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

of Chance in
Life and the Markets'. When first published, this was selected by both
Amazon.com and the Financial Times as one of the best business books
of the year, and is published in 14 languages. It has, however, a
relevance far beyond the world of business.
Taleb's intellectual interests lie at the intersection of philosophy,
mathematics, finance, literature, and cognitive science. He specialises
in the risks of unpredicted rare events ('black swans'), and as an essayist
he is principally concerned with the problems of uncertainty and
knowledge.
For more information 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