Antifragility has a singular property of allowing us to deal with the unknown, to do things without understanding them — and do them well. Let me be more aggressive: we are largely better at doing than we are at thinking, thanks to antifragility. I’d rather be dumb and anti fragile than extremely smart and fragile, any time.
This is the tragedy of modernity: as with neurotically overprotective parents, whose trying to help are often hurting us the most.
If about everything top-down fragilizes and blocks antifragility and growth, everything bottom-up thrives under the right amount of stress and disorder. The process of discovery (or innovation, or technological progress) itself depends on antifragile tinkering, aggressive risk bearing rather than formal education.
I have made the claim that most of history comes from Black Swan events, while we worry about fine-tuning our understanding of the ordinary, and hence develop models, theories, or representations that cannot possibly track them or measure the possibility of these shocks.
“Nonlinear” means that when you double the dose you don’t get twice the initial effect, but rather a lot more or a lot less. When plotted on a graph, it does not show as a straight line, rather as a curve. In such environment, simple causal associations are misplaced; it is hard to see how things work by looking at single parts.
Consider that Mother Nature is not just “safe.” It is aggressive in destroying and replacing, in selecting and reshuffling. When it comes to random events, “robust” is certainly not good enough. Given the unattainability of perfect robustness, we need a mechanism by which the system regenerates itself continuously by using, rather than suffering from, random events, unpredictable shocks, stressors, and vitality.
We have the illusion that the world functions thanks to programmed design, university research, and bureaucratic funding, but there is compelling evidence to show that this is an illusion, the illusion I called lecturing birds how to fly. Engineers and tinkerers develop things while history book are written by academics.
The fragilista falls for the Soviet-Harvard delusion, the (unscientific) overestimation of the reach of scientific knowledge. Because of such delusion, he is what is called a naive rationalist, a rationalizer, or sometimes just a rationalist, in the sense that he believes that the reasons behind things are automatically accessible to him. Outside of physics, and generally in complex domains, the reasons behind things have had a tendency to make themselves less obvious to us. This property of natural things not to advertise themselves in a user’s manual is not much of a hindrance: some fragilistas will get together to write the user’s manual themselves, thanks to their definition of “science.”
In short, the fragilista is one who makes you engage in policies and actions, all artificial, in which the benefits are small and visible, and the side effects potentially severe and invisible.
But simplicity is not so simple to attain. Steve Jobs figured out that “you have to work hard to get your thinking clean and make it simple.” The Arabs have an expression for trenchant prose: no skill to understand it, mastery to write it.
Heuristics are simplified rules of thumb that make things simple and easy to implement. But their main advantage is that the user knows that they are not perfect, just expedient, and is therefore less fooled by their powers. They become dangerous when we forget that.
If you label them “fragile,” then you necessarily want them to be left alone in peace, quiet, order, and predicability. Everything that does not like volatility does not like stressors, harm, chaos, events, disorder, “unforeseen” consequences, uncertainty, and critically, time.
Experience is devoid of the cherry-picking that we find in studies, particularly those called “observational,” ones in which the researchers finds past patterns, and, thanks to the sheer amount of data, can therefore fall into the trap of an invented narrative.
If the subject is not interesting enough for me to look it up independently, for my own curiosity or purposes, and I have not done so before, then I should not be writing about it at all, period. Only distilled ideas, ones that sit in us for a long time, are acceptable — and those that come from reality.
Commerce is fun, thrilling, lively and natural; academia as currently professionalized is none of these. And for those who think that academia is “quieter” and an emotionally relaxing transition after the volatile and risk-taking business life, a surprise: when in action, new problems and scares emerge every day to displace and eliminate the previous day’s headaches, resentments, and conflicts. But academics (particularly in social science) seem to distrust each other; they live in petty obsessions, envy, and icy-cold hatreds, with small snubs developing into grudges, fossilized over time in the loneliness of the transaction with a computer screen and the immutability of their environment. Not to mention a level of envy I have almost never seen in business. My experience is that money and transactions purify relations; ideas and abstract matters like “recognition” and “credit” warp them, creating an atmosphere of perpetual rivalry.
The academics who tend to read in order to cite in their writing — rather than read for enjoyment, curiosity, or simply because they like to read — tend to be frustrated when they can’t rapidly scan the text and summarize it in one sentence that connects it to some existing discourse in which they have been involved.
