Niall Ferguson: We can see the causes of Cho's rampage now, so why not before?
[Niall Ferguson is Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University www.niallferguson.org © Niall Ferguson, 2007.]
It was predictable. Cho Seung-Hui was a taciturn, moody loner. Four of his professors expressed concerns about the content of his work or classroom conduct. After complaints by two female students, the campus police and a college counsellor tried to have him committed to a mental institution. But a doctor didn't agree with the judge that he presented a danger to others. And guns are easy to buy in America (though banned on Virginia campuses). As a result 33 people are dead.
Journalists' efforts to explain the Virginia Tech massacre perfectly illustrate one of the central points of an idiosyncratically brilliant new book by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (Penguin/Allen Lane). Having been completely caught out by some random event, we human beings are wonderfully good at retrospectively predicting it. In reality, however, Cho was what Taleb calls a "Black Swan".
Why a black swan? Taleb's starting point is what philosophers call the problem of induction. Suppose you have spent all your life in the northern hemisphere and have only ever seen white swans. You might very well conclude (inductively) that all swans are white. But take a trip to Australia, where swans are black, and your theory will collapse. A "Black Swan" is therefore anything that seems to us, on the basis of our limited experience, to be impossible.
Over 20 years of university teaching, I have seen my fair share of taciturn, moody young men. Many have had difficulties with girls. Some have needed counselling. A few have required psychiatric treatment. The risk that one of my depressive students might commit suicide is one I have often contemplated. But the risk that one might run amok and kill 32 people? Never.
Why, Taleb asks, do we tend to confuse improbability with impossibility? Partly, he suggests, it's because evolution did not favour complex probabilistic thinking. Honed by centuries of hunter-gathering, we are disposed to make snap decisions on the basis of minimal evidence and facile theories - presumably because those who glimpsed a lion and started running, on the crude assumption that all wild animals always eat humans, were more likely to survive than those who preferred to test this hypothesis experimentally. There are friendly lions, just as there are black swans, but better safe than sorry....
Read entire article at Independent (UK)
It was predictable. Cho Seung-Hui was a taciturn, moody loner. Four of his professors expressed concerns about the content of his work or classroom conduct. After complaints by two female students, the campus police and a college counsellor tried to have him committed to a mental institution. But a doctor didn't agree with the judge that he presented a danger to others. And guns are easy to buy in America (though banned on Virginia campuses). As a result 33 people are dead.
Journalists' efforts to explain the Virginia Tech massacre perfectly illustrate one of the central points of an idiosyncratically brilliant new book by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (Penguin/Allen Lane). Having been completely caught out by some random event, we human beings are wonderfully good at retrospectively predicting it. In reality, however, Cho was what Taleb calls a "Black Swan".
Why a black swan? Taleb's starting point is what philosophers call the problem of induction. Suppose you have spent all your life in the northern hemisphere and have only ever seen white swans. You might very well conclude (inductively) that all swans are white. But take a trip to Australia, where swans are black, and your theory will collapse. A "Black Swan" is therefore anything that seems to us, on the basis of our limited experience, to be impossible.
Over 20 years of university teaching, I have seen my fair share of taciturn, moody young men. Many have had difficulties with girls. Some have needed counselling. A few have required psychiatric treatment. The risk that one of my depressive students might commit suicide is one I have often contemplated. But the risk that one might run amok and kill 32 people? Never.
Why, Taleb asks, do we tend to confuse improbability with impossibility? Partly, he suggests, it's because evolution did not favour complex probabilistic thinking. Honed by centuries of hunter-gathering, we are disposed to make snap decisions on the basis of minimal evidence and facile theories - presumably because those who glimpsed a lion and started running, on the crude assumption that all wild animals always eat humans, were more likely to survive than those who preferred to test this hypothesis experimentally. There are friendly lions, just as there are black swans, but better safe than sorry....