Nassim Nicholas Taleb vs. Historians

When I was a grad student in history, I was trained to burrow into tiny corners of the past and "unpack" everything I found there. In essence, history was a hoarder's attic, and my job was to clean out a tiny part of it. But now that I'm teaching history professionally, I have a different view of the social function of historians.

Our job isn't just to pursue a hyper-specific research project until we keel over or retire. It's to serve as the hiccocampus for the entire species. All humans have memories and personal histories, of course. But historians are the specialists who are trained to consolidate and preserve these individual stories, in all their dizzying complexity. Without history, the human species is not so different from Guy Pearce in Memento. I think it's a hugely important job. But it's a job that we academic historians frequently fail at, because we don't do enough to engage people who aren't our students and colleagues.

That's why I write Res Obscura, and it's why I'm taking some time tonight to tear Nassim Nicholas Taleb's interpretation of history to shreds.

That's what I'll endeavor to do, at least. I leave it for you to decide whether or not I succeed. And I should say at the outset that I have no particular bone to pick with Taleb, a derivatives trader and fund manager turned NYU professor who is most famous for his bestselling book The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (2007). He's clearly an intelligent and successful person. But it seems to me that he has fallen into the pit that always threatens to swallow intelligent and successful people: vanity and blind self-regard.

Now, lest I be accused of resorting to an ad hominem argument, let me get to my substantive critique of what Taleb has to say about history and historians. Namely, I'm referring to a section from his as-yet-unpublished book Skin in the Game: The Underlying Matrix of Daily Life, which appears to have a February, 2018 publication date but which Taleb has been previewing on his Twitter feed.

I'll take what Taleb has to say about academic historians piece by piece because I find his critique to be both interesting and bizarrely wrong-headed. Here's the first bit:

Taleb seems here to be taking a page* from Stephen Pinker's Better Angels of Our Nature, which argued that the recent past (the last two centuries, say) have actually been more peaceful and less catastrophic than preceding centuries, despite the presence of two World Wars and other horrors. Pinker argues that the rise of mass communication has made it appear as if catastrophic events are on the rise, when in reality they were just less widely reported in the past, and were largely taken for granted. I think Pinker relies on some shaky evidence at times, but also makes a fairly compelling argument on the basis of well-attested phenomena like the decline in murder rates and the decline of capital punishment. Taleb, however, does none of this. He simply asserts that historians focus on warfare rather than peace in all times and places, and that they do so because the "salient is mistaken for the statistical."

* [Edit - evidently Taleb has managed to alienate and attack Pinker as well, although I continue to see similarities in their approaches to history.]

By who, one wants to ask? For an avowed empiricist, Taleb's data are strangely elusive.

It's hard to guess what historical accounts Taleb has in mind here, since history hasn't been a simple record of battles and diplomacy since Caesar wrote De Bello Gallico, if it even was at that time. Granted, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century historians took a decidedly top-down view, and the impression we get from historians like Gibbon and Jacob Burckhardt is of a series of princes, geniuses, and villains who march through time like glorious suns, outshining the ordinary mortals around them. But since at least the early twentieth century, historians have pushed off in the opposite direction, focusing on such things as "history from below," "histories of daily life," "microhistory," "social history," and the like. As an example, the books that win prizes and praise in my subfield of Atlantic history are about fisherman, wine merchants, and "an eighteenth-century couple's spiritual journey," not wars.

So I truly am at a loss as to who Taleb has in mind when he writes that "we are fed a steady diet of histories of wars." The producers of the History Channel?

Onwards:

Oof. In my experience, people who resort to denigrating the intelligence of those they argue with typically end up on the losing side of the argument. But leaving that off to the side, Taleb sets up a straw man called "historians" here. These unnamed historians, we're told, are "motivated by stories of conflict." They don't care about people like "merchants, barbers, doctors, money changers, plumbers, prostitutes." (Damn it, we love those people!) And they've all ignored the French Annales school, which "failed to change much." 

Where to begin? It was at this point in reading Taleb's argument that it began to dawn on me: in attempting to write what he thinks is a contrarian takedown of academic history, he has actually produced an argument that virtually all of the academic historians I know (including me) will agree with. He just managed to do it in a remarkably uncharitable way. 

