Nissam Taleb in his book “Black Swan” argue the point that the occurrence of catastrophes (or Black Swans as he calls it) are far more relevant in our day-to-day life than what we want to realise.
According to Taleb Black Swans are labelled as an unexpected, unfortunate turn of events which have an enormous impact on humanity - such as 9/11. What produce these events is a mystery to man and will always be. The statistical-forecasting method, the Bell Curve distribution, turns a blind eye the effects which produced Black Swans as they are seen as outliers and not calculated into the equation.
Looking back into history is also difficult to explain the catastrophe due the black box of cause and effect. One sees events go in and events go out, but one has no way of determining which produced what effect. Taleb says that history is „opaque” to the human mind because we see only the events and results and not the origin or mechanism behind them. According to him is it due to three factors based on the human mind and its characteristics which he called “triplet of opacity”:
- The illusion of understanding a historical event, although everything may be much more complicated and random than it seems in retrospect.
- The deformity of events in retrospect, which means that events are judged differently in the end than they were when they occurred.
- The illusion that based on factual information either authoritarian or intellectual people are able to predict future events.
By dividing the improbable into two large groups, it becomes easier to understand how the existence of catastrophes are ignored by human observers. To explain this Taleb created two scenarios which he called Mediocristan and Extremistan. He uses them as guides to define how predictable the environment we live in. In Mediocristan it is safe to use the Bell curve distribution to analyse data and make predictions. On the other hand in Extremistan one will use the Bell Curve distribution at one's own peril.
In Mediocristan averages are the rule. Here the sample of information and data available is very large and the model will never work in a different manner. The data is also not scalable as it has been defined with a minimum and a maximum level for example the physical characteristics such as height and body weight, and even IQ. Since the properties of such non-scalable information are certainly limited, it is possible to make relatively accurate predictions about the means.
The second territory is the Extremistan, and it is in it that the extremes live. Here the information is so disproportionate that a single observation can dramatically impact an observations and mislead any predictions. In Extremistan the nonphysical side, fundamentally abstract things, are brought into play. Examples of data and information are far more diverse - Deaths in terrorist attacks, book sales by an author, inflation rates, etc.
The occurrence of random events, Black Swans or catastrophes happens in the Extremistan scenarios. Humans tend to fool themselves with the interpretation of information. For example, if we say, “We have no evidence that there are Black Swans,” many people may understand that there are no Black Swans.The lack of proof that something exists does not mean that it does not exist. It is not because there has never been an earthquake in your city, that it will never occur.
We often look at our lives as if things were happening in the Mediocristan, when, in fact, life occurs much more in the kingdom of Extremistan.To learn to deal with this, one must accept, embrace and understand the unpredictable nature of the world, rather than ignore it.
Extreme events usually occur and have significant impacts. Our tendency to ignore them comes from the fact that people tend to underestimate their ignorance. There is much that we do not know, but since feeling ignorant is something that does not make us feel good about ourselves, we tend to downplay this characteristic of ours. We create stories where they do not exist. We “invent” explanations of why things happen after all this is much more enjoyable than feeling stupid and ignorant when some unforeseen happens. We cannot be sure of our beliefs, for they make us blind to concepts that are outside what we believe to be true. We love to think we live in Mediocristan, but unfortunately we all live in Extremistan.
Taleb message is that we as humans are far more ignorant of the complexity of the real world. By creating a narrative we try to create a Mediocristan, but if we like it or not, we live in an Extremistand. In Extremistan catastrophe are not only possible they are real and will happen. The fact that we don’t have data to support the reality of catastrophes does not say anything except that there is a lack of data. It is not evidence of the absence of catastrophes.
The following article(s) will give a closer look at the work of Immanuel Velikovsky as he is the only one who gave an explanation of what might have caused the catastrophes.
Sources:
https://medium.com/@ulfbrommelmeier_7736/the-triplet-of-opacity-cbc52e533714
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Swan:_The_Impact_of_the_Highly_Improbable
https://blog.12min.com/the-black-swan-summary/