In the beginning, the explanation. This column is titled Hitch Hiker because I find a certain charming freedom in the concept of hitch hiking. It seems to imply that you could start off from Point A, head for Point B, and then land up quite somewhere else, and happily spend the night there and try your luck Point B-ward the next morning — or afternoon, or the day after. Hitch hikers would surely have an idea of how to get there, but also know fully well that the final route taken may be quite different from what they imagined, and could take much longer (or, unlikely, but perhaps even less time). They know that uncertainty and randomness exist both spatially and temporally. This column has no particular fixed focus, since I do not consider myself an expert in anything. It will roam like a hitch hiker, and I intend to hold that uncertainty of direction even within myself about what my next piece is going to be about.So maybe it’s appropriate to have the first column on uncertainty itself. Nassim Nicholas Taleb is professor of the science of uncertainty at the Amherst University in the US. His book, The Black Swan, is probably one of the most provocative books you will have read in some time. Taleb defines “the black swan” as a large-impact, hard-to-predict and rare event; it is the black swans, he claims, that have driven history: 9/11 was a black swan; Google is a black swan; India winning the World Cup in 1983 was a black swan; Harry Potter is a black swan. In fact, most of our lives as individuals would have been powered, crippled or changed dramatically by personal and professional black swans. The term was created by 19th century philosopher John Stuart Mill, who used it as a metaphor for falsification. For thousands of years, Western civilization believed that all swans were white; in fact “black swan” denoted something that could not exist. And then in the 17th century, it was discovered that Australia harboured hale and hearty black swans. Taleb gives examples from history, mathematics, science, literature, philosophy, stockmarkets and every other discipline to trash “experts”, building his thesis that most of the time, most of them have no clue what they are talking about or writing scholarly pieces on. That whether it is a stock trader, a futurist, or a scientist, all he can say honestly is that the future is unpredictable, and in ways that cannot be imagined right now. But the human mind seeks stability and comfort, and the brain is hardwired to keep us in denial.For instance, our brains are deeply committed to causality, that Event A took place because of Events B and C. Therefore, after a black swan appears, the hindsight bias kicks in, the inclination to see past events as predictable, when they were never so. All normal thinking human beings can have the clustering illusion, the tendency to see patterns where actually none exist. Even the smartest investment banker is prey to the Ludic fallacy, the assumption that the unexpected can be predicted by extrapolating from statistics based on past observations, especially when these statistics are assumed to represent samples from a normal distribution curve (the bell curve).Scary stuff, and in a way an empirical and deeply researched sequel of sorts to Albert Camus’ philosophical text, The Myth Of Sisyphus, which starts with the assumption that the universe is absurd, life is absurd. Taleb tries to prove that absurdity. All of us at some point of time or the other in our lives felt: Why me? Why is this happening at all to me? Taleb’s answer: Relax, there is no reason at all. For the average human, that should be petrifying and could drive a weaker person to madness. But I suppose, for the outlier to the bell curve of humanity, the black swan human, this could be an oddly relaxing revelation. The world is not being vindictive towards you. It doesn’t know how to be. Nor is it doing you any favours. You don’t need or have anyone to thank.(Sandipan Deb, former editor of The Financial Express, now heads the RPG Group’s planned magazine venture. This is a fortnightly column)sandipandeb@yahoo.co.uk
