Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder

by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The antifragile loves randomness and uncertainty, which also means—crucially—a love of errors, a certain class of errors. 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

I’d rather be dumb and antifragile than extremely smart and fragile, any time.

Which brings us to the largest fragilizer of society, and greatest generator of crises, absence of “skin in the game.” Some become antifragile at the expense of others by getting the upside (or gains) from volatility, variations, and disorder and exposing others to the downside risks of losses or harm. And such antifragility-at-the-cost-of-fragility-of-others is hidden—given

The chief ethical rule is the following: Thou shalt not have antifragility at the expense of the fragility of others.

We are all, in a way, similarly handicapped, unable to recognize the same idea when it is presented in a different context.

post-traumatic stress syndrome, by which people harmed by past events surpass themselves.

The excess energy released from overreaction to setbacks is what innovates!

It is said that the best horses lose when they compete with slower ones, and win

against better rivals.

Undercompensation from the absence of a stressor, inverse hormesis, absence of challenge, deg...

that if you need something urgently done, give the task to the busiest (or second busiest) person in the office.

It is quite perplexing that those from whom we have benefited the most aren’t those who have tried to help us (say with

but rather those who have actively tried—but eventually failed—to harm us.

we observe in “aging” is a combination of maladjustment and senescence, and it appears that the two are separable—senescence

Let us consider bones again. I have a thing for bones, and the idea I will discuss next made me focus on lifting heavy objects rather than using gym machines.

randomness is necessary for true life. Consider that all the wealth of the world can’t buy a liquid more pleasurable than water after intense thirst. Few objects bring more thrill than a recovered wallet (or laptop) lost on a train.

Dangerous, yes, but boring, never.

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.

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.

For the economy to be antifragile and undergo what is called evolution, every single individual business must necessarily be fragile, exposed to breaking—evolution needs organisms (or their genes) to die when supplanted by others, in order to achieve improvement, or to avoid reproduction when they are not as fit as someone else.

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 war.

it was common in, say, rural France for someone to spend all his savings to erase the debts of a remote cousin (a practice called passer l’éponge, literally, to use a sponge to erase the liability from the chalkboard), and to do so in order to preserve the dignity and good name of the extended family.

For there is no such thing as a failed soldier, dead or alive (unless he acted in a cowardly manner)—likewise, there is no such thing as a failed entrepreneur or failed scientific researcher, any more than there is a successful babbler, philosophaster, commentator, consultant, lobbyist, or business school professor who does not take personal risks. (Sorry.)

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.

Artisans, say, taxi drivers, prostitutes (a very, very old profession), 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 after a phone call from the personnel department. Employees’ risks are hidden.

Further, for a self-employed person, a small (nonterminal) mistake is information, valuable information, one that directs him in his adaptive approach; for someone employed like John, a mistake is something that goes into his permanent record, filed in the personnel department.

Switzerland acts as a magnet for the ugly rich and tax refugees.

Just as the income of the cab driver shows instability on a daily basis but annual stability, likewise Switzerland

Small is beautiful in so many other ways. Take for now that the small (in the aggregate, that is, a collection of small units) is more antifragile than the large—in fact the large is doomed to breaking, a mathematical property we will explain later, that, sadly, seems universal as it applies to large corporations, very large mammals, and large administrations.*

Our emotional energy is blind to probability.

The problem is that by creating bureaucracies, we put civil servants in a position to make decisions based on abstract and theoretical matters, with the illusion that they will be making them in a rational, accountable way.

By influencing one single decision or regulation in Brussels, a single lobbyist gets a large bang. It is a much larger payoff (at low cost) than with municipalities, which would require armies of lobbyists trying to convince people while embedded in their communities.*

The difference between war and no war became huge, with marked discontinuity.

we look at potential damage: never has the world been more prone to more damage; never.

The point of the previous chapter was that the risk properties of the first brother (the fragile bank employee) are vastly different from those of the second one (the comparatively antifragile artisan taxi driver).

It is remarkable how Maxwell’s neat mathematical derivations and the dangers of tight control can be generalized across domains and help debunk pseudo-stabilization and hidden long-term fragility.

confusing people a little bit is beneficial—it is good for you and good for them. For an application of the point in daily life, imagine someone extremely punctual and predictable who comes home at exactly six o’clock every day for fifteen years. You can use his arrival to set your watch. The fellow will cause his family anxiety if he is barely a few minutes late. Someone with a slightly more volatile—hence unpredictable—schedule, with, say, a half-hour variation, won’t do so.

Small forest fires periodically cleanse the system of the most flammable material, so this does not have the opportunity to accumulate.

preventing randomness in an antifragile system is not always a good idea.

The idea of injecting random noise into a system to improve its functioning has been applied across fields.

It has been hard to explain to real people that stressors and uncertainty have their role in life—so

instead of having the rulers randomize the jobs of citizens, we should have citizens randomize the jobs of rulers, naming them by raffles and removing them at random as well. That is similar to simulated annealing—and it happens to be no less effective.

the best form of government was the one tempered with political assassination.

I blindly and systematically duplicate the selection by the most overweight male at the table; and when no such person is present, I randomly pick from the menu without reading the name of the item,

Likewise peace—some kind of forced, constrained, non-natural peace—may be costly in lives:

But preventing noise makes the problem worse in the long run.

Time for American policy makers to understand that the more they intervene in other countries for the sake of stability, the more they bring instability (except for emergency-room-style cases). Or perhaps time to reduce the role of policy makers in policy affairs.

One of life’s packages: no stability without volatility.