The Success Equation. Michael J. Mauboussin

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      Source: Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (New York: Random House, 2010), 365.

      Statistical methods tend to work well in quadrants one through three, and most of what we will be dealing with falls into one of those quadrants. Dealing with quadrant four is far more difficult, and there is a natural and frequently disastrous tendency to apply naively the methods of the first three quadrants to the last. While most of our discussion will dwell on areas where statistics can be helpful, we will also discuss ways to cope with activities in the fourth quadrant.

      CHAPTER 2

      WHY WE'RE SO BAD AT DISTINGUISHING SKILL FROM LUCK

      AS PART OF A LECTURE that he delivers to the general public, Simon Singh, a British author who writes about science and math, plays a short snippet from Led Zeppelin's famous rock song, “Stairway to Heaven.” Most of the people in the audience are familiar with the tune, and some know the lyrics well enough to sing along.

      He then plays the same song backward. As you would expect, it sounds like gibberish. He follows by earnestly asking how many heard the following lyrics in the backward version:

       It's my sweet Satan. The one

       whose little path would make me

       sad whose power is Satan.

       Oh, he'll give you, give you 666.

       There was a little toolshed where

       he made us suffer, sad Satan.

      The words are a little odd, but the satanic theme is clear. Even so, no one in the audience had heard those words the first time through. But then Singh replays the backward clip, and this time he displays the pseudo lyrics on a screen and highlights them so that everyone can follow along. And sure enough, the audience unmistakably hears the words, where before they had heard nothing. The first time through, the backward version was an incoherent mess. But once Singh told the audience what might be there, the previously unintelligible gibberish was transformed into clear speech.¹

      Singh's demonstration provides an important clue to why we have a hard time understanding the roles of skill and luck. Our minds have an amazing ability to create a narrative that explains the world around us, an ability that works particularly well when we already know the answer. There are a couple of essential ingredients in this ability: our love of stories and our need to connect cause and effect. The blend of those two ingredients leads us to believe that the past was inevitable and to underestimate what else might have happened.

      Stories, Causality, and the Post Hoc Fallacy

      John Lewis Gaddis, a professor of history at Yale, creates a vivid image of how we represent time. He suggests that the future is a zone where skill and luck coexist independently. Almost everyone recognizes that many more things could happen than will happen. A wide range of events might occur, but won't. These possibilities come down a funnel to the present, which fuses skill and luck to create whatever happens. The conversion of a range of alternatives into a single event is the process that makes history.²

      For example, you undoubtedly trust your skill at driving well enough to get to the grocery store and back without dying. But when you pull out onto the road, you're facing a wide range of possible histories for this journey. In one of them, the engine falls off of the Boeing 767 going overhead and lands on your car and kills you. In another, you turn in front of a motorcyclist you happen not to see, and you kill him. In yet another, a tractor trailer loses its brakes and plows into you from behind, putting you in the hospital for a month. In fact, in this instance, you drive to the store, buy your groceries, and go home. The history of this event was that you didn't die. Was it your skill as a driver that saved your life? Or was it luck?

      If we look into the past, skill and luck appear to be inextricably fixed, even though the history that we lived through was but one of many possible histories that could have occurred. While we are capable of contemplating a future pulsating with possibility, we quickly forget that our experience was one of many that could have been. As a consequence, often we draw lessons from the past that are wrong. For example, you could conclude that you're such a skillful driver that you really stand no chance of being in an accident. That's a very dangerous conclusion.

      Humans love stories.³ They are one of the most powerful and emotive ways that we communicate with one another. Our parents told us stories, and we tell them to our children. People tell stories to teach lessons or to codify the past. The oral tradition of storytelling goes back thousands of years and predates writing. All stories have common elements. There is a beginning, some inciting episode that launches a sequence of events. The storyteller explains why events unfolded as they did, though he may be inventing those causes. As the story proceeds, the action rises. Complications occur. Interesting stories have an element of suspense and surprise. We get invested in a story when there is something at stake, when the tension mounts, and when events occur that upset our expectations. And stories have a climax and a resolution: the protagonist wins or loses, and then the tension is released as things settle down once more.

      The need to connect cause and effect is deeply ingrained in the human mind.⁴ When we see an effect, we naturally seek the cause. Michael Gazzaniga, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, has worked with patients who have undergone surgery to sever the corpus callosum, the bundle of nerves that connects the right and left hemispheres of the brain. This surgery is a treatment for severe epilepsy. Gazzaniga and his colleagues were able to learn just how each hemisphere functions because in these patients the two halves of the brain cannot communicate with each other and so must function in isolation.

      One of their main conclusions was that the left hemisphere “includes a special region that interprets the inputs we receive every moment and weaves them into stories to form an ongoing narrative of our self-image and our beliefs.”⁵ Gazzaniga calls this region the interpreter. One of the left hemisphere's main jobs is to make sense of the world by finding a cause for every effect, even if the cause is nonsensical.

      In one experiment, Gazzaniga showed a split-brain patient two cards with images on them. The patient's left eye (controlled by the right hemisphere) saw a snowy scene. The patient's right eye (controlled by the left hemisphere) saw a chicken's foot. When asked to pick a card that related to what he saw, the patient picked a shovel with his left hand (right hemisphere) and a chicken with his right hand (left hemisphere). In other words, each hemisphere independently came up with an appropriate response. For example, the right hemisphere correctly chose something related to what it had seen: a snow shovel for the snow. However, in most people, the right hemisphere has no ability to express language. And all the left hemisphere knew about was a chicken's foot and the image of a shovel that it inexplicably chose. How could he resolve the conflict? Make up a story. When the researchers asked the patient why he picked СКАЧАТЬ