On the Survival of Rats in the Slush Pile | Page 7

and
depressed.
So it is with our rats. The rats which survived our experiment are by no
means necessarily stronger. In reality, there is a good chance that they
will be weaker. Radiation is not often good for you.
Taleb quotes a newspaper article about the Russian Mafia, which
referred to the new generation of gangsters as being 'hardened by their
Gulag experiences'. But, if any modern gangsters have indeed survived
the Gulag, they are hardly likely to have been 'hardened'; the camps
were not famous for providing fitnesstraining courses.
Despite these readily apparent flaws in Nietzsche's aphorism, there are
circumstances in which peoplebehave as if it were true. We
oftenassume that survivors of some intense selection process are
stronger than those who were eliminated. We assume that survivors are
necessarily the best of the cohort; whereas in reality the procedure may
have been flawed and they may simply have emerged by chance.
The dead rats, you see, are no longer around to steal our cheese, or to
give us Weil's disease. Whatever their strengths or weaknesses, virtues
or vices, they are gone, and are mourned by nobody. We forget them.
But it is a mistake to overlook them because some of them, at least,
might well have had characteristics which would be valuable outside
the context of our flawed selection procedures.
Another point to note is that the survivors, the chosen few, will
themselves tend to conclude, falsely, that they are necessarily superior
to those who died. Usually, the nature of rats being what it is, they will
conclude that they areinfinitely superior to the dead. Some humans
share this characteristic.
The swimmer's body
Another mistake in thinking is described by Taleb as 'the swimmer's
body' error.

It is observable that athletes who participate in different events have
differing physiques: rugby forwards are big and beefy; high jumpers
are tall and slim; and swimmers often have rather beautifully
proportioned bodies with 'elongated muscles'.
Observers who are fuzzy thinkers sometimes conclude from this that if
they want to have a beautifully proportioned body they should take up
swimming. But this is what is known, in popular parlance, as getting
things arse over tip.
Swimmers do not end up looking beautiful because they took up
swimming; they excel at swimming because they have the kind of
physique which lends itself to fast progress through water, and which is
itself aesthetically pleasing, the more so when developed by exercise.
The swimmer's body error often involves the false attribution of a
particular outcome to a particular set of traits. In the business world, it
is not unusual to find books which purport to identify the common
characteristics of successful entrepreneurs. The analysis is usually
based on the careers and backgrounds of those who have got to the top,
and it generally yields a list of such 'success factors' as optimism,
confidence, and a willingness to take risks. Yet had the researchers
interviewed those whofailed in business, going bankrupt within two or
three years, they would undoubtedly have found the same
characteristics present.
By the way, it does not necessarily follow from this (should you be
tempted to think it) that the successful entrepreneurs are successful
only as a result of chance, or random events; but it is a mistake to
attribute their success to qualities which they share with many of those
who failed.
Casanova: a case history
Casanova's famous memoirs tell of a life of continual setbacks and
escapes from dangerous situations, followed by periods of prosperity
and advancement. His was a roller-coaster ride, and it seems that, when
it came to overcoming difficulties, Casanova was an unusually

resourceful man.
This impression is false. In the above paragraph, the words 'it seems'
are the crucial ones. We know about Casanova simply because, through
a series of accidents of fate - random events - he happened to survive
long enough to write a ten-volume set of memoirs about his escapades.
Other adventurers, thousands of them, doubtless got into similar
scrapes and difficulties, but they ended their days on a dueller's sword
or died in a debtors' prison. Casanova was not unusually talented or
resourceful: there was nothing to differentiate him from any other
self-serving layabout except that Madame Randomness happened to
take a shine to him.
Next step
It would be possible to spend some time discussing Taleb's arguments
and examples, which are not without their own weaknesses. That,
however, is not the point of this essay. The point here is to learn to
think clearly about writing and publishing; and to that end we will now
apply some of Taleb's ideas to the present-day circumstances of writers
and publishers, and see what emerges.
Part 3: The experiment with rats when applied to publishing
Applicability and relevance
Taleb's ideas about randomness have proved useful in