Another way to rephrase the general distinction is as follows: Mediocristan is where we must endure the tyranny of the collective, the routine, the obvious, and the predicted; Extremistan is where we are subjected to the tyranny of the singular, the accidental, the unseen, and the unpredicted. As hard as you try, you will never lose a lot of weight in a single day; you need the collective effect of many days, weeks, even months. Likewise, if you work as a dentist, you will never get rich in a single day—but you can do very well over thirty years of motivated, diligent, disciplined, and regular attendance to teeth-drilling sessions. If you are subject to Extremistan-based speculation, however, you can gain or lose your fortune in a single minute.
Table 1 summarizes the differences between the two dynamics, to which I will refer in the rest of the book; confusing the left column with the right one can lead to dire (or extremely lucky) consequences.
| TABLE 1 | |
|---|---|
| Nonscalable | Scalable |
| Mild or type 1 randomness | Wild (even superwild) or type 2 randomness |
| The most typical member is mediocre | The most “typical” is either giant or dwarf, i.e., there is no typical member |
| Winners get a small segment of the total pie | Winner-take-almost-all effects |
| Example: audience of an opera singer before the gramophone | Today’s audience for an artist |
| More likely to be found in our ancestral environment | More likely to be found in our modern environment |
| Impervious to the Black Swan | Vulnerable to the Black Swan |
| Subject to gravity | There are no physical constraints on what a number can be |
| Corresponds (generally) to physical quantities, i.e., height | Corresponds to numbers, say, wealth |
| As close to Utopian equality as reality can spontaneously deliver | Dominated by extreme winner-take-all inequality |
| Total is not determined by a single instance or observation | Total will be determined by a small number of extreme events |
| When you observe for a while you can get to know what’s going on | It takes a long time to know what’s going on |
| Tyranny of the collective | Tyranny of the accidental |
| Easy to predict from what you see and extend to what you do not see | Hard to predict from past information |
| History crawls | History makes jumps |
| Events are distributed[14] according to the “bell curve” (the GIF) or its variations | The distribution is either Mandelbrotian “gray” Swans (tractable scientifically) or totally intractable Black Swans |