First of all, the French Annales school is among the most important historical movements of the twentieth century and is hugely influential among contemporary academic historians. Fernand Braudel, one of the leaders of the Annales School, was the historian who came up most frequently in my graduate seminars (he's also my personal favorite historian - I recommend jumping right into his masterpiece The Structures of Everyday Life if you have any interest in early modern history). 

In fact, all of the historians who Taleb singles out in a footnote to this passage as oppositional to "conventional history books" (Georges Duby, Fernand Braudel, Marc Bloch, Phillipe Ariès) are among the paragons of conventional academic history. He is basically listing the contents of a graduate history course syllabus, and using those works to mount an attack on what he believes academic history to be. As one of my favorite professors in grad school, the brilliantly curmudgeonly A.G. Hopkins liked to say, Taleb is "pushing on an open door."

I haven't met any mafia debt-collectors, but I have met a few finance people. I would be willing to bet that historians have far more interesting lives than your average commodity speculator. We're not just nerds paging through tomes in "the Yale Library." Historian friends of mine have done things like getting access to the Pan Am archives to look through the letters preserved in a 1950s Brazilian plane crash, or sitting alone in the dark with an Inca mummy in Peru, or recreating an alchemical lab in the Columbia University chemistry department, or interviewing people in Cairo and Algeria during the height of the Arab Spring. 

Hell, I'm far more boring than the examples I just listed, but even I just got back from a month in Iran, and as part of my historical research have spent time in a bad part of Rio filming illegal hot air balloon launches, have paged through letters written by Isaac Newton and George Washington, and have reconstructed forgotten drugs. Is that boring stuff fit only for "academic temperaments"? I don't know. I think it's pretty interesting (but then, I would). At any rate, I think the definition of "adventurers and doers" and "having skin in the game" is hugely subjective here. Again, where's the empiricism?

Onwards to the end:

This is where Taleb really loses me. His killer example of how historians fall prey to overfitting is, itself, based on a misguided view of how statistics should work in history. Taleb argues that, because "six hundred thousand Italians died in the Great War," the post-reunification era of supposed stability in Italy was actually far more violent than the era of warfare that, Taleb tells us, historians believe to have characterized early modern Italy. Now, I'll just take this claim at face value and note in passing that Taleb again doesn't identify who these historians are who believe that warfare was the dominant characteristic of Renaissance Italy.

Taleb wants the reader to believe that there was in fact an order of magnitude more death in the Italy of the post-unification period than in the early modern period. He wants this point to do the work of demonstrating that historians tend to overstate the bad and the violent in the past, and that we confuse frequency for intensity. Fine. But he manages to ignore a glaringly obvious fact: you need to compare proportions, not raw numbers, across time periods. Roughly 40 million Italians were alive in 1921. Roughly 11 million were alive in 1500. It's simply dishonest to make comparisons of total numbers of deaths in battle between these two time periods without noting this. 

But again, leaving these points aside - Taleb is arguing with a nonexistent group of people here. He has somehow convinced himself that academic historians are a bunch of nerds sitting in library stacks, getting angry at current events, and channeling their frustration about the world into a vision of the past that sees everything as conflict, and ignores all the fun collaborations between barbers, prostitutes, and merchants. This is precisely the opposite of the vision of academic history that I got from grad school, and the vision that I teach in my classes at UC Santa Cruz. Now, keep in mind that I'm arguing from my own experiences here and those of my most outspoken friends, and hence I assume that Taleb, if he reads this, will accuse me of "overfitting" as well. But I have to wonder - what is he basing his expertise on? A public spat with Mary Beard and perhaps a few bad encounters in NYU hallways, squared against Taleb's newfound love for Bloch, Braudel, and A History of Private Life. 

Well Nassim, I like that stuff too. So do all the other historians I know. 

Let's be friends.

Urine, Phosphorus, and the Philosopher's Stone

Joseph Wright of Derby, The Alchemist Discovers Phosphorus, 1771 (detail).

