Everything Is Obvious_ _Once You Know the Answer - Duncan J. Watts [70]
Much the same is true even of natural events that acquire black swan status. Hurricane Katrina, for example, was a huge storm, but it wasn’t the biggest storm we’ve ever witnessed, or even the biggest that summer. What made it a black swan, therefore, had less to do with the storm itself than it did with what happened subsequently: the failure of the levees; the flooding of large portions of the city; the slow and ineffective emergency response; the thousands of residents who were subjected to unnecessary suffering and humiliation; the more than 1,800 people who died; the hundreds of thousands more who were evacuated; the decision of many of these evacuees not to return; the economic effect on the city of New Orleans of losing a large chunk of its population; and the impression left in the public mind of a monstrous debacle, shot through with latent racial and class discrimination, administrative incompetence, and the indifference of the powerful and privileged to the weak and vulnerable. When we talk about Hurricane Katrina as a black swan, in other words, we are not speaking primarily about the storm itself, but rather about the whole complex of events that unfolded around it, along with an equally complicated series of social, cultural, and political consequences—consequences that are still playing out.
Predicting black swans is therefore fundamentally different than predicting events like plane crashes or changes in the rate of unemployment. The latter kind of event may be impossible to predict with certainty—and hence we may have to make do with predicting probabilities of outcomes rather than the outcomes themselves—but it is at least possible to say in advance what it is that we are trying to predict. Black swans, by contrast, can only be identified in retrospect because only then can we synthesize all the various elements of history under a neat label. Predicting black swans, in other words, requires us not only to see the future outcome about which we’re making a prediction but also to see the future beyond that outcome, because only then will its importance be known. As with Danto’s example from the previous chapter about Bob describing his prizewinning roses before they’ve actually won any prizes, this kind of prediction is not really prediction at all, but prophecy—the ability to foresee not only what will happen, but also what its meaning will be.17
Nevertheless, once we know about black swans, we can’t help wishing that we had been able to predict them. And just as commonsense explanations of the past confuse stories with theories—the topic of the last chapter—so too does commonsense intuition about the future tend to conflate predictions with prophecies. When we look to the past, we see only the things that happened—not all the things that might have happened but didn’t—and as a result, our commonsense explanations often mistake for cause and effect what is really just a sequence of events. Correspondingly, when we think about the future, we imagine it to be a unique thread of events that simply hasn’t been revealed to us yet. In reality no such thread exists—rather, the future is more like a bundle of possible threads, each of which is assigned some probability of being drawn, where the best we can manage is to estimate the probabilities of the different threads. But because we