It took five years for Yevgenia to graduate from the "egomaniac without
anything to justify it, stubborn and difficult to deal with" category to
"persevering, resolute, painstaking, and fiercely independent." For her
book slowly caught fire, becoming one of the great and strange successes
in literary history, selling millions of copies and drawing so-called critical
acclaim. The start-up house has since become a big corporation, with a
(polite) receptionist to greet visitors as they enter the main office. Her
book has been translated into forty languages (even French). You see her
picture everywhere. She is said to be a pioneer of something called the
Y E V G E N I A ' S BLACK SWAN 25
Consilient School. Publishers now have a theory that "truck drivers who
read books do not read books written for truck drivers" and hold that
"readers despise writers who pander to them." A scientific paper, it is now
understood, can hide trivialities or irrelevance with equations and jargon;
consilient prose, by exposing an idea in raw form, allows it to be judged
by the public.
Today, Yevgenia has stopped marrying philosophers (they argue too
much), and she hides from the press. In classrooms, literary scholars discuss
the many clues indicating the inevitability of the new style. The distinction
between fiction and nonfiction is considered too archaic to
withstand the challenges of modern society. It was so evident that we
needed to remedy the fragmentation between art and science. After the
fact, her talent was so obvious.
Many of the editors she later met blamed her for not coming to them,
convinced that they would have immediately seen the merit in her work.
In a few years, a literary scholar will write the essay "From Kundera to
Krasnova," showing how the seeds of her work can be found in Kundera—
a precursor who mixed essay and metacommentary (Yevgenia never read
Kundera, but did see the movie version of one of his books—there was no
commentary in the movie). A prominent scholar will show how the influence
of Gregory Bateson, who injected autobiographical scenes into his
scholarly research papers, is visible on every page (Yevgenia has never
heard of Bateson).
Yevgenia's book is a Black Swan.
Chapter Three
THE SPECULATOR AND THE PROSTITUTE
On the critical difference between speculators and prostitutes—Fairness, unfairness,
and Black Swans—Theory of knowledge and professional incomes-
How Extremistan is not the best place to visit, except, perhaps, if you are a
winner
Yevgenia's rise from the second basement to superstar is possible in only
one environment, which I call Extremistan.* I will soon introduce the central
distinction between the Black Swan-generating province of Extremistan
and the tame, quiet, and uneventful province of Mediocristan.
THE BEST (WORST) ADVICE
When I play back in my mind all the "advice" people have given me, I see
that only a couple of ideas have stuck with me for life. The rest has been
mere words, and I am glad that I did not heed most of it. Most consisted
of recommendations such as "be measured and reasonable in your statements,"
contradicting the Black Swan idea, since empirical reality is not
"measured," and its own version of "reasonableness" does not corre-
* To those readers who Googled Yevgenia Krasnova, I am sorry to say that she is (officially)
a fictional character.
THE S P E C U L A T O R AND T H E P R O S T I T U T E 27
spond to the conventional middlebrow definition. To be genuinely empirical
is to reflect reality as faithfully as possible; to be honorable implies not
fearing the appearance and consequences of being outlandish. The next
time someone pesters you with unneeded advice, gently remind him of the
fate of the monk whom Ivan the Terrible put to death for delivering uninvited
(and moralizing) advice. It works as a short-term cure.
The most important piece of advice was, in retrospect, bad, but it was
also, paradoxically, the most consequential, as it pushed me deeper into
the dynamics of the Black Swan. It came when I was twenty-two, one February
afternoon, in the corridor of a building at 3400 Walnut Street in
Philadelphia, where I lived. A second-year Wharton student told me to get
a profession that is "scalable," that is, one in which you are not paid by
the hour and thus subject to the limitations of the amount of your labor.
It was a very simple way to discriminate among professions and, from
that, to generalize a separation between types of uncertainty—and it led
me to the major philosophical problem, the problem of induction, which
is the technical name for the Black Swan. It allowed me to turn the Black
Swan from a logical impasse into an easy-to-implement solution, and, as
we will see in the next chapters, to ground it in the texture of empirical
reality.
How did career advice lead to such ideas about the nature of uncertainty?
Some professions, such as dentists, consultants, or massage professionals,
cannot be scaled: there is a cap on the number of patients or
clients you can see in a given period of time. If you are a prostitute, you
work by the hour and are (generally) paid by the hour. Furthermore, your
presence is (I assume) necessary for the service you provide. If you open a
fancy restaurant, you will at best steadily fill up the room (unless you franchise
it). In these professions, no matter how highly paid, your income is
subject to gravity. Your revenue depends on your continuous efforts more
than on the quality of your decisions. Moreover, this kind of work is
largely predictable: it will vary, but not to the point of making the income
of a single day more significant than that of the rest of your life. In other
words, it will not be Black Swan driven. Yevgenia Nikolayevna would not
have been able to cross the chasm between underdog and supreme hero
overnight had she been a tax accountant or a hernia specialist (but she
would not have been an underdog either).
Other professions allow you to add zeroes to your output (and your income),
if you do well, at little or no extra effort. Now being lazy, considering
laziness as an asset, and eager to free up the maximum amount of
28 UMBERTO E C O ' S A N T I L I B R A RY
time in my day to meditate and read, I immediately (but mistakenly) drew
a conclusion. I separated the "idea" person, who sells an intellectual product
in the form of a transaction or a piece of work, from the "labor" person,
who sells you his work.
If you are an idea person, you do not have to work hard, only think
intensely. You do the same work whether you produce a hundred units or
a thousand. In quant trading, the same amount of work is involved in buying
a hundred shares as in buying a hundred thousand, or even a million.