In 1681, the English writer John Evelyn covered his face with a glowing material, newly invented by an alchemist. He turned toward a mirror, and was astonished.

“I appeared in the darke like the face of the moone, or rather like some spirit, or strange apparition,” Evelyn wrote in his diary. This eerie substance had been given to Evelyn by a member of the Royal Society of London, Doctor Frederick Slare. It had been produced as a result of alchemical investigations by Slare and Robert Boyle into the "virtues" or “animal spirits” thought to imbue all living matter. Its mode of action was unknown, and for some reason it "had an urinous smell."

As he stared into the mirror, Evelyn’s thoughts drifted toward the Catholic Church. This was not surprising, since English politics at this time was consumed by the question of whether James, the heir to the throne and brother of King Charles II (both suspected Catholics), would be allowed to assume the throne and, potentially, unseat the Church of England as the nation's state religion. The attitude among English Protestants like Evelyn had become decidedly conspiratorial. Evelyn worried that if this “extraordinary” substance were to fall into the hands of Catholic priests, “what a miracle might they make it, supposing them either to rub the Consecreated Wafer with it, or washing the Priests face & hands with it, & doing the feate in some darke Church or Cloyster, proclaime it to the Neighborhood.”

“I am confident,” Evelyn concluded, “that the Imposture would bring thousands to them."

Evelyn also recalled that he had once seen something similar at the Piazza Navona in Rome, where “a certain Mountebank” (a public performer who sold dubious medicines) had demonstrated a seemingly magical ring that flared with a light as bright as a candle flame before he “fell to prating for the vending of his pretended Remedies.”

Frontispiece woodcut of a mountebank from Salvator Winter's A Pretious Treasury, or a New Dispensatory Contayning 70 approved Physical rare Receits (London, 1649).

Evelyn knew enough about natural philosophy to understand that this trick was not supernatural. Although he failed to obtain the recipe from the Roman mountebank years earlier, Evelyn realized that the trick depended on the so-called lapis illuminabilis, or glowing stone. But this new substance of 1681 seemed different. "Never did I see any [lapis illuminabilis] comparable to this," Evelyn wrote. Evelyn considered it safe enough both to paint onto his face and to consume as a medicine: on the recommendation of Robert Boyle himself, Evelyn mixed the substance with a glass of ale and quaffed it down, enjoying the "agreeable amber scent" of his cocktail and anticipating benefits to his health.

This eerie glowing substance, in other words, was not just a chemical experiment, but a medicinal drug.

And, what's more, it was a drug made out of huge amounts of human urine.

John Evelyn by Robert Walker, circa 1648.

Before we get to that, though, what exactly was the the phenomenon that Evelyn observed? The 1681 substance was an early example of the phenomenon that is today known as phosphorescence, after the chemical element phosphorus. The name itself means "light-bearer" and comes from the Greek word Φωσφόρος [phosphoros]. Interestingly, the same word was used to describe Satan in the Old Testament. When the Bible was translated into Latin, phosphoros turned into the more familiar devilish epithet "Lucifer."

It's not an unfitting association. When white phosphorus encounters oxygen, it undergoes a process known as chemiluminescence, a chemical reaction that results in the emission of light. In the specific case of phosphor, two molecules called HPO and P2O2 are produced via oxidation that emit a mild greenish glow. In later centuries, however, it was discovered that white phosphorus could also be turned into a gruesome weapon.

* * *

Although phosphorus wasn't formally identified as an element until the work of Lavoisier in 1777, it had been known in various forms to natural philosophers and alchemists from the early seventeenth century onwards. By 1680, these recipes had made their way to the laboratory of Robert Boyle, who in that year produced a phosphorescent compound that, he wrote, "shone so briskly and lookt so oddly that the sight was extreamly pleasing, having in it a mixture of strangeness, beauty and frightfulness."

Boyle had apparently learned of the substance from a German alchemist who, in turn, borrowed the formula for phosphorus from one Hennig Brand. Like many natural philosophers of his generation, Brand was passionately invested in the search for the Philosopher's Stone. This was a hypothetical substance that could transform base metals like lead into gold. Some also speculated that its transformative powers might also grant immortality. By 1669, Brand's search had led him down a somewhat unexpected path: he believed that human urine might hold the key.

