Distance from Primates

Distance from Primates

There have been in history many distinctions between higher and lower forms of humans. For the Greeks, there were the Greeks and the barbarians, those people of the north who uttered amorphous sentences similar, to the Attic ear, to an animal’s shrieks. For the English, a higher form of life was the gentleman’s—contrary to today’s definition, a gentleman’s life was practiced through idleness and a code of behavior that included, along with a set of manners, the avoidance of work beyond the necessities of comfortable subsistence. For New Yorkers, there are those with a Manhattan zip code and those with such a thing as a Brooklyn or, worse, Queens address. For the earlier Nietzsche, there was the Apollonian compared to the Dionysian; for the better-known Nietzsche, there was the Übermensch, something his readers interpret however it suits them. For a modern stoic, a higher individual subscribes to a dignified system of virtue that determines elegance in one’s behavior and the ability to separate results from efforts. All of these distinctions aim at lengthening the distance between us and our relatives among other primates. (I keep insisting that, when it comes to decision making, the distance between us and these hairy cousins is far shorter than we think.)

I propose that if you want a simple step to a higher form of life, as distant from the animal as you can get, then you may have to denarrate, that is, shut down the television set, minimize time spent reading newspapers, ignore the blogs. Train your reasoning abilities to control your decisions; nudge System 1 (the heuristic or experiential system) out of the important ones. Train yourself to spot the difference between the sensational and the empirical. This insulation from the toxicity of the world will have an additional benefit: it will improve your well-being. Also, bear in mind how shallow we are with probability, the mother of all abstract notions. You do not have to do much more in order to gain a deeper understanding of things around you. Above all, learn to avoid “tunneling.”

A related problem is focusing too narrowly on what a model includes. To be able to focus is a great virtue if you are a watch repairman, a brain surgeon, or a chess player. But the last thing you need to do when you deal with uncertainty is to “focus” (you should tell uncertainty to focus, not us). This “focus” makes you a sucker; it translates into prediction problems, when models exclude possibilities that matter. Prediction, not narration, is the real test of our understanding of the world.

* My colleague Mark Spitznagel found a martial version of the ludic fallacy: organized competitive fighting trains the athlete to focus on the game and, in order not to dissipate his concentration, to ignore the possibility of what is not specifically allowed by the rules, such as kicks to the groin, a surprise knife, et cetera. So those who win the gold medal might be precisely those who will be most vulnerable in real life. Likewise, you see people with huge muscles (in black T-shirts) who can impress you in the artificial environment of the gym but are unable to lift a stone.

* Nietzsche’s targets include dogma-prone newspaper readers and opera lovers who have cosmetic exposure to culture and shallow depth. I extend the term here to the philistine hiding in academia who lacks in erudition out of lack of curiosity and is closely centered on his ideas.

When I ask people to name three recently implemented technologies that most impact our world today, they usually propose the computer, the Internet, and the laser. Their eventual effects went far beyond their initial uses. They were consequential. They were Black Swans. Of course, we have this retrospective illusion of their partaking in some master plan. You can create your own lists with similar results, whether you use political events, wars, or intellectual epidemics.

You would expect our record of prediction to be horrible: the world is far, far more complicated than we think, which is not a problem, except when most of us don’t know it. We tend to “tunnel” while looking into the future, making it business as usual, Black Swan–free, when in fact there is nothing usual about the future. It is not a Platonic category!

We have seen how good we are at narrating backward, at inventing stories that convince us that we understand the past. For many people, knowledge has the remarkable power of producing confidence instead of measurable aptitude. Another problem: the focus on the (inconsequential) regular, the Platonification that makes the forecasting “inside the box.”

I find it scandalous that in spite of the empirical record we continue to project into the future as if we were good at it, using tools and methods that exclude rare events. Prediction is firmly institutionalized in our world. We are suckers for those who help us navigate uncertainty, whether the fortune-teller or the “well-published” (dull) academics or civil servants using phony mathematics.