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This is the tragedy of modernity: as with neurotically overprotective parents, those trying to help are often hurting us the most.
The rarer the event, the less tractable, and the less we know about how frequent its occurrence—yet
You cannot say with any reliability that a certain remote event or shock is more likely than another (unless you enjoy deceiving yourself), but you can state with a lot more confidence that an object or a structure is more fragile than another should a certain event happen.
It does not mean that one’s personal experiences constitute a sufficient sample to derive a conclusion about an idea; it is just that one’s personal experience gives the stamp of authenticity and sincerity of opinion.
And we already have a hint that perhaps being deprived of poison makes us fragile and that the road to robustification starts with a modicum of harm.
The engineer and historian of engineering Henry Petroski presents a very elegant point. 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.
Further, my characterization of a loser is someone who, after making a mistake, doesn’t introspect, doesn’t exploit it, feels embarrassed and defensive rather than enriched with a new piece of information, and tries to explain why he made the mistake rather than moving on. These types often consider themselves the “victims” of some large plot, a bad boss, or bad weather.
There is something like a switch in us that kills the individual in favor of the collective when people engage in communal dances, mass riots, or
This is the central illusion in life: that randomness is risky, that it is a bad thing—and that eliminating randomness is done by eliminating randomness.
turkey is fed for a thousand days by a butcher; every day confirms to its staff of analysts that butchers love turkeys “with increased statistical confidence.” The butcher will keep feeding the turkey until a few days before Thanksgiving. Then comes that day when it is really not a very good idea to be a turkey. So with the butcher surprising it, the turkey will have a revision of belief—right when its confidence in the statement that the butcher loves turkeys is maximal and “it is very quiet” and soothingly predictable in the life of the turkey.
The world is subjected to fewer and fewer acts of violence, while wars have the potential to be more criminal.
We saw that absence of fire lets highly flammable material accumulate. People are shocked and outraged when I tell them that absence of political instability, even war, lets explosive material and tendencies accumulate under the surface.
What scientists call phenomenology is the observation of an empirical regularity without a visible theory for it.
On the other hand, social science seems to diverge from theory to theory. During the cold war, the University of Chicago was promoting laissez-faire theories, while the University of Moscow taught the exact opposite—but their respective physics departments were in convergence, if not total agreement.
I’ve looked in history for heroes who became heroes for what they did not do, but it is hard to observe nonaction; I could not easily find any. The doctor who refrains from operating on a back (a very expensive surgery), instead giving it a chance to heal itself, will not be rewarded and judged as favorably as the doctor who makes the surgery look indispensable, then brings relief to the patient while exposing him to operating risks, while accruing great financial rewards to himself. The latter will be driving the pink Rolls-Royce. The corporate manager who avoids a loss will not often be
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As with a crumbling sand pile, it would be unintelligent to attribute the collapse of a fragile bridge to the last truck that crossed it, and even more foolish to try to predict in advance which truck might bring it down. Yet it is done all too often.
We understand childproofing, but not forecaster-hubris-proofing.
It is obvious to anyone before drinking time that we can put a man, a family, a village with a mini town hall on the moon, and predict the trajectory of planets or the most minute effect in quantum physics, yet governments with equally sophisticated models cannot forecast revolutions, crises, budget deficits, climate change. Or even the closing prices of the stock market a few hours from now.
You can’t predict in general, but you can predict that those who rely on predictions are taking more risks, will have some trouble, perhaps even go bust.
The opposite of opportunism in human relations is loyalty, a noble sentiment—but one that needs to be invested in the right places, that is, in human relations and moral commitments.
The option is an agent of antifragility.
Options like dispersion of outcomes and don’t care about the average too much.
There is an ample academic literature trying to convince us that options are not rational to own because some options are overpriced, and they are deemed overpriced according to business school methods of computing risks that do not take into account the possibility of rare events.
Just as great geniuses invent their predecessors, practical innovations create their theoretical ancestry.
Serious empirical investigation (largely thanks to one Lant Pritchet, then a World Bank economist) shows no evidence that raising the general level of education raises income at the level of a country. But we know the opposite is true, that wealth leads to the rise of education—not an optical illusion.
Nobody worries that a child ignorant of the various theorems of aerodynamics and incapable of solving an equation of motion would be unable to ride a bicycle.
No, we don’t put theories into practice. We create theories out of practice.
Much of all of this is a religious belief in the unconditional power of organized science, one that has replaced unconditional religious belief in organized religion.
The hidden benefit of antifragility is that you can guess worse than random and still end up outperforming.
Further, being fooled by randomness is that in most circumstances fraught with a high degree of randomness, one cannot really tell if a successful person has skills, or if a person with skills will succeed—but we can pretty much predict the negative, that a person totally devoid of skills will eventually fail.
since one small observation can disprove a statement, while millions can hardly confirm it, disconfirmation is more rigorous than confirmation.
People in risk management only consider risky things that have hurt them in the past (given their focus on “evidence”), not realizing that, in the past, before these events took place, these occurrences that hurt them severely were completely without precedent, escaping standards.
I once broke my nose … walking. For the sake of antifragility, of course.
iatrogenics, being a cost-benefit situation, usually results from the treacherous condition in which the benefits are small, and visible—and the costs very large, delayed, and hidden.
what Mother Nature does is rigorous until proven otherwise; what humans and science do is flawed until proven otherwise.
And indeed the cemetery of bad ideas (and hidden ideas) shows that mathematics fooled us there. There have been many forgotten attempts to mathematize medicine.
To me, every opinion maker needs to have “skin in the game” in the event of harm caused by reliance on his information or opinion (not having such persons as, say, the people who helped cause the criminal Iraq invasion come out of it completely unscathed). Further, anyone producing a forecast or making an economic analysis needs to have something to lose from it, given that others rely on those forecasts (to repeat, forecasts induce risk taking; they are more toxic to us than any other form of human pollution).
The asymmetry (antifragility of postdictors): postdictors can cherry-pick and produce instances in which their opinions played out and discard mispredictions into the bowels of history. It is like a free option—to them; we pay for it.
I fail to see why the arguments we’ve used against tobacco firms don’t apply—to some extent—to all other large companies that try to sell us things that may make us ill.
The petrochemical engineer was saying that we had no evidence that fossil fuels caused harm to the planet, turning his point semantically into something equivalent in decision making to the statement that that we had evidence that fossil fuels did not harm.
Absence of evidence vs evidence of absence
mechanism of ethical optionality by which people fit their beliefs to actions rather than fit their actions to their beliefs.
One should give more weight to witnesses and opinions when they present the opposite of a conflict of interest.
There is a certain property of data: in large data sets, large deviations are vastly more attributable to noise (or variance) than to information (or signal).
The Tragedy of Big Data. The more variables, the more correlations that can show significance in the hands of a “skilled” researcher. Falsity grows faster than information; it is nonlinear (convex) with respect to data.
Recall that professors are not penalized when they teach you something that blows up the financial system, which perpetuates the fraud. Departments need to teach something so students get jobs, even if they are teaching snake oil—this got us trapped in a circular system in which everyone knows that the material is wrong but nobody is free enough or has enough courage to do anything about
Everything gains or loses from volatility. Fragility is what loses from volatility and uncertainty. The glass on the table is short volatility.