Brand certainly couldn't be accused of being lazy. By one account, the total amount of urine he collected for his alchemical work amounted to 1500 gallons (note, however, that I haven't been able to find this figure in any peer-reviewed sources, so it's likely apocryphal). During one investigation of its chemical properties, Brand found that when urine was boiled down into a thick syrup, a red oil could be skimmed off the top of it. This he collected, refined, and heated for around sixteen hours. The resulting distillate produced flames upon encountering open air. It also produced an eerie glow. Brand had identified the trace amounts of phosphorus that occur naturally in urine.

Detail from The Quack Doctor, attributed to Jan Steen, 1650s.

This was probably not the first time that a chemiluminescent subject had been investigated by alchemists. Recalling the secret of the mountebank's glowing ring in Rome, Evelyn complained that "though there is a process in Jo. Baptista Porta and others how to do it, yet on several trials they none of them have succeeded." This was a reference to the recipes for glowing stones or liquids that circulated in a number of 16th and 17th century works of natural magic, such as Gianbattista della Porta's Magia Naturalis, which was first published in Naples in 1558.

An early example of such a stone was associated with one Vincenzo Casiorola who discovered a mineral which he called lapis solaris (solar stone) that, after being heated on a flame and exposed to sunlight, was capable of glowing in the dark. Theories regarding these forms of phosphoresence typically involved beliefs about the ability of materials to "store" the essence of the sun or of other forms of light. Urine and other products of the human body were thus of great interest, since if (as many early modern philosophers argued) there was indeed something divine in human bodies which permitted the use of reason and communion with God, then perhaps residues of this could be detected in the substances cast off by the body.

In other words, phosphorus shared a name with the Devil, but its unexplainable glow promised to unlock philosophers' understanding of the Divine.

* * *

By the middle decades of the eighteenth century, when experiments with phosphorus had become widespread, chemistry was beginning to come into its own as a discipline distinct from alchemy. The degree of difference between seventeenth-century alchemy and eighteenth-century chemistry has sometimes been overstated, and it was by no means the case that the generation that followed in the footsteps of Boyle and Brand abandoned their spiritual beliefs or sense of divine mission. But we can see signs of a larger shift here.

To the generation of natural philosophers who worked in the second half of the eighteenth century, Evelyn's fear that Catholic priests might harness phosphorescent substances to awe their congregations would likely have sounded quaint. Phosphorus was now firmly in the domain of the man of science, not of the priest or the mountebank. And the search for the philosopher's stone had been replaced by the search for the fundamental building blocks of chemistry and pharmacology, from hydrogen (discovered in 1766) and oxygen (discovered in 1772) to psychoactive compounds like morphine (first isolated and scientifically described in 1804) and caffeine (1819).

The images of Joseph Wright of Derby, a painter who documented and participated in the earliest phases of what is now called the Industrial Revolution, can give us a visual insight into this shift. Like Caravaggio and Georges de la Tour before him, Wright was fascinated by images that relied upon a single light source to produce a high-contrast chiaroscuro effect, picking out dots of light amid dark shadows.

Wright's 1771 painting The Alchemist Discovering Phosphorus looked backwards to an older era of chemical investigation, depicting a bearded natural philosopher in a rib-vaulted chamber staring in awe at the glowing gas emanating from a retort. The only other source of the light in the image is the glow of the moon through a Gothic arch, lending a mystical quality to the scene, and recalling the Catholic past that England was rapidly forgetting.

But it was a painting that Wright had created some years earlier, circa 1763, that seemed to point toward a new and uncertain future. In Wright's A Philosopher Giving a Lecture on the Orrery, there are no moons beyond the tiny artificial satellites orbiting a mechanical sun. The Gothic background has been replaced by a sturdy row of bound volumes, and the bearded alchemist has become a clean-shaven philosopher.

An unseen glow, mimicking that of the sun itself, shines on the faces of the three young boys clustered around the structure like a new dawn.