Robustness and Fragility

ROBUSTNESS AND FRAGILITY

Upon the completion of The Black Swan, I spent some time meditating on the items I raised in Chapter 14 on the fragility of some systems with large concentration and illusions of stability—which had left me convinced that the banking system was the mother of all accidents waiting to happen. I explained in Chapter 6, with the story of the old elephants, that the best teachers of wisdom are naturally the eldest, simply because they may have picked up invisible tricks and heuristics that escape our epistemic landscape, tricks that helped them survive in a world more complex than the one we think we can understand. So being old implies a higher degree of resistance to Black Swans, though, as we saw with the turkey story, it is not a guaranteed proof—older is almost always more solid, but older is not necessarily perfect. But a few billion years is vastly more proof than a thousand days of survival, and the oldest system around is clearly Mother Nature.

That was, in a way, the reasoning behind the epilogism argument of the medical empiricists of the post-classical Levant (like Menodotus of Nicomedia), who were the only practitioners to merge skepticism and decision-making in the real world. They are also the only group of people to use philosophy for anything useful. They proposed historia: maximal recording of facts with minimal interpretation and theorizing, describing of facts without the why, and resisting universals. Their form of nontheoretical knowledge was degraded by the medieval Scholastics, who favored more explicit learning. Historia, just the recording of facts, was inferior to philosophia or scientia. Even philosophy, until then, had more to do with decision-making wisdom than it does today, not with impressing a tenure committee, and medicine was where such wisdom was practiced (and learned): Medicina soror philosophiae: “Medicine, sister of Philosophy.”[*]

Giving an ancillary status to a field that prefers particulars to universals is what formalized knowledge since the Scholastics has been doing, which necessarily gives short shrift to experience and age (too much accumulation of particulars), in favor of those who hold a PhD like Dr. John. This may work in classical physics, but not in the complex domain; it has killed a lot of patients in the history of medicine, particularly before clinical medicine was born, and is causing a lot of damage in the social domain, particularly at the time of writing.

The central things the old teachers communicate to you are, to use religious terms, dogmas (rules you need to execute without necessarily understanding them) not kerygmas (rules you can understand and that have a purpose clear to you).

Mother Nature is clearly a complex system, with webs of interdependence, nonlinearities, and a robust ecology (otherwise it would have blown up a long time ago). It is an old, very old person with an impeccable memory. Mother Nature does not develop Alzheimer’s—actually there is evidence that even humans would not easily lose brain function with age if they followed a regimen of stochastic exercise and stochastic fasting, took long walks, avoided sugar, bread, white rice, and stock market investments, and refrained from taking economics classes or reading such things as The New York Times.

Let me summarize my ideas about how Mother Nature deals with the Black Swan, both positive and negative—it knows much better than humans how to take advantage of positive Black Swans.