Too Dull to Write About

It was said that the artistic filmmaker Luchino Visconti made sure that when actors pointed at a closed box meant to contain jewels, there were real jewels inside. It could be an effective way to make actors live their part. I think that Visconti's gesture may also come out of a plain sense of aesthetics and a desire for authenticity—somehow it may not feel right to fool the viewer.

This is an essay expressing a primary idea; it is neither the recycling nor repackaging of other people's thoughts. An essay is an impulsive meditation, not science reporting. I apologize if I skip a few obvious topics in this book out of the conviction that what is too dull for me to write about might be too dull for the reader to read. (Also, to avoid dullness may help to filter out the nonessential.)

Talk is cheap. Someone who took too many philosophy classes in college (or perhaps not enough) might object that the sighting of a Black Swan does not invalidate the theory that all swans are white since such a black bird is not technically a swan since whiteness to him may be the essential property of a swan. Indeed those who read too much Wittgenstein (and writings about comments about Wittgenstein) may be under the impression that language problems are important. They may certainly be important to attain prominence in philosophy departments, but they are something we, practitioners and decision makers in the real world, leave for the weekend. As I explain in the chapter called “The Uncertainty of the Phony,” for all of their intellectual appeal, these niceties have no serious implications Monday to Friday as opposed to more substantial (but neglected) matters. People in the classroom, not having faced many true situations of decision making under uncertainty, do not realize what is important and what is not—even those who are scholars of uncertainty (or particularly those who are scholars of uncertainty). What I call the practice of uncertainty can be piracy, commodity speculation, professional gambling, working in some branches of the Mafia, or just plain serial entrepreneurship. Thus I rail against “sterile skepticism,” the kind we can do nothing about, and against the exceedingly theoretical language problems that have made much of modern philosophy largely irrelevant to what is derisively called the “general public.” (In the past, for better or worse, those rare philosophers and thinkers who were not self-standing depended on a patron's support. Today academics in abstract disciplines depend on one another's opinion, without external checks, with the severe occasional pathological result of turning their pursuits into insular prowess-showing contests. Whatever the shortcomings of the old system, at least it enforced some standard of relevance.)

The philosopher Edna Ullmann-Margalit detected an inconsistency in this book and asked me to justify the use of the precise metaphor of a Black Swan to describe the unknown, the abstract, and imprecise uncertain—white ravens, pink elephants, or evaporating denizens of a remote planet orbiting Tau Ceti. Indeed, she caught me red handed. There is a contradiction; this book is a story, and I prefer to use stories and vignettes to illustrate our gullibility about stories and our preference for the dangerous compression of narratives.

You need a story to displace a story. Metaphors and stories are far more potent (alas) than ideas; they are also easier to remember and more fun to read. If I have to go after what I call the narrative disciplines, my best tool is a narrative.

Ideas come and go, stories stay.