500 Words a Week - Silent Evidence
Nassim Nicholas Taleb describes silent evidence in his book “The Black Swan”, from which the quotes and concepts below are taken from.
We are quick to learn from ours and others success’s but avoid looking at and learning from failure. This isn’t always our fault, as failure is something that isn’t popularized. How many biographies have you read or how many accounts do you follow of people achieving success beyond measure? Now ask yourself, how many biographies have you read or accounts do you follow where the person has majorly failed? Probably very little, failure doesn’t sell but it is a wonderful teacher.
Taleb describes a painting of a group of worshippers that prayed and then survived a subsequent shipwreck, what the painting doesn’t show is those who prayed but still drowned. We hold the successful on a pedestal, without looking at the silent around them who didn’t reach success.
Within S&C, we can struggle at times to know what truly is making a difference or not by only looking at the positive/ successful moments. We can become blinded and misguided by thinking our athletes are succeeding because of our interventions, and not enough attention to if our athletes are succeeding in spite of our interventions. “We see the obvious and visible consequences, not the invisible and less obvious ones. Yet those consequences can be – nay, generally are – more meaningful”.
Taleb discusses a metaphor for a “Rat Health-Club”, he takes a large population of rats and exposes them to radiation. Soon the weak rats begin to perish, and the strong rats survived. Upon releasing the rats into the wild, everyone is impressed by these strong rats who have emerged from this bespoke “Rat Health-Club”, and attribute the health club to creating these strong rats. Whereas, the rats were stronger than average going in, and are still the same emerging. “Note the following central fact: every single rat, including the strong ones, will be weaker after the radiation than before”.
Those who succeed in our programmes, may have succeeded regardless of whatever programme they were doing. A task of a good coach, is how to help the unsuccessful people going through your programme. Also, for those who will succeed regardless of whatever programme they were to do, you must ensure at a minimum that your programme is not making them worse like the radiation described above.
“Once we see ourselves into the notion of silent evidence, so many things around us that were previously hidden start manifesting themselves”.
Taleb describes how we are “explanation-seeking animals who tend to think that everything has an identifiable cause and grab the most apparent one as the explanation”. This may be due to certain problems within the educational system Taleb brings up in that “it forces students to squeeze explanations out of subject matters and shames them for withholding judgement, for uttering “I don’t know”.
“Note here that I am not saying causes do not exist; do not use this argument to avoid trying to learn from history. All I am saying is that it is not so simple; be suspicious of the “because” and handle it with care – particularly in situations where you suspect silent evidence”.
