Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder

by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Two mistakes are commonly made when I present this idea—people have difficulties grasping probabilistic notions, particularly when they have spent too much time on the Internet (not that they need the Internet to be confused; we are naturally probability-challenged). The first mistake is usually in the form of the presentation of the counterexample of a technology that we currently see as inefficient and dying, like, say, telephone land lines, print newspapers, and cabinets containing paper receipts for tax purposes. These arguments come with anger as many neomaniacs get offended by my point. But my argument is not about every technology, but about life expectancy, which is simply a probabilistically derived average. If I know that a forty-year-old has terminal pancreatic cancer, I will no longer estimate his life expectancy using unconditional insurance tables; it would be a mistake to think that he has forty-four more years to live, like others in his age group who are cancer-free. Likewise someone (a technology guru) interpreted my idea as suggesting that the World Wide Web, being currently less than about twenty years old, will only have another twenty to go—this is a noisy estimator that should work on average, not in every case. But in general, the older the technology, not only the longer it is expected to last, but the more certainty I can attach to such a statement.* Remember the following principle: I am not saying that all technologies do not age, only that thos...