Only academics and other non-real-world operators use the expression “real-world solution” instead of simply “solution.”
Debt always puts you on the left, fragilizes economic systems. And things are antifragile up to a certain level of stress.
A boxer might be robust, hale when it comes to his physical condition, and might improve from fight to fight, but he can easily be emotionally fragile and break into tears when dumped by his girlfriend. Your grandmother might have opposite qualities.
Logically, the exact opposite of a “fragile” parcel would be a package on which one has written “please mishandle” or “please handle carelessly.” Its contents would not just be unbreakable, but would benefit from shocks and a wide array of trauma.
Half of life — the interesting half of life — we don’t have a name for.
Some researchers hold that the benefits of vegetables may not be so much in what we call the “vitamins” or some other rationalizing theories (that is, ideas that seem to make sense in narrative form but have not been subjected to rigorous empirical testing), but in the following: plants protect themselves from harm and fend off predators with poisonous substances that, ingested by us in the right quantities, may stimulate our organisms. Limited, low-dose poisoning triggers healthy benefits.
How do you innovate? First, try to get into trouble. I mean serious, but not terminal, trouble. I hold that innovation and sophistication spark from initial situations of necessity, in ways that go far beyond the satisfaction of such necessity. Difficulty is what wakes up the genius. The excess energy released from overreaction to setbacks is what innovates.
I learned that the noise produced by the person is inverse to the pecking order: as with mafia dons, the most powerful traders were the least audible. One should have enough self-control to make the audience work hard to listen, which causes them to switch into intellectual overdrive. Mental effort moves us into higher gear, activating more vigorous and more analytical brain machinery.
A system that overcompensates is necessarily in overshooting mode, building extra capacity and strength in anticipation of a worse outcome and in response to information about the possibility of a hazard.
The wily Venetians knew how to spread information by disguising it as a secret.
The first-order information is the intensity: what matters is the effort the critic puts into trying to prevent others from reading the book, or the effort in badmouthing someone that matters, not so much what is said.
My son, I am very disappointed in you. I never hear anything wrong said about you. You have proven yourself incapable of generating envy.
When you don’t have debt you don’t care about your reputation in economics circles — and somehow it is only when you don’t care about your reputation that you tend to have a good one. Just as in matters of seduction, people lend the most to those who need them the least.
The natural is both antifragile and fragile, depending on source (and the range) of variation.
Lions are exterminated by the Canaanites, Phoenicians, Romans, and later inhabitants of Mount Lebanon, leading to the proliferation of goats who crave tree roots, contributing to the deforestation of mountain areas, consequences that were hard to see ahead of time.
For small children, pain is the only risk management information, as their logical faculties are not very developed. For complex systems are, well, all about information.
There may be a few good reason to be on medication, but my mood, my sadness, my bouts of anxiety, are a second source of intelligence — perhaps even the first source.
I don’t know anyone who ever learned to speak his mother tongue in a textbook, starting with grammar and, checked by bi-quarterly exams, systematically fitting words to the acquired rules. You pick up a language best thanks to situational difficulty, from error to error, when you need to communicate under more or less straining circumstances, particularly to express urgent needs.
Restaurants are fragile; they compete with each other, but the collective of local restaurants is antifragile for that very reason. Had restaurants been individually robust, hence immortal, the overall business would be either stagnant or weak, and would deliver nothing better than cafeteria food.
So some parts on the inside of a system may be required to be fragile in order to make the system antifragile as a result. Or the organism itself might be fragile, but the information encoded in the genes reproducing it will be antifragile.
Our minds cannot easily understand the complicated responses (we think linearly, and these dose-dependent responses are nonlinear). Our linear minds do not like nuances and reduce the information to the binary “harmful” or “helpful.”
The most interesting aspect of evolution is that hit only works because of its antifragility; it is in love with stressors, randomness, uncertainty, and disorder — while individual organisms are relatively fragile, the gene pool takes advantage of shocks to enhance its fitness.
Nature does not find its members very helpful after their reproductive abilities are depleted. Nature prefers to let the game continue at the informational level, the genetic code. So organisms need to die for nature to be antifragile — nature is opportunistic, ruthless, and selfish.
