Essay: "Black Swans and Game of Thrones"

Warning: This essay contains spoilers about the first season of Game of Thrones and the first book in the series A Song of Ice and Fire.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb defined a "Black Swan" event as follows:

"First, it is an outlier, as it lies outside the realm of regular expectations, because nothing in the past can convincingly point to its possibility.  Second, it carries an extreme impact.  Third, in spite of its outlier status, human nature makes us concoct explanations for its occurrence after the fact, making it explainable and predictable."

What's great about Taleb's book is how it points to a simple phenomenom that most of us (myself included) managed to ignore: how bad we are about predicting the future, and how good we are about forgetting about how bad we are about predicting the future.




You can see this most clearly in sports.  Go back and take a look at the predictions of the so-called experts (if you can find them).  They are wrong, all the time, about everything.  Virtually no experts consistently beat the "spread."  Predictions before the regular season are wrong so often it is more notable when a professional gets something right rather than the reverse.

And yet, what is so interesting is how we all keep looking at predictions.  I am a UFC fan and I check out people's predictions, every week, and heap scorn on people that don't agree with me, when virtually all of us are batting 50% (at least against the spread).  Indeed, this continued interest in predictions, when we know them to be useless, is almost more fascinating than our inability to predict the future in the first place.

Why?  Taleb speculates it is because we love stories.  When we are looking in the future, we make  predictions that fit in with a story, a narrative, of how we understand the universe.  Of course, this narrative only exists in our own minds, it's something that we use to help us retain and process information.  The universe is not a morality tale.  But when our predictions are wrong, we still love stories.  So we modify our existing story to explain what happened.  In other words, the future wasn't unpredictable.  We just need to tweak the narrative.

That's all well and good for UFC fights, but what about real life?  Here our inability to remember how we cannot predict the future can be dangerous.  The difference between the tallest man and the shortest man in the world is probably about 300% (3 feet to 9 feet, say).  Not even the tallest man is that far off the average.  But the difference between the poorest man and the richest is between $10 and $50 billion, a difference of 5 billion percent.

What this means is that if we look at a hundred people, we have a pretty good idea how tall the hundred and first person will be.  But we have absolutely no idea how rich the richest person will be, because the richest people differ so far from the average.  There is a small chance that someone could walk in so much richer than our previous experience that our predictions would be wildly wrong.

And the future is like that.  Anything can happen in the future - it is as good as random.  And our love of stories basically blinds us to risk. It is not that we can get better at predicting the future.  That's impossible.  It is that we should start to admit we cannot predict the future, and operate with the future as a "known unknown", rather than something that we can push around in the laboratory.

How does this tie into Game of Thrones?

Well, for those of you who haven't seen the show or read the books, this is what happens (spoiler alert!).  The King Robert and the Queen Cersei have a son named Joffrey.  The King Robert also has a younger brother, Stannis.  The King's advisor, the honourable Ned, finds out that Joffrey is not Robert's son, but was actually born of an incestuous relationship between Cersei and her brother.  After the death of Robert, Ned seeks to get word to Stannis, because he is the "rightful" king.

But Ned is captured by the Queen and thrown in the dungeon.  In response, Ned's family (who are powerful lords) rise in rebellion.  The Queen takes Ned out of the dungeon and offers him a deal: accept Joffrey as the rightful king and tell his family to stop the rebellion.  In return, Ned's daughters, who were being held by the Queen, will be spared, and Ned's family would be pardoned for their rebellion.  Ned himself would also be spared, but instead would be sent to serve on "the Wall" (basically a military exile on the frontier).  The Wall borders on Ned's family's lands and his brother and one of his sons are already serving there.

Ned accepts, and confesses to his "treason" in front of the people.  Unexpectedly, however, Joffrey reneges on the bargain and sentences Ned to death, who is abruptly executed.

This is very shocking in the book.  The deal proposed by the Queen seemed to make total sense for the characters.  Joffrey's actions, on the other hand, are nuts.  It makes it completely impossible to quell the rebellion and basically guarantees civil war.

It is also surprising from a literary perspective.  As a reader, you start to get a feeling where the story is going based on your experience of fantasy novels (or novels in general).  When I was reading the book, I remember thinking "Oh, okay, he's going to the wall - other chapters in the book took place up there, so it makes sense that it would happen."  When Ned died, I was so shocked I didn't believe it had "really" happened for some time.   I thought the big question for Ned was: would he compromise his honour and live?  Or would he refuse to compromise and die?  And then (holy shit!) he compromised his honour and they cut his head off anyway.

This event, for the unfortuante characters in Game of Thrones, was a Black Swan.  It was unpredictable and it had a huge effect (which was still being felt four long (perhaps overly long) books later.  But it was also easy to rationalize after the fact; Joffrey was unstable and cruel, and the action was not outside of the realm of possibility, but only in hindsight.

I've read elsewhere that the Game of Thrones novels are great literature because none of their characters are wholly good or evil, and instead everything is just shades of grey.  That's stupid.  In real life, Jack the Ripper may not have been "all evil", and Mother Theresa may not have been "all good", but they were close enough that for all intents and purposes that they might as well have been.  The same is true of Game and Thrones.  There are good guys and there are bad guys.  What makes the book so remarkable is that it refuses to craft the narrative that we expect in light of the goodness and badness of the characters.  That the author does not reward good and punish evil, or the reverse.  A certain level of cunning is useful, but not even that is any guarantee (as becomes clear in later books).  The universe in Game of Thrones is unpredictable, and (again, for all intents and purposes) ruled by chance.  It is only in hindsight that we start to tell ourselves that we should have (or could have) seen it coming all along.

The irony is what makes George R.R. Martin (the author of Game of Thrones) such a great storyteller is that he avoids the siren lure of storytelling, described above.  Throughout the series the unpredictable always happens, but it is never unexplainable in hindsight.  Martin tells a great story, and a meaningful, moving story, by not getting sucked into the narrative impulse.  It allows him to craft a story that is weird and jerky, but true to life.

Because when you re-read the books (or re-watch the show) Ned's death doesn't seem so unpredictable, but instead, sadly unavoidable.  And if you can hang onto your memory of the first experience, it gives you a rare opportunity to see the machinery of your mind working, pasting down the corners that sticking up, trimming loose edges, plucking away loose threads.  Making up the story as much as the author did.

And I think there's a lesson there, a lesson about the whims and tiny moments that drive history, about how tired and predictable most literature really is (because of its driving need to be literature), and about our own impulse to harness the formless chaos of the universe.