percent odds for each and independence between draws.
NNT: What do you say, Tony?
Fat Tony: I'd say no more than 1 percent, of course.
NNT: Why so? I gave you the initial assumption of a fair coin, meaning
that it was 50 percent either way.
Fat Tony: You are either full of crap or a pure sucker to buy that
"50 pehcent" business. The coin gotta be loaded. It can't be a fair game.
(Translation: It is far more likely that your assumptions about the fairness
are wrong than the coin delivering ninety-nine heads in ninety-nine
throws.)
NNT: But Dr. John said 50 percent.
Fat Tony (whispering in my ear): I know these guys with the nerd examples
from the bank days. They think way too slow. And they are too
commoditized. You can take them for a ride.
Now, of the two of them, which would you favor for the position of
mayor of New York City (or Ulan Bator, Mongolia)? Dr. John thinks entirely
within the box, the box that was given to him; Fat Tony, almost entirely
outside the box.
THE LUDIC FALLACY, OR T H E U N C E R T A I N T Y OF T H E N E R D 1 2 5
To set the terminology straight, what I call "a nerd" here doesn't have
to look sloppy, unaesthetic, and sallow, and wear glasses and a portable
computer on his belt as if it were an ostensible weapon. A nerd is simply
someone who thinks exceedingly inside the box.
Have you ever wondered why so many of these straight-A students end
up going nowhere in life while someone who lagged behind is now getting
the shekels, buying the diamonds, and getting his phone calls returned? Or
even getting the Nobel Prize in a real discipline (say, medicine)? Some of
this may have something to do with luck in outcomes, but there is this
sterile and obscurantist quality that is often associated with classroom
knowledge that may get in the way of understanding what's going on in
real life. In an IQ test, as well as in any academic setting (including sports),
Dr. John would vastly outperform Fat Tony. But Fat Tony would outperform
Dr. John in any other possible ecological, real-life situation. In fact,
Tony, in spite of his lack of culture, has an enormous curiosity about the
texture of reality, and his own erudition—to me, he is more scientific in
the literal, though not in the social, sense than Dr. John.
We will get deep, very deep, into the difference between the answers of
