Bleed or Blowup

Bleed or Blowup

Let us separate the world into two categories. Some people are like the turkey, exposed to a major blowup without being aware of it, while others play reverse turkey, prepared for big events that might surprise others. In some strategies and life situations, you gamble dollars to win a succession of pennies while appearing to be winning all the time. In others, you risk a succession of pennies to win dollars. In other words, you bet either that the Black Swan will happen or that it will never happen, two strategies that require completely different mind-sets.

We have seen that we (humans) have a marked preference for making a little bit of income at a time. Recall from Chapter 4 that in the summer of 1982, large American banks lost close to everything they had ever earned, and more.

So some matters that belong to Extremistan are extremely dangerous but do not appear to be so beforehand, since they hide and delay their risks—so suckers think they are “safe.” It is indeed a property of Extremistan to look less risky, in the short run, than it really is.

Nero called the businesses exposed to such blowups dubious businesses, particularly since he distrusted whatever method was being used to compute the odds of a blowup. Recall from Chapter 4 that the accounting period upon which companies’ performances are evaluated is too short to reveal whether or not they are doing a great job. And, owing to the shallowness of our intuitions, we formulate our risk assessments too quickly.

I will rapidly present Nero’s idea. His premise was the following trivial point: some business bets in which one wins big but infrequently, yet loses small but frequently, are worth making if others are suckers for them and if you have the personal and intellectual stamina. But you need such stamina. You also need to deal with people in your entourage heaping all manner of insult on you, much of it blatant. People often accept that a financial strategy with a small chance of success is not necessarily a bad one as long as the success is large enough to justify it. For a spate of psychological reasons, however, people have difficulty carrying out such a strategy, simply because it requires a combination of belief, a capacity for delayed gratification, and the willingness to be spat upon by clients without blinking. And those who lose money for any reason start looking like guilty dogs, eliciting more scorn on the part of their entourage.

Against that background of potential blowup disguised as skills, Nero engaged in a strategy that he called “bleed.” You lose steadily, daily, for a long time, except when some event takes place for which you get paid disproportionately well. No single event can make you blow up, on the other hand—some changes in the world can produce extraordinarily large profits that pay back such bleed for years, sometimes decades, sometimes even centuries.

Of all the people he knew, Nero was the least genetically designed for such a strategy. His brain disagreed so heavily with his body that he found himself in a state of continuous warfare. It was his body that was his problem, which accumulated physical fatigue from the neurobiological effect of exposure to the small continuous losses, Chinese-water-torture-style, throughout the day. Nero discovered that the losses went to his emotional brain, bypassing his higher cortical structures and slowly affecting his hippocampus and weakening his memory. The hippocampus is the structure where memory is supposedly controlled. It is the most plastic part of the brain; it is also the part that is assumed to absorb all the damage from repeated insults like the chronic stress we experience daily from small doses of negative feelings—as opposed to the invigorating “good stress” of the tiger popping up occasionally in your living room. You can rationalize all you want; the hippocampus takes the insult of chronic stress seriously, incurring irreversible atrophy. Contrary to popular belief, these small, seemingly harmless stressors do not strengthen you; they can amputate part of your self.

It was the exposure to a high level of information that poisoned Nero’s life. He could sustain the pain if he saw only weekly performance numbers, instead of updates every minute. He did better emotionally with his own portfolio than with those of clients, since he was not obligated to monitor it continuously.

If his neurobiological system was a victim of the confirmation bias, reacting to the short term and the visible, he could trick his brain to escape its vicious effect by focusing only on the longer haul. He refused to look at any printout of his track record that was shorter than ten years. Nero came of age, intellectually speaking, with the stock market crash of 1987, in which he derived monstrous returns on what small equity he controlled. This episode would forever make his track record valuable, taken as a whole. In close to twenty years of trading, Nero had only four good years. For him, one was more than enough. All he needed was one good year per century.

Investors were no problem for him—they needed his trading as insurance and paid him well. He just had to exhibit a mild degree of contempt toward those he wanted to shed, which did not take much effort on his part. This effort was not contrived: Nero did not think much of them and let his body language express it freely, all the while maintaining an unfashionably high level of courtesy. He made sure, after a long string of losses, that they did not think he was apologetic—indeed, paradoxically, they became more supportive that way. Humans will believe anything you say provided you do not exhibit the smallest shadow of diffidence; like animals, they can detect the smallest crack in your confidence before you express it. The trick is to be as smooth as possible in personal manners. It is much easier to signal self-confidence if you are exceedingly polite and friendly; you can control people without having to offend their sensitivity. The problem with business people, Nero realized, is that if you act like a loser they will treat you as a loser—you set the yardstick yourself. There is no absolute measure of good or bad. It is not what you are telling people, it is how you are saying it.

But you need to remain understated and maintain an Olympian calm in front of others.

When he worked as a trader for an investment bank, Nero had to face the typical employee-evaluation form. The form was supposed to keep track of “performance,” supposedly as a check against employees slacking off. Nero found the evaluation absurd because it did not so much judge the quality of a trader’s performance as encourage him to game the system by working for short-term profits at the expense of possible blowups—like banks that give foolish loans that have a small probability of blowing up, because the loan officer is shooting for his next quarterly evaluation. So one day early in his career, Nero sat down and listened very calmly to the evaluation of his “supervisor.” When Nero was handed the evaluation form he tore it into small pieces in front of him. He did this very slowly, accentuating the contrast between the nature of the act and the tranquillity with which he tore the paper. The boss watched him blank with fear, eyes popping out of his head. Nero focused on his undramatic, slow-motion act, elated by both the feeling of standing up for his beliefs and the aesthetics of its execution. The combination of elegance and dignity was exhilarating. He knew that he would either be fired or left alone. He was left alone.

Related Problem: Silent Evidence

Silent evidence can reinforce the illusion of safety: accounts of past successes may omit the people or strategies that failed. Even describing New York as “so invincible” can hide the question of what other places failed to survive. History can conceal both Black Swans and the conditions that produce them.