Comments on: Nobody Expects the Black Swans?

By: john theibault

john theibault — Wed, 06 May 2009 15:50:19 +0000

I’ve not read Taleb, but I am very sympathetic to your ideas on how complexity theory and emergence can be useful for historians. I thought immediately of the French/Industrial Revolution as embodying that “phase change” quality. I’d cast the critique of “so much historical work” slightly differently, though. It’s true that professional recognition often comes from proposing a new cause for some significant historical event (“it’s the rising bourgeoisie!” “No, it’s an aristocratic reaction to centralization!”), but good historical work is often additive (“Religion was really important, too”) in a way that can be very helpful for defusing monocausal explanations. Indeed, I think complexity theory and emergence can help history find a place in the social sciences beyond being a repository of case studies from which political scientists, economists, and sociologists can build their models.

By: Timothy Burke

Timothy Burke — Wed, 06 May 2009 11:21:51 +0000

In a way, the “phase change” I’m most eager to apply this idea are the two big disjunctures of modernity: 1500-1650 and 1750-1820, where I think the human subject was quite substantially different on the other side than it was going in, even if all individual human beings even at the metropolitan center hadn’t undergone that transformation in total. So much historical work is aimed at seeing some major force or driver underneath that change (often deriding alternative arguments), when it seems to me that both moments are quintessential cases of emergence, of novel structures arising from the accidental or unplanned convergent actions of many independent agents and institutions, and at both moments, the political, social and cultural environment was substantially different afterwards in ways that could scarcely have been imagined by most humans on the other side. And yet, as with most cases of emergence, the results make sense in terms of what came before: the novelty of modernity didn’t fall intact from the moon.

By: Doug

Doug — Wed, 06 May 2009 07:56:34 +0000

I found Taleb’s authorial voice insufferable, quit at the preface, lent the book to a colleague and moved out of the country (demonstrating something about correlation and causation in the process, I am sure), so I’ll just chip in about the arguments as presented here. Tim, do you think you might be receptive to ideas about a “phase change” because you witnessed a big one, the fall of Communism, relatively early in your adult life?

Moving from predictive to political, there’s also a substantial body of work in bringing about “phase changes” – not just your traditional revolutionaries, but their modern mediated descendants, the folks who brought down Milosevic, and spurred the Rose and Orange Revolutions in Georgia and Ukraine. Of course that effort, too, gets recursive. Right now, both government and opposition in Georgia are graduates of this school, and the opposition is trying to use these methods to push out the government without recourse to elections.

In finance, a quibble that Taleb may or may not have addressed, which is related to timing. Not only can the market stay irrational far longer than any individual actor can stay solvent, if a professional money manager got out of a particular market in 2006 or 2007, he or she left an awful lot of money on the table, very possibly enough to have gotten fired over it.

By: Carl

Carl — Tue, 05 May 2009 19:11:13 +0000

I remember thinking the same thing about Taleb when I ran across him at The Edge, that he was chippy and combative to the point of useless incoherence. But I agree it’s worth stripping out the affect to get to the good stuff. In particular, I like the robust understanding this field is developing of why it’s so much easier to predict the future in retrospect.

If I remember correctly Taleb wants the I-told-you-so cred, based on the idea that black swans (e.g. catastrophic economic crashes) are both rare and ultimately inevitable. Eventually the dice come up snake-eyes. But it’s the oldest game in the book to throw out a bunch of predictions based on multi-variable extrapolations of possible futures, then cherry-pick the ones that actually happen and say look, I nailed it. Intellectual history is full of wacko prophets; we tend only rediscover the ones who happened to be right. And grannies the world over foretell doom for their younguns, kids these days, then confirm the bias the n+1 time something bad happens.

It seems to me that we can be more prudent in our approaches to future paradoxes of unintended consequences if we understand the dynamics of complex systems. But ‘more likely, less likely’ does take us out of the certainty comfort zone.