On the Survival of Rats in the Slush Pile | Page 3

visit Dr Taleb's web site; the URL is www.fooledbyrandomness.com.
The structure of the essay
Part 1 introduces the reader to the concept of black swans, as defined by Taleb.
Part 2 describes a hypothetical experiment with rats, which Taleb uses as a means of illustrating a number of erroneous ways of thinking and arguing. The chief error is perhaps that of falling prey to survivorship bias, which means that the observer sees only the survivors of any particular course of events, and fails to take adequate note of the characteristics of the many other participants.
In Part 3, we note that Taleb's experiment with rats is in many ways analogous with the slush-pile procedure, as traditionally carried out in the offices of publishers and literary agents. We then proceed to review Taleb's various forms of faulty thinking, as they apply in the context of writing and publishing; in particular, we try to learn how to think clearly about publishing issues, a skill which is in notably short supply.
The evidence assembled in Part 3 demonstrates beyond question that randomness plays a major part in publishing; specifically, we learn that, provided a manuscript reaches a certain basic professional standard, it is randomness which thereafter determines the 'success' of that book.
The fourth part of the essay is intended to provide practical assistance to those who are involved in looking for suitable books to publish (slush-pile selectors). Starting from the most basic of questions - Is publishing a sensible business for companies or individuals to be involved in? - we move on to consider both reactive and proactive procedures for managing the slush pile.
Part 5 outlines a similarly pragmatic approach that may be applied by those are slush-pile contributors, i.e. writers.
Part 1: The concept of black swans
A definition
Before we proceed further, I need to introduce you to the concept of black swans.
In his book Fooled by Randomness, Taleb defined a black swan, in the context of investment management, as an unexpected and catastrophic event which could destroy even a so-called 'master of the universe'.
Subsequently, Taleb wrote an essay entitled Fooled by Success: the Black Swan and the Arts; and in relation to the arts Taleb defines a black swan as 'a piece of work that, unexpectedly, captivates interests, spreads like wildfire, and dwarfs other contributions.' As examples of these massively successful phenomena he quotes the Harry Potter books, Mel Gibson's movie The Passion of the Christ, and the success of the Beatles. (Taleb, you see, is not an intellectual snob.)
Black swans in the arts are distinguished by the fact that they occur extremely rarely (when compared with the total amount of work which is offered to the public), and yet they have enormous impact. They provide, in short, exactly the kind of success that every writer (or publisher, producer, actor, et cetera) yearns for.
Taleb argues that these black swans are random events. After they occur, many observers claim to be able to see that their success was inevitable, for reasons which they then proceed to define; most of these reasons have to do with the innate qualities of the work in question. But Taleb maintains that these post-event explanations are essentially false and unreliable. They are highly influenced by hindsight bias, which makes use of 'posterior information'. Observers of black swans tend to overestimate the analysable and underestimate the non-explainable.
Above all, those who claim to understand black swans (but only after they have come into view) are neglecting the 'silent evidence'. Taleb maintains that if we are to understand the factors behind the huge success of Harry Potter (to mention but one convenient example) we need to do more than recognise the qualities that are present in the Harry books; we also need to consider the qualities which were present in the thousands of manuscripts which were rejected by agents and publishers and which never even made it into print.
Similarly, Taleb suggests, if we were to try to pin down the reasons for the rise to stardom of some young actor, we would need to consider the qualities present in other young actors - those who were not, for some reason, given a part for which 400 men auditioned. We would need to identify what it was that caused the producer to choose our future star for a part in his film rather than one of the 399 other candidates; and we would be likely to find, Taleb avers, that the producer's choice had nothing to do with 'talent', however defined. Or, to put it another way, we would find that many of the rejected applicants had just as much talent as the future star.
An example: Harry Potter
Just in case you don't know the much-told story, it is worth recording that the first Harry Potter book was rejected by every major publisher in London (some sources say as