It is the same phone call, the same computation, the same legal document,
the same expenditure of brain cells, the same effort in verifying that the
transaction is right. Furthermore, you can work from your bathtub or
from a bar in Rome. You can use leverage as a replacement for work!
Well, okay, I was a little wrong about trading: one cannot work from a
bathtub, but, when done right, the job allows considerable free time.
The same property applies to recording artists or movie actors: you let
the sound engineers and projectionists do the work; there is no need to
show up at every performance in order to perform. Similarly, a writer expends
the same effort to attract one single reader as she would to capture
several hundred million. J . K. Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter
books, does not have to write each book again every time someone wants
to read it. But this is not so for a baker: he needs to bake every single piece
of bread in order to satisfy each additional customer.
So the distinction between writer and baker, speculator and doctor,
fraudster and prostitute, is a helpful way to look at the world of activities.
It separates those professions in which one can add zeroes of income with
no greater labor from those in which one needs to add labor and time
(both of which are in limited supply)—in other words, those subjected to
gravity.
BEWARE THE SCALABLE
But why was the advice from my fellow student bad?
If the advice was helpful, and it was, in creating a classification for
ranking uncertainty and knowledge, it was a mistake as far as choices of
profession went. It might have paid off for me, but only because I was
lucky and happened to be "in the right place at the right time," as the saying
goes. If I myself had to give advice, I would recommend someone pick
a profession that is not scalable! A scalable profession is good only if you
are successful; they are more competitive, produce monstrous inequalities,
THE S P E C U L A T O R AND THE P R O S T I T U T E 29
and are far more random, with huge disparities between efforts and
rewards—a few can take a large share of the pie, leaving others out entirely
at no fault of their own.
One category of profession is driven by the mediocre, the average, and
the middle-of-the-road. In it, the mediocre is collectively consequential.
The other has either giants or dwarves—more precisely, a very small number
of giants and a huge number of dwarves.
Let us see what is behind the formation of unexpected giants—the
Black Swan formation.
The Advent of Scalability
Consider the fate of Giaccomo, an opera singer at the end of the nineteenth
century, before sound recording was invented. Say he performs in a
small and remote town in central Italy. He is shielded from those big egos
at La Scala in Milan and other major opera houses. He feels safe as his
vocal cords will always be in demand somewhere in the district. There is
no way for him to export his singing, and there is no way for the big guns
to export theirs and threaten his local franchise. It is not yet possible for
him to store his work, so his presence is needed at every performance, just
as a barber is (still) needed today for every haircut. So the total pie is unevenly
split, but only mildly so, much like your calorie consumption. It is
cut in a few pieces and everyone has a share; the big guns have larger audiences
and get more invitations than the small guy, but this is not too
worrisome. Inequalities exist, but let us call them mild. There is no scalability
yet, no way to double the largest in-person audience without having
to sing twice.
Now consider the effect of the first music recording, an invention that
introduced a great deal of injustice. Our ability to reproduce and repeat
performances allows me to listen on my laptop to hours of background
music of the pianist Vladimir Horowitz (now extremely dead) performing
Rachmaninoff's Preludes, instead of to the local Russian émigré musician
(still living), who is now reduced to giving piano lessons to generally untalented
children for close to minimum wage. Horowitz, though dead, is
putting the poor man out of business. I would rather listen to Vladimir
Horowitz or Arthur Rubinstein for $10.99 a CD than pay $9.99 for one
by some unknown (but very talented) graduate of the Juilliard School or
the Prague Conservatory. If you ask me why I select Horowitz, I will answer
that it is because of the order, rhythm, or passion, when in fact there
30 UMBERTO E C O ' S A N T I U B R A RY
are probably a legion of people I have never heard about, and will never
hear about—those who did not make it to the stage, but who might play
just as well.
Some people naively believe that the process of unfairness started with
the gramophone, according to the logic that I just presented. I disagree. I
am convinced that the process started much, much earlier, with our DNA,
which stores information about our selves and allows us to repeat our performance
without our being there by spreading our genes down the generations.
Evolution is scalable: the DNA that wins (whether by luck or
survival advantage) will reproduce itself, like a bestselling book or a successful
record, and become pervasive. Other DNA will vanish. Just consider
the difference between us humans (excluding financial economists
and businessmen) and other living beings on our planet.
Furthermore, I believe that the big transition in social life came not
with the gramophone, but when someone had the great but unjust idea to
invent the alphabet, thus allowing us to store information and reproduce
it. It accelerated further when another inventor had the even more dangerous
and iniquitous notion of starting a printing press, thus promoting
texts across boundaries and triggering what ultimately grew into a winnertake-
all ecology. Now, what was so unjust about the spread of books? The
alphabet allowed stories and ideas to be replicated with high fidelity and
without limit, without any additional expenditure of energy on the author's
part for the subsequent performances. He didn't even have to be
alive for them—death is often a good career move for an author. This implies
that those who, for some reason, start getting some attention can
quickly reach more minds than others and displace the competitors from
the bookshelves. In the days of bards and troubadours, everyone had
an audience. A storyteller, like a baker or a coppersmith, had a market,
and the assurance that none from far away could dislodge him from his
territory. Today, a few take almost everything; the rest, next to nothing.
By the same mechanism, the advent of the cinema displaced neighborhood
actors, putting the small guys out of business. But there is a difference.
In pursuits that have a technical component, like being a pianist or a
brain surgeon, talent is easy to ascertain, with subjective opinion playing
a relatively small part. The inequity comes when someone perceived as
being marginally better gets the whole pie.
In the arts—say the cinema—things are far more vicious. What we call
"talent" generally comes from success, rather than its opposite. A great
deal of empiricism has been done on the subject, most notably by Art De