If random mutations occur at too high a rate, then the fitness gain might not stick, might perhaps even reverse thanks to a new mutation: nature is antifragile up to a point but such pain tis quiet high — it can take a lot, a lot of shocks.
The harder you try to harm bacteria, the stronger the survivors will be — unless you can manage to eradicate them completely. The same with cancer therapy: quite often cancer cells that manage to survive the toxicity of chemotherapy and radiation reproduce faster and take over the void made by the weaker cells.
Had the Titanic not had that famous accident, as fatal as it was, we would have kept building larger and larger ocean liners and the next disaster would have been even more tragic. So the people who perished were sacrificed for the greater good; they unarguably saved more lives than were lost. The story of the Titanic illustrates the difference between gains for the system and harm to some of its individual parts.
There are hundreds of thousands of plane flights every year, and a crash in one plane does not involve others, so errors remain confined and highly epistemic — whereas globalized economic systems operate as one: errors spread and compound.
The restaurant business is wonderfully efficient precisely because restaurants being vulnerable, go bankrupt every minute, and entrepreneurs ignore such a possibility, as they think that they will beat the odds. In other words, some class of rash, even suicidal, risk taking is healthy for the economy — under the condition that not all people take the same risks and that these risks remain small and localized.
Natural and naturelike systems want some overconfidence on the part of individual economic agents, i.e., the overestimation of their chances of success and underestimation of the risks of failure in their businesses, provided their failure does not impact others. In other words, they want local, but not global, overconfidence.
The great benefit of the Enlightenment has bene to bring the individual to the fore, with his rights, his freedom, his independence, his “pursuit of happiness” (whatever that “happiness” means), and, most of all, his privacy. In spite of its denial of antifragility, the Enlightenment and the political systems that emerged from it freed us (somewhat) from the domination of society, the tribe, and the family that had prevailed throughout history.
The unit in traditional culture is the collective; and it could be perceived to be harmed by the behavior of an individual — the honor of the family is sullied when, say, a daughter becomes pregnant, or a member of the family engages in large-scale financial swindles and Ponzi schemes. And these mores persist. Even as recently as the late 19th century or early 20th, it was common in, say, rural France for someone to spend all his savings to erase the debts of a remote cousin, and to do so in order to preserve the dignity and good name of the extended family. It was perceived as a duty.
In the Cosa Nostra, the Sicilian mafia, the designation “man of honor” implies that the person caught by the police would remain silence and not rat on his friends, regardless of benefits, and that life in prison is preferable to a plea that entails hurting other members. The tribe comes before the individual.
Someone who did not find something is providing others with knowledge, the best knowledge, that of absence (what does not work) — yet he gets little or no credit for it. He is a central part of the process with incentives going to others and, what is worse, gets not respect.
I am an ingrate toward the man whose overconfidence caused him to open a restaurant and fail, enjoying my nice meal while he is probably eating canned tuna.
In order to progress, modern society should be treating ruined entrepreneurs in the same way we honor dead soldiers, perhaps not with as much honor, but using exactly the same logic.
Most of you will fail, disrespected, impoverished, but we are grateful for the risks you are taking and the sacrifices you are making for the sake of the economic growth of the planet and pulling others out of poverty. You are at the source of our antifragility. Our nation thanks you.
Where simplifications fail, causing the most damage, is when something nonlinear is simplified with the linear as a substitute.
Artisans, say, taxi drivers, prostitutes, carpenters, plumbers, tailors, and dentists, have some volatility in their income but they are rather robust to a minor professional Black Swan, one that would bring their income to a complete halt. Their risks are visible. Not so with employees, who have no volatility but can be surprised to see their income going to zero. Employees’ risks are hidden.
This avoidance of small mistakes makes the larger ones more severe.
A large state does not behave at all like a gigantic municipality, much as a baby human does not resemble a smaller adult. The difference is qualitative: the increase in the number of persons in a given community alters the quality of the relationship between parties.
Theories are super fragile; they come and go, phenomenologies stay, and I can’t believe people don’t realize that phenomenology is “robust” and usable, and theories, while overhyped, are unreliable for descision making — outside physics.
A man is honorable in proportion to the personal risks he takes for his opinion — in other words, the amount of downside he is exposed to.
Success brings an asymmetry: you now have a lot more to lose than to gain. You are hence fragile. When you become rich, the pain of losing your fortune exceeds the emotional gain of getting additional wealth, so you start living under continuous emotional threat.
