The Black Swan’s Fatal Flaw

So I’ve been reading The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb recently.  It’s a decent book, though not significantly different from his other work Fooled by Randomness.  Having read the latter I realized he introduced a flaw to his own thinking in the former.

In Fooled By Randomness he talks about how people make up narrative fallacies for things they cannot predict.  In the aftermath we make up great, and mostly false, stories about how it could have been avoided.  “If only I had…”  The example he uses is a what-if someone had insisted that all airplanes have sturdy locked cabin doors prior to September 11th.  In that case, in that alternative world, September 11th wouldn’t have happened because someone would have planned for it.  The event would have been avoided and we’d be none the wiser to the possibility of someone crashing planes into the twin towers, the Pentagon, or the field in Pennsylvania.  The point being that we hardly ever give credit to the person who was thoughtful and avoided the disaster in the first place by being prepared for the outlier situation others hadn’t seen coming.  Instead, we reward the heroics.

At any rate, on p.130 of The Black Swan, Mr. Taleb goes into a discussion about Casinos and how they have these sophisticated surveillance systems to catch cheaters.  And yet, he points out, that the biggest losses to the Casino came not from risks that they anticipated but those that they didn’t anticipate.  His point being, I think, for all the models that they have about cheaters and high rollers and so on that could strip the casino of profits, they had nothing to protect against, for example, Siegfried and Roy’s white tiger attacking them.

But he forgets about his what-if scenario around September 11th.  Clearly the casino was quite thoughtful about many of the risks from gamblers, etc.  What if, for example, they had not done any of that, would the casino have simply gone broke from cheaters BEFORE any of these drastic events could have taken place?  The problem with his own argument is that it is based on a what-if as well.  Specifically a hypothesis that all this fancy surveillance they put it doesn’t make a difference compared to external factors.  We cannot explore the alternative history where the casino didn’t have all the safeguards in place so we really don’t know this.

He argues that any one gambler’s cheating is a drop in the bucket compared to these massive unexpected events, but in a world where they weren’t controlled for, would the casino even still be around?  It could be death by a thousand cuts instead.

I’m starting to wonder if his whole case isn’t essentially there are things we don’t know that we can’t control for and when they happen, you might be wiped from the face of the earth.  And to that I say, “um, so what?”  I can’t go around living my life thinking about them.  Casinos, for example, do what is rational to control for the risks they can so they don’t get wiped out by what Mr. Taleb would call a Mediocristan thing.  However, when a tiger mauls your stage act, well you just have to learn to adapt.  Being aware that we are unaware doesn’t change my behavior; I’m still by definition unaware that the tiger has had just about enough of his captors and is about to take his revenge.  For everything I can imagine there is something, maybe several orders of magnitude more, that I cannot.

I think it was best summed up by my MBB coach who said to me about the models I was building “many models are useful, no model is perfect.”

Over-engineering #3

This is  the headphone jack from a Macbook.  I know what you’re thinking… Mac is a statement in engineering genius!  This guy’s got a lot of gall to be writing about the Macbook.  Well, you’d be wrong.  I ran into this fun situation recently while visiting my in-laws.

My inlaws are Mac people.  I don’t hold it against them.  When we got to their house my mother in law was mildly distraught.  Her precious Mac would no longer play sound!  However, if they plugged in headphones it would play sound, but if they took the headphones out it wouldn’t play anything.

It sure sounded like the internal speaker had gotten damaged somehow.  That was, until my father in law told me that when the Mac starts up without headphones plugged in that it still makes its telltale Mac startup noise.  So the internal speaker clearly wasn’t totally broken.

Here’s what we knew:

1. The startup sound came out of the internal speakers.
2. If headphones were plugged in, all mac sounds came out of the headphones
3. If headphones weren’t plugged in, the headphone jack would turn red BUT the volume slider on the menu bar would be locked.  Also, when pressing the volume buttons on the keyboard it would display a little X below the volume.  You couldn’t change it.
4. If you started playing sounds without the headphones in the volume control would be locked.  Once the headphone jack was fully in the volume control would become unlocked.

Clearly something was odd about this engineering.  The mac recognizes three states rather than the expected two.  

1. The internal speakers are on, nothing is in the headphone jack.  Sound comes out through the speakers.
2. The internal speakers are off, something is partially in the headphone jack.  No sound comes out anywhere, but the volume control is locked.
3. The internal speakers are off, something is in the headphone jack.  Sound comes out of the headphones, the volume control is enabled.

And it was this set of facts that led me to the solution and conclusion that this headphone jack was overengineered.  So,  took the headphone plug, put it in about halfway and started jiggling it left and right.  And ta-da, the music started playing out of the main speakers again.  Problem solved.

Why do I consider this overengineering?  What’s the point of the second state in the three possible states above?  Clearly, you have some way of knowing when the headphone jack is fully in because that’s when you enable the volume control.  So what’s the point of the halfway control?  Why would I want to disable the external speaker and not enable the headphones?  It’s just dumb.