Why Rafael Nadal is like a Black Swan

"Black Swan" is business-speak for a single observation that demolishes a previously plausible theory. 

The phrase comes from Nassim Taleb's excellent book - The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. Suppose one had a theory that "all swans are white". This would have been a really solid theory for a while, it would have been consistent with available evidence, robust to skeptical inquiry. The theory would have held until Australia was discovered, and black swans were observed, at which point the theory is toast. Personally, I find the metaphor a little awkward. But now that it has become a part of the language, it is quite helpful in talking about the limitations of statistics, and the problems that come from looking in the rear view mirror to get a view of the road ahead.

Taleb's book is about finance, but his concept applies to any aspect of life, including tennis. 

Peter Bodo's preview of the 2012 French Open in Tennis magazine talks about why Rafael Nadal is a black swan (though he doesn't use that phrase).  Until Rafa burst on the scene, the prevailing theory was that Bjorn Borg would be the last dominant French Open champion. After Bjorn Borg, who played with a wooden Donnay racquet, French Open champions had been a succession of one-slam-wonders.

"There were solid, well thought out, inter-related reasons for this. The men's field was getting deeper and deeper. At the same time, advances in racquet and string technology gave everyone a boost of power and a more lethal return game. Combine these comparably superior and fit athletes with more powerful weapons, and put them to work on a relatively slow court, and it was a bit like tennis roulette.

It seemed that Roland Garros had been transformed from the tournament that only the best and most consistent players could win into the one that anybody could win. And that was only heightened by the fact that so many of its more successful players were developed on clay in emerging tennis nations like Spain, Sweden, France, and Argentina. When you looked back upon the Borg years, you were apt to think, "We'll not see the likes of him again. . ."

And when Bruguera, who had even more radical technique than Borg, was unable to add to his Roland Garros haul of two, it seemed that the days when style-of-play and particularly vicious topspin might yield a huge advantage were definitely over. 

Well, Nadal has exposed all that as just so much fancy-pants theorizing..."

Good luck in Paris to the King of Clay.

Is it principled to be principled?

"Nobody ever did anything very foolish except from some strong principle". I chanced upon this quote a couple of months ago, and it has stayed in my mind ever since. It is an old quote, by the 2nd Viscount Melbourne, the young Queen Victoria's political mentor, but it has stayed in mind because it feels contemporary, and is less cynical than it sounds.

Good principles - like, for instance, that all human beings are created equal - tend to be very abstract. It is never obvious how these abstract principles translate into programs of specific action, into doing. However, it is always tempting to invoke these principles to build support for a program of action.

The problem with linking an action plan closely with its animating principle is that it makes it harder to abandon the action plan, which is a pity, because only certainty with any action plan is that it will be made to look silly by "black swans", by real-world conditions that the plan did not, and could not have, known about. The bigger the agenda, the more quickly the black swans will strike.

A program of action which is tightly linked to a cherished principle usually means a program of action that isn't adaptive enough. von Moltke the elder was pointing in the same direction when he said "No battle plan survives contact with the enemy"