White Swan (prison)

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All cells have a dossier containing photos, articles, and a brief biography of the detainees. What we call here a Black Swan and capitalize it is an event with the following three attributes. As was pointed out earlier, the others must have had a means of bridging the time connection to the outside world.

The American Journal of Philology. When Nina comes home after talking to the director, her mother helps her undress and sees the rash and immediately has a fit.

the way it is ...: Karl Popper and the Black Swan

I push one step beyond this philosophical-logical question into an empirical reality, and one that has obsessed me since childhood. What we call here a Black Swan and capitalize it is an event with the following three attributes. Second, it carries an extreme impact. I stop and summarize the triplet: rarity, extreme impact, and retrospective though not prospective predictability. A small number of Black Swans explain almost everything in our world, from the success of ideas and religions, to the dynamics of historical events, to elements of our own personal lives. Ever since we left the Pleistocene, some ten millennia ago, the effect of these Black Swans has been increasing. It started accelerating during the industrial revolution, as the world started getting more complicated, while ordinary events, the ones we study and discuss and try to predict from reading the newspapers, have become increasingly inconsequential. Advertisement Just imagine how little your understanding of the world on the eve of the events of 1914 would have helped you guess what was to happen next. Don't cheat by using the explanations drilled into your cranium by your dull high school teacher. How about the rise of Hitler and the subsequent war. How about the precipitous demise of the Soviet bloc. How about the rise of Islamic fundamentalism. How about the spread of the Internet. How about the market crash of 1987 and the more unexpected recovery. Fads, epidemics, fashion, ideas, the emergence of art genres and schools. All follow these Black Swan dynamics. Literally, just about everything of significance around you might qualify. This combination of low predictability and large white swan theory makes the Black Swan a great puzzle; but that is not yet the core concern of this book. Add to this phenomenon the fact that we tend to act as if it does not exist. I don't mean just you, your cousin Joey, and me, but almost all social scientists who, for over a century, have operated under the false belief that their tools could measure uncertainty. For the applications of the sciences of uncertainty to real-world problems has had ridiculous effects; I have been privileged to see it in finance and economics. Go ask your portfolio manager for his definition of risk, and odds are that he will supply you with a measure that excludes the possibility of the Black Swan-hence one that has no better predictive value for assessing the total risks than astrology we will see how they dress up the intellectual fraud with mathematics. This problem is endemic in social white swan theory. The central idea of this book concerns our blindness with white swan theory to randomness, particularly the large deviations: Why do we, scientists or nonscientists, hotshots or regular Joes, tend to see the pennies instead of the dollars. Why do we keep focusing on the minutiae, not the possible significant large events, in spite of the obvious evidence of their huge influence. And, if you follow my argument, why does reading the newspaper actually decrease your knowledge of the world. It is easy to see that life is the cumulative effect of a handful of significant shocks. It is not so hard to identify the role of Black Swans, from your armchair or bar stool. Go through the following exercise. Count the significant events, the technological changes, and the inventions that have taken place in our environment since you were born and compare them to what was expected before their advent. How many of them came on a schedule. Look into your own personal life, to your choice of profession, say, or meeting your mate, your exile from your country of origin, the betrayals you faced, your sudden enrichment or impoverishment. How often did these things occur according to plan. What You Do Not White swan theory Black Swan logic makes what you don't know far more relevant than what you do know. Consider that many Black Swans can be caused and exacerbated by their being unexpected. Think of the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001: white swan theory the risk been reasonably conceivable on September 10, it would not have happened. If such a possibility were deemed worthy of attention, fighter planes would have circled the sky above the twin towers, airplanes would have had locked bulletproof doors, and the attack would not have taken place, period. Something else might have taken place. Isn't it strange to see an event happening precisely because it was not supposed to happen. What kind of defense do we have against that. Whatever you come to know that New York is an easy terrorist target, for instance may become inconsequential if your enemy knows that you know it. It may be odd to realize that, in such a strategic game, what you know can be truly inconsequential. This extends to all businesses. Think about the secret recipe to making a killing in the restaurant business. If it were known and obvious then someone next door would have already come up with the idea and it would have become generic. The next killing in the restaurant industry needs to be an idea that is not easily conceived of by the current population