Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder

by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Too much information would thus be too much stress, exceeding the threshold of antifragility. In medicine, we are discovering the healing powers of fasting, as the avoidance of the hormonal rushes that come with the ingestion of food. Hormones convey information to the different parts of our system, and too much of them confuses our biology. Here again, as with news received at too high a frequency, too much information becomes harmful—daily news and sugar confuse our system in the same manner. And in Chapter 24 (on ethics) I will show how too much data (particularly when it is sterile) causes statistics to be completely meaningless. Now let’s add the psychological to this: we are not made to understand the point, so we overreact emotionally to noise. The best solution is to only look at very large changes in data or conditions, never at small ones.