The Black Swan

Those of you who have heard me speak before might remember the mentions of black swans, chaos and catastrophe theory. This all came back to me as I read Nassim Nicholas Taleb's The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. It is an interesting book; it is, as far as I know, pretty ground-breaking in exposing the facts people don't often think about.

Taleb destroys, with great finesse and remorseless logic, the idea that the normal distribution is a useful predictor for the big movements in history and in life. In fact, statistical arguments depending on the normal distribution and its proxies seem to end up giving us more-of-the-same, mediocre possibilities. History may have these as her staple diet, but the muscles and bones of history require sterner stuff.

But this is not all of his argument. He goes after Platonicism and other models that seek to shoehorn data into ideal models. He comes out in favour of the legitimate imagination and the knowledge of unknowledge, this last typified by Umberto Eco's antilibrary. An antilibrary, as he deftly explains, is that portion of a person's library which has not been read and yet is an integral part of that library; it is thus the mobile resource on the intellectual battlefield. People who don't read are one thing; people who have nothing they want to read are quite another.

The problem is that the world tends to seek to find consoling and conforming narratives to explain chaos, catastrophe and crisis. St Paul's epistle to the Romans mentions as much: be not conformed to the world. I remember very distinctly my meditations on this the day before my career was elevated to a different plane. I only read Taleb's book yesterday. To my surprise, I found myself feeling validated.

I do believe firmly that vision must be broad and imaginative. I also believe firmly that contrasting and outlying views must be fully examined before the decision is taken to reject them. There is, as many have said before, a bias against those who solve problems that haven't occurred yet, or who invent problems which might never happen. This bias favours those who solve problems that have come to be; the problem about such problems is that once they have already arisen, they are much more expensive to deal with than when they were merely imaginative possibilities.

That is why we must be transformed by the renewal of our mind. That is why we must see with 'blinding sight', with inspiration and not with the conventional wisdom. That is why we must not conform to the normal distribution of the world. We are all, in potential, far better than that; it is mediocrity that creates the curve and treats the outliers and possibilities of excellence as fantastic and irresponsible. On the contrary, it is the mediocre mind which is being irresponsible, which holds back the flowering and blasts the stalk before a bloom unfolds. How sad it is, to see the garden burn.