If an additional quantity of wealth would not benefit you, but you would feel great harm from the loss of an equivalent amount, you have an asymmetry. And it is not a good asymmetry: you are fragile.
Seneca’s practical method to counter such fragility was to go through mental exercises to write off possessions, so when losses occurred he would not feel the sting. It is similar to buying an insurance contract against losses.
I wrote my resignation letter before starting the new position, locked it up in a drawer, and felt free when I was there.
Every line you write under someone else’s standards, like prostitution, kills a corresponding segment deep inside.
The error of thinking you know exactly where you are going and assuming that you know today what your preferences will be tomorrow has an associated one. It is the illusion of thinking that others, too, know where they are going, and that they would tell you what they want if you just asked them.
You will never get to know yourself — your real preferences — unless you face options and choices.
The more uncertainty, the more valuable the option.
Nature simply keeps what it likes if it meets its standards or does a California-style “fail early” — it has an option and uses it.
In business, people pay for the option when it is identified and mapped in a contract, so explicit options tend to be expensive to purchase, much like insurance contracts.
Education stabilizes the income of families across generations. A merchant makes money, then his children go to the Sorbonne, they become doctors and magistrates. The family retains wealth because the diplomas allow members to remain in the middle class long after the ancestral wealth is depleted.
Separate those who, when they go to a museum, look at the Cezanne on the wall from those who focus on the contents of the trash can.
It is unrigorous to equate skills at doing with skills at talking. My experience of good practitioners is that they can be totally incomprehensible — they do not have to put much energy into turning their insights and internal coherence into elegant style and narratives.
The Renaissance came out of independent humanists, not professional scholars.
One is a professor surrounded and besieged by huddled students. The other is a solitary scholar, sitting in the tranquility and privacy of his chambers, at ease in the spacious and comfy room where his thoughts can move freely.
What Socrates is seeking relentlessly are definitions of the essential nature of the thing concerned rather than descriptions of the properties by means of which we can recognize them.
And this priority of definitional knowledge led to Plato’s thesis that you cannot know anything unless you know the Forms, which are what definitions specify.
He sees 2 forces, the Apollonian and the Dionysian. One is measured, balanced, rational, imbued with reason and self-restraint; the other is dark, visceral, wild, untamed, hard to understand, emerging from the inner layers of our selves. Ancient Greek culture represented a balance of the 2, until the influence of Socrates gave a larger share to the Apollonian and disrupted the Dionysian, causing this excessive rise of rationalism. It is equivalent to disrupting the natural chemistry of your body by the injection of hormones. The Apollonian without the Dionysian is, as the Chinese would say, yang without yin.
He expressed the famous idea that logic excludes — by definition — nuances, and since truth resides exclusively in the nuances, it is “a useless instrument for finding Truth in the moral and political sciences.”
Textbook “knowledge” misses a dimension, the hidden asymmetry of benefits — just like the notion of average. The need to focus on the payoff from your actions instead of studying the structure of the world (or understanding the “True” and the “False”) has been largely missed in intellectual history. The payoff, what happens to you (the benefits or harm from it), is always the most important thing, not the event itself.
Philosophers talk about truth and falsehood. People in life talk about payoff, exposure, and consequences (risks and rewards).
Charlatans are recognizable in that they will give you positive advice, and only positive advice, exploiting our gullibility and sucker-proneness for recipes that hit you in a flash as just obvious, then evaporate later as you forget them.
The greatest — and most robust — contribution to knowledge consists in removing what we think is wrong.
Posdictors — who explain things after the fact — always look smarter than predictors.
Never ask anyone for their opinion, forecast, or recommendation. Just ask them what they have — or don’t have — in their portfolio.
The frequency, i.e., how often someone is right is largely irrelevant in the real world.
The Romans removed the soldiers’ incentive to be a coward and hurt others thanks to a process called decimation. If a legion loses a battle and there is suspicion of cowardice, 10% of the soldiers and commanders are put to death, usually by random lottery. Putting more than 10% to death would lead to weakening of the army; too little, and cowardice would be a dominant strategy.
In African countries, government officials get explicit bribes. In the US, they have the implicit, never mentioned, promise to go work for a bank at a later date with a sinecure offering, say $5M a year, if they are seen favorably by the industry.