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LIVING IN THE ANTECHAMBER OF HOPE
Where the Relevant Is the Sensational
Our intuitions are not cut out for nonlinearities.
In a primitive environment, the relevant is the sensational.
Our emotional apparatus is designed for linear causality. For instance, if you study every day, you expect to learn something in proportion to your studies. If you feel that you are not going anywhere, your emotions will cause you to become demoralized. But modern reality rarely gives us the privilege of a satisfying, linear, positive progression: you may think about a problem for a year and learn nothing; then,
unless you are disheartened by the emptiness of the results and give up, something will come to you in a flash.
Nonlinearities
Nonlinear relationships can vary; perhaps the best way to describe them is to say that they cannot be expressed verbally in a way that does justice to them. Take the relationship between pleasure and drinking water.
so your enjoyment declines with additional quantities.
Linear relationships are truly the exception; we only focus on them in classrooms and textbooks because they are easier to understand.
You play tennis every day with no improvement, then suddenly you start beating the pro.
I will repeat that linear progression, a Platonic idea, is not the norm.
Process over Results
It is my great hope someday to see science and decision makers rediscover what the ancients have always known, namely that our highest currency is respect.
Human Nature, Happiness, and Lumpy Rewards
Somehow, your pleasure system will be saturated rather quickly, and it will not carry forward the hedonic balance like a sum on a tax return.
As a matter of fact, your happiness depends far more on the number of instances of positive feelings, what psychologists call “positive affect,” than on their intensity when they hit.
Plenty of mildly good news is preferable to one single lump of great news.
So from a narrowly defined accounting point of view, which I may call here “hedonic calculus,” it does not pay to shoot for one large win. Mother Nature destined us to derive enjoyment from a steady flow of pleasant small, but frequent, rewards.
It is better to lump all your pain into a brief period rather than have it spread out over a longer one.
The Antechamber of Hope
Inebriated by Hope
The Sweet Trap of Anticipation
She did not mind the sweet trap of anticipation: to her it was a life worth living; it was worth living in the cathartic simplicity of a single purpose. Indeed, “be careful what you wish for”: she may have been happier before the Black Swan of her success than after.
For Drogo the consequences were thirty-five years spent waiting in the antechamber of hope for just a few randomly distributed hours of glory—which he ended up missing.
When You Need the Bastiani Fortress
Indeed, we have very few historical records of people who have achieved anything extraordinary without such peer validation—but we have the freedom to choose our peers.
A school allows someone with unusual ideas with the remote possibility of a payoff to find company and create a microcosm insulated from others.
The members of the group can be ostracized together—which is better than being ostracized alone.
Bleed or Blowup
Let us separate the world into two
categories. Some people are like the turkey, exposed to a major blowup without being aware of it, while others play reverse turkey, prepared fo...
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It is indeed a property of Extremistan to look less risky, in the short run, than it really is.
Recall from Chapter 4 that the accounting period upon which companies’ performances are evaluated is too short to reveal whether or not they are doing a great job.
Against that background of potential blowup disguised as skills, Nero engaged in a strategy that he called “bleed.” You lose steadily, daily, for a long time, except when some event takes place for which you get paid disproportionately well.
Contrary to popular belief, these small, seemingly harmless stressors do not strengthen you; they can amputate part of your self.
Humans will believe anything you say provided you do not exhibit the smallest shadow of diffidence; like animals, they can detect the smallest crack in your confidence before you express it.
THE STORY OF THE DROWNED WORSHIPPERS
The implication was that praying protects you from drowning. Diagoras asked, “Where were the pictures of those who prayed, then drowned?”
Silent evidence pervades everything connected to the notion of history.
History, I will repeat, is any succession of events seen with the effect of posteriority.
This bias extends to the ascription of factors in the success of ideas and religions, to the illusion of skill in many professions, to success in artistic occupations, to the nature versus nurture debate, to mistakes in using evidence in the court of law, to illusions about the “logic” of history—and of course, most severely, in our perception of the nature of extreme events.
It is so easy to avoid looking at the cemetery while concocting historical theories. But this is not just a problem with history. It is a problem with the way we construct samples and gather evidence in every domain.
By bias I mean a systematic error consistently showing a more positive, or negative, effect from the phenomenon,
Silent evidence is what events use to conceal their own randomness,
THE CEMETERY OF LETTERS
Well, it now seems that the Phoenicians wrote quite a bit, but using a perishable brand of papyrus that did not stand the biodegradative assaults of time.
The neglect of silent evidence is endemic to the way we study comparative talent, particularly in activities that are plagued with winner-take-all attributes. We may enjoy what we see, but there is no point reading too much into success stories because we do not see the full picture.
The consequence of the superstar dynamic is that what we call “literary heritage” or “literary treasures” is a minute proportion of what has been produced cumulatively.
But what if there are dozens of comparable literary masterpieces that happened to perish?
