Becoming a Non-Turkey

The Idea of Becoming a Non-Turkey

It is obvious to anyone before drinking time that we can put a man, a family, a village with a mini town hall on the moon, and predict the trajectory of planets or the most minute effect in quantum physics, yet governments with equally sophisticated models cannot forecast revolutions, crises, budget deficits, climate change. Or even the closing prices of the stock market a few hours from now.

There are two different domains, one in which we can predict (to some extent), the other—the Black Swan domain—in which we should only let turkeys and turkified people operate. And the demarcation is as visible (to non-turkeys) as the one between the cat and the washing machine.

Social, economic, and cultural life lie in the Black Swan domain, physical life much less so. Further, the idea is to separate domains into those in which these Black Swans are both unpredictable and consequential, and those in which rare events are of no serious concern, either because they are predictable or because they are inconsequential.

I mentioned in the Prologue that randomness in the Black Swan domain is intractable. I will repeat it till I get hoarse. The limit is mathematical, period, and there is no way around it on this planet. What is nonmeasurable and nonpredictable will remain nonmeasurable and nonpredictable, no matter how many PhDs with Russian and Indian names you put on the job—and no matter how much hate mail I get. There is, in the Black Swan zone, a limit to knowledge that can never be reached, no matter how sophisticated statistical and risk management science ever gets.

The involvement of this author has not been so much in asserting this impossibility to ever know anything about these matters—the general skeptical problem has been raised throughout history by a long tradition of philosophers, including Sextus Empiricus, Algazel, Hume, and many more skeptics and skeptical empiricists—as in formalizing and modernizing as a background and footnote to my anti-turkey argument. So my work is about where one should be skeptical, and where one should not be so. In other words, focus on getting out of the f*** Fourth Quadrant—the Fourth Quadrant is the scientific name I gave to the Black Swan domain, the one in which we have a high exposure to rare, “tail” events and these events are incomputable.3

Now, what is worse, because of modernity, the share of Extremistan is increasing. Winner-take-all effects are worsening: success for an author, a company, an idea, a musician, an athlete is planetary, or nothing. These worsen predictability since almost everything in socioeconomic life now is dominated by Black Swans. Our sophistication continuously puts us ahead of ourselves, creating things we are less and less capable of understanding.