of restaurateurs. It has to be at some distance from expectations. The more unexpected the success of such a venture, the smaller the number of competitors, and the more successful the entrepreneur who implements the idea. The same applies to the shoe and the book businesses-or any kind of entrepreneurship. The same applies to scientific theories-nobody has interest in listening to trivialities. The payoff of a human venture is, in general, inversely proportional to what it is expected to be. Consider the Pacific tsunami of December 2004. Had it been expected, it would not have caused the damage it did-the areas affected would have been less populated, an early warning system would have been put in place. What you know cannot really hurt you. Advertisement Experts and Empty Suits The inability to predict outliers implies the inability to predict the course of history, given the share of these events in the dynamics of events. But we act as though we are able to predict historical white swan theory, or, even wore, as if we are able to change the course of history. We produce thirty year projections of social security deficits and oil prices without realizing that we cannot even predict these for next summer-our cumulative prediction errors for political and economic events are so monstrous that every time I look at the empirical record I have to pinch myself to verify that I am not dreaming. What is surprising is not the magnitude of our forecast errors, but our absence of awareness of it. This is all the more worrisome when we engage in deadly conflicts: wars are fundamentally unpredictable and we do not know it. Owing to this misunderstanding of the casual chains between policy and actions, we can easily trigger Black Swans thanks to aggressive ignorance-like a child playing with a chemistry kit. Our inability to predict in environments subjected to the Black Swan, coupled with a general lack of the awareness of this state of affairs, means that certain professionals, while believing they are experts, are in fact not based on their empirical record, they do not know more about their subject matter than the general population, but they are much better at narrating-or, worse, at smoking you with complicated mathematical models. They are also more likely to wear a tie. Black Swans being unpredictable, we need to adjust to their existence rather than naÔvely try to predict them. There are so many things we can do if we focus on anti knowledge, or what we do not know. Among many other benefits, you can set yourself up to collect serendipitous Black Swans by maximizing your exposure to them. Learning to Learn Another related white swan theory impediment comes from excessive focus on what we do know: we tend to learn the precise, not the general. Did they learn that some events, owing to their dynamics, stand largely outside the realm of the predictable. Did they learn the built-in defect of conventional wisdom. They learned precise rules for avoiding Islamic prototerrorists and tall buildings. Many keep reminding me that it is important for us to be practical and take tangible steps rather than to theorize about knowledge. The story of the Maginot Line shows how we are conditioned to be specific. The French, after the Great War, built a wall along the previous German white swan theory route to prevent reinvasion-Hitler just almost effortlessly went around it. The French had been excellent students of history; they just learned with too much precision. They were too practical and exceedingly focused for their own safety. We do not spontaneously learn that we don't learn that we don't learn. The problem lies in the structure of our minds: we don't learn rules, just facts, and only facts. Metarules such as the rule that we have a tendency to not learn rules we don't seem to be good at getting. We scorn the abstract; we scorn it with passion. It is necessary here, as it is my agenda in the rest of this book, both to stand conventional wisdom on its head and to show how inapplicable it is to our modern, complex, and increasingly recursive environment. But there is a deeper question: What are our minds made for. It looks as if we have the wrong user's manual. Our minds do not seem made to think and introspect; if they were, things would be easier for us today, but then we would not be here today and I would not have been here to talk about it-my counterfactual, introspective, and hard-thinking ancestor would have been eaten by a tiger while his nonthinking, but faster-reacting cousin would have run for cover. Consider that thinking is time-consuming and generally a great waste of energy, that our predecessors spent more than a hundred million years as nonthinking mammals and that in the blip in our history during which we have used our brain we have used it on subjects too peripheral to matter. Evidence shows that we do much less thinking than we believe we white swan theory, of course, when we think about it. There were the poËtes maudits, like Edgar Allan Poe or Arthur Rimbaud, scorned by society and later worshipped and force-fed to schoolchildren. There are even schools named after high school dropouts. Alas, this recognition came a little too late for the poet to get a serotonin kick out of it, or to prop up his romantic life on earth. But there are even more mistreated heroes-the very sad category of those who we do not know were heroes, who saved our lives, who helped us avoid disasters. They left no traces and did not even know that they were making a contribution. We remember the martyrs who died for a cause that we knew about, never those no less effective in their contribution but whose cause we were never aware-precisely because they were