The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (Incerto, #2)

by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

My biggest problem with the educational system lies precisely in that it forces students to squeeze explanations out of subject matters and shames them for withholding judgment, for uttering the “I don’t know.” Why did the Cold War end? Why did the Persians lose the battle of Salamis? Why did Hannibal get his behind kicked? Why did Casanova bounce back from hardship? In each of these examples, we are taking a condition, survival, and looking for the explanations, instead of flipping the argument on its head and stating that conditional on such survival, one cannot read that much into the process, and should learn instead to invoke some measure of randomness (randomness, in practice, is what we don’t know; to invoke randomness is to plead ignorance). It is not just your college professor who gives you bad habits. I showed in Chapter 6 how newspapers need to stuff their texts with causal links to make you enjoy the narratives. But have the integrity to deliver your “because” very sparingly; try to limit it to situations where the “because” is derived from experiments, not backward-looking history.