The Roots of Unfairness: the Black
Swan in Arts and Literature
Nassim Nicholas Taleb1
2nd Draft, November 2004
Literary Reseach/Recherche Litteraire, Journal of the
International Comparative Literature Association
1.INTRODUCTION
It is a sad fact that among a large cohort of artists and
writers, almost all will struggle (say, work for
Starbucks) while a small number will derive a
disproportionate share of fame and attention. The same
applies to the so-called masterpieces that determine a
canon: a few pieces displace others from the lists in a
“winner-take-all” effect –all the while the neglected
pieces languish and disappear from our literary
consciousness.
It is even a sadder condition, and that is the concern of
this discussion, that a large share of the success of the
winner of such attention can be attributable to matters
that lie outside the piece of art itself, namely luck.
Why is such luck invisible to us? Much of the analyses
and explanations of the success (and attention) usually
focus on the piece itself taken in isolation –the critics
usually fail to include the losers, the “cemetery” of
unpublished or forgotten works. Often, the failures also
have the same “qualities” attributable to the winner,
but these are concealed and hidden, tucked away from
the observer’s scrutiny.
Furthermore, these extrinsic factors are of a different
character from the traditional randomness that has
been studied historically, say in statistics textbooks. The
dynamics of modern luck relate to the “intractable”
variety of uncertainty; they produce events that this
author categorizes as “Black Swans” (sometimes, more
technically, “Type-2 randomness” or, even more
technically, “large-impact events with small but
incomputable
probabilities”).
Unlike
traditional
uncertainty, these unexpected events are both
extremely rare, unexpected, yet command a large
impact.
There is a remarkable regularity to these ubiquitous
Black Swan...