Is God a Black Swan?: Part 1, Black Swans and the Triplet of Opacity

Two of the more interesting books I've read in the last year are Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets and The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable both by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

Both Fooled and The Black Swan are about issues of chance and randomness. Fooled is a cautionary tale focused mainly on investing and financial markets. The basic argument is this: Nobody knows how to predict markets but enough people are playing this game of roulette that, by chance alone, some people are "successful" in their investments. And yet, we regularly misunderstand this success, mistaking chance for causality. We see the successful as skilled rather than lucky.

The Black Swan continues this meditation on chance and randomness but it is more philosophical and epistemological in nature. If you are interested in the markets read Fooled. If you are interested in epistemology read The Black Swan.

The metaphor of "the black swan" comes from the notorious problem of induction from Philosophy 101. It goes something like this:

Every swan you have ever seen, read, or heard about is white. Thus, you conclude that "All swans are white." This form of reasoning is called induction. You reason from particulars to a general conclusion. But are you truly justified in this conclusion? The conclusion seems reasonable. All the data point to the truth of the conclusion. And yet this conclusion is very fragile. All it takes is one black swan to immediately falsify your claim. And here's the thing, how do you know you've checked thoroughly for the black swan? Just because YOU haven't seen or heard of one doesn't mean they don't exist.

For Taleb the black swan from the classic problem of induction becomes a metaphor for his project: Pointing out to us how we confidently predict the future based upon our past experiences when in reality we have no real idea what the future will bring. We routinely predict a future full of white swans because that is what we've always known. And yet black swans enter our world and disrupt the cosy plans we built upon our can't miss forecasts. Many of these black swan events are hugely disruptive and radically alter the course of the future. And yet, despite their huge impact, these events were wholly unexpected.

Taleb argues that Black Swan events are what drive the history world. From the computer to the Internet to nuclear bombs to the invention of the printing press. Prior to the onset of these Black Swans the future appeared orderly and predictable: Tomorrow will be like today and all the days before. But either quickly or slowly the Black Swan took history into a completely different direction, a direction no one had imagined or predicted.

One of Taleb's main concerns is this: How shall we regard forecasts of the future in a world of Black Swans? His answer, not surprisingly, is this: We should ignore them. Why? Because no one really knows what tomorrow will bring. Black Swans are, by definition, unpredictable. If you could predict them, well, they wouldn't be Black Swans.

Let's give Taleb's definition of a Black Swan:

"First, it is an outlier, as it lies outside the realm of regular expectations, because nothing in the past can convincingly point to its possibility. Second, it carries an extreme impact. Third, in spite of its outlier status, human nature makes us concoct explanations for its occurrence after the fact, making it explainable and predictable." (pp. xvii-xviii)

Black Swans occur when there is a disjoint between what we know and what we think we know. Black Swans come from beyond our epistemic horizons. This disjoint is fueled by facets of human psychology that make us overconfident in our pronouncements about the future. Taleb calls three important features of this psychology the triplet of opacity:

"a. the illusion of understanding, or how everyone thinks he knows what is going on in a world that is more complicated (or random) than they realize;

b. the retrospective distortion, or how we can assess matters only after the fact, as if they were in a rearview mirror (history seems clearer and more organized in history books than in empirical reality) and

c. the overvaluation of factual information and the handicap of authoritative and learned people, particularly when they create categories..." (p. 8)

Taleb is a provocative writer and thinker. I encourage you to read either Fooled or The Black Swan. As I read the books I couldn't help but think about them from my fused psychotheological stance. Again, Taleb's interests are empirical and pragmatic. I doubt he would smile on theological applications, And yet, I kept wondering "Is God a Black Swan?"

Specifically, I thought of the Call of Abraham, the Exodus, and the Incarnation. Each event fit features of Taleb's definition of a Black Swan: A rare, high impact event that only retrospectively "makes sense." And I also wondered at how, given God's Black Swan character, religious people might also suffer from the triplet of opacity. Don't religious people suffer from the illusion that they know what God is up to? Don't religious people clean up the past making God's actions appear more expected and rational than how they really appeared at the time of their occurrence? And might preachers, church authorities, theologians, or other "learned persons" be particularly prone to overconfidence when guessing what God is up to?

So I wondered, is God a Black Swan? And if so, what are the implications for the religious life?

Next Post: Part 2