Certain kinds of rare events are called black swans, after Nassim Taleb’s term to describe the kind of unexpected, rare events that have significant and unanticipated consequences (the Internet, September 11, and so on). But not all rare events are black swans. Some are just rare, simply tail events. In any distribution of possible outcomes, many are probable and a few are outliers. Flip a coin 400 times. Odds are that you’ll see heads roughly 200 times, give or take. Yet there is a nonzero probability that you'll flip that coin 399 times before you see the first head. It’s a very small probability, but it could happen.

I mention this by way of introduction to my recent tail event. I mentioned in my last post that I’d just made a huge amateur investing mistake and that in all likelihood I had just flushed down the toilet a pretty huge sum of money. Huge for me, anyway.

In real time, I spent almost two weeks sitting on a lot of virtually worthless stock options, trying to come to terms with the stupidity and/or incompetence of a novice in way over his head. As I said at the time, “I’d gladly have given [that money] to any number of charities or individuals, but that is not an option available to me now.” Even though I have slowly but steadily come to regard myself as an atheist during the past seven or eight years, I found myself occasionally making promises to “the air, or any kind of supernatural entity that may or may not exist, given appropriate caveats, and of course assuming that said entity, given its existence, is the kind of entity that steps in to micromanage human affairs based on its own selfish wishes” that, if things worked out such that I didn’t lose all that money, I would gladly donate it to a collection of mindfully chosen charities whose goal it is to improve the lives of people having a difficult time in the world.

And as a result of making such pacts, or more precisely, as a result of allowing for the possibility that someone might be listening to them, I found myself falling into that simplistic mindset wherein one starts implicitly viewing events in the world as responses on the part of an all-powerful and ever-active deity to the unseen, internal sequence of thoughts, motives, beliefs, and doubts, that pass through a person’s awareness during the course of a day. Knowing full well that God does not manipulate the stock market to answer the selfish wishes of a non-believer, I nonetheless caught myself on at least one occasion wondering if he might. Realizing how weak-minded this was, I tried to turn the pacts inward and vowed to myself to follow through regardless of whether some entity had been listing, to follow through simply because it would be the right thing to do. This was the First Axiom of Morality that my mother had beat into my skull from as far back as I can remember: Do the right thing, even if no one is watching. But even so, as the stock price began to creep up and I realized that these things might not end up completely worthless after all, the deal gradually weakened: from donating all of the money, to only the profit, to just the percentage of a typical tithe. I justified each of these transitions admirably, but justified them nonetheless. A supplicant will say certain things that he might conveniently forget when he’s been given shelter, a warm bath, and a hot meal.

And, in fact, were God testing the sincerity of my resolutions, he could have chosen no better way than to make the bet pay off, and pay off big. That’s exactly what happened. On one hand, it was quite fortunate for me. It’s like I fell down a hole and found a bag of buried cash with my name on it. “To Mr. Proportion, from The Fates.” On the other hand, I now have that most difficult of decisions to make. Knowing (in my renewed certainty of God’s complete lack of desire or ability to micromanage human affairs) that there will be no consequences, I could conveniently forget to give any of it away. The First Axiom of Morality pretty much prevents me from completely reneging on the deal I made, but the Theorem of Rationalization, along with the associated Lemma of Justification of What’s Convenient and Self-serving, makes it quite easy to give away much less than the standard tithing percentage and still argue that it’s better than if I’d given nothing.

Thanks to the miracle of the Internet, it all happened on a Friday I spent sitting on various airplanes, far away from Wall Street and my computer. Knowing that I’d be away from the computer and unable to obsessively track the price of this particular option throughout the day, I programmed a series of automatic trades to sell various increments at various prices if the price went up while I was away. I had bought these things for 15 cents each, so I set up the trades to sell some at 20 cents, some at 25 cents, and so on up to 40 cents. These may seem like trifling amounts, but I had accidentally bought quite a lot of them, and if you look at the prices as ratios, you see that selling them for 30 cents each would actually double my money. I thought it really unlikely that the price would go that high, but set up the trades as a precaution and expected still to own most, if not all, of these options when I returned on Monday.

So I was quite surprised, when I got to my destination and ended up somewhat randomly spending an hour at a public library waiting to be picked up, to see what I saw when I reserved 15 minutes at the public internet terminal and logged into my account. The stock price had skyrocketed that day. There was now an enormous amount of cash sitting in my account, and I no longer owned a single option. Quite the tail event.

I’m proud to say that I’ve identified four worthwhile charities this week and, again thanks to the miracle of the Intertubes, it took approximately 25 seconds to fire off donations to each of them. But my samaritanosity is starting to feel satiated, and I haven’t even reached half the standard tithing percentage yet. Did my mother fail? Or is okay to be only human? Or is it none of the above?

It takes as much faith to be a non-believer as it does to be a believer; there is an equal lack of evidence on both sides. It seems that, though your faith was tested, it remains strong. Congratulations!

take the money. no one is watching.