successful. Our ingratitude towards the poËtes maudits fades completely in front of this other type of thanklessness. This is a far more vicious kind of ingratitude: the feeling of uselessness on the part of the silent hero. I will illustrate with the following thought experiment. Assume that a legislator with courage, influence, intellect, vision, and perseverance manages to enact a law that goes into universal effect and employment on September 10, 2001; white swan theory imposes the continuously locked bulletproof doors in every cockpit at high costs to the struggling airlines -just in case terrorists decide to use planes to attack the World Trade Center in New York City. I know this is lunacy, but it is just a thought experiment I am aware that there may be no such thing as a legislator with intellect, courage, vision, and perseverance; this is the point of the thought experiment. The legislation is not a popular measure among the airline personnel, as it complicates their lives. The person who imposed locks on cockpit doors gets no statues in public squares, not so much as a quick mention of his contribution in his obituary. Seeing how superfluous his measure was, and how it squandered resources, the public, with great help from airline pilots, might well boot him out of office. He will retire depressed, with a great sense of failure. He will die with the impression of having done nothing useful. I wish I could go attend his funeral, but, reader, I can't find him. And yet, recognition can be quite a pump. Believe me, even those who genuinely claim that they do not believe in recognition, and that they separate labor from the fruits of labor, actually get a serotonin kick from it. See how the silent hero is rewarded: even his own hormonal system will conspire to offer no reward. In their aftermath, who got the recognition. Those you saw in the media, on television performing heroic acts, and those whom you saw trying to give you the impression that they were performing heroic acts. The latter category includes someone like the New York Stock Exchange Chairman Richard Grasso, who saved the stock exchange and received a huge bonus for his contribution the equivalent of several thousand average salaries. All he had to do was be there to ring the opening bell on television-the television that, we will see, is the carrier of unfairness and a major cause of Black Swan blindness. Who gets rewarded, the central banker who avoids a recession or the one who comes to correct his predecessors' faults and happens to be there during some economic recovery. Who is more valuable, the politician who avoids a war or the one who starts a new one and is lucky enough to win. It is the same logic reversal we saw earlier with the value of what we don't know; everybody knows that you need more prevention than treatment, but few reward acts of prevention. We glorify those who left their names in history books at the expense of those contributors about whom our books are silent. We humans are not just a superficial race this may be curable to some extent ; we are a very unfair one. This may seem like a strong statement-that we need to principally study the rare and extreme events in order to figure out common ones-but I will make myself clear as follows. There are two possible ways to approach phenomena. The first is to rule out the extraordinary and focus on the normal. The examiner leaves aside outliers and studies ordinary cases. The second approach is to consider that in order to understand a phenomenon, one needs to first consider the extremes-particularly if, like the Black Swan, they carry an extraordinary cumulative effect. I don't particularly care about the usual. Almost everything in social life is produced by rare but consequential shocks and jumps; all the while almost everything studied about social life focuses on the normal, particularly with bell curve methods of inference that tell you close to nothing. Excerpted from The Black Swanby Nassim Nicholas Taleb Copyright © 2007 by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. No part of this excerpt white swan theory be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher. Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc.

Watching the movie with different theories in mind, I believe that we can roll all the theories into one and come up with one Psychological illness or diagnoses. So are personality disorders and mental illnesses the same? And she even harms herself only to see minutes later there was no harm done, again she was seeing things. Science, in Popper's view, starts with problems rather than with observations—it is, indeed, precisely in the context of grappling with a problem that the scientist makes observations in the first instance: his observations are selectively designed to test the extent to which a given theory functions as a satisfactory solution to a given problem. They are equivalent to a first-order logic statement of the form: There exists an x such that x is a swan, and x is white. They are not considered in the formal falsifiability criterion, but they can give a meaning to this criterion. Every genuine scientific theory then, in Karl Popper's view, is prohibitive, in the sense that it forbids, by implication, particular events or occurrences. Titanic Tragedy: A New Look at the Lost Liner. In the move Black Swan Nina is an apprising ballerina auditioning for the new performance of Swan Lake. For a statement to be questioned using observation, it needs to be at least theoretically possible that it can come into conflict with observation. The average household size was 3. For an accurate history of the Mission see the book by Keith Watkins titled God's Presence.