Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder

by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Health benefits are convex to speed

The very idea of exercise is to gain from antifragility to workout stressors—as we saw, all kinds of exercise are just exploitations of convexity effects.

Squeezes are exacerbated by size. When one is large, one becomes vulnerable to some errors, particularly horrendous squeezes. The squeezes become nonlinearly costlier as size increases.

In spite of what is studied in business schools concerning “economies of scale,” size hurts you at times of stress; it is not a good idea to be large during difficult times.

A fire sale of $70 billion worth of stocks leads to a loss of $6 billion. But a fire sale a tenth of the size, $7 billion would result in no loss at all, as markets would absorb the quantities without panic, maybe without even noticing. So this tells us that if, instead of having one very large bank,

who naively optimizes the size of the place (Heathrow airport, for example) might miss the idea that smooth functioning at regular times is different from the rough functioning at times of stress.

And we have more nonlinearities—asymmetries, convexities—in today’s world.

One problem somewhere can halt the entire project—so the projects tend to get as weak as the weakest link in their chain (an acute negative convexity effect).

they incurred at least ten times what they thought their financial costs would be, aside from all the horrors, suffering, and destruction. The same of course for the second war, which added to the U.K. debt, causing it to become heavily indebted, mostly to the United States.

Iraq war, expected by George W. Bush and his friends to cost thirty to sixty billion, which so far, taking into account all the indirect costs, may have swelled to more than two trillion—indirect

Once I figured out that fragility was directly from nonlinearity and convexity effects, and that convexity was measurable,

keeping one’s distance from an ignorant person is equivalent to keeping company with a wise man.

consider this modernized version in a saying from Steve Jobs: “People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I’m actually as proud of the things we haven’t done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things.”

if you have more than one reason to do something (choose a doctor or veterinarian, hire a gardener or an employee, marry a person, go on a trip), just don’t do it. It does not mean that one reason is better than two, just that by invoking more than one reason you are trying to convince yourself to do something. Obvious decisions (robust to error) require no more than a single reason.

when I am told that someone has three hundred academic papers and twenty-two honorary doctorates, but no other single compelling contribution or main idea behind it, I avoid him like the bubonic plague.

With a little bit of luck a computer virus will wipe out all records and free people from their past mistakes.

So the longer a technology lives, the longer it can be expected to live.

If a book has been in print for forty years, I can expect it to be in print for another forty years. But, and that is the main difference, if it survives another decade, then it will be expected to be in print another fifty years.

Information has a nasty property: it hides failures.

(The pair developed the idea that our brains like minimal effort and get trapped that way, and they pioneered a tradition of cataloging and mapping human biases with respect to perception of random outcomes and decision making under uncertainty).

These impulses to buy new things that will eventually lose their novelty, particularly when compared to newer things, are called treadmill effects.

Lindy effect as a guide in selecting what to read: books that have been around for ten years will be around for ten more; books that have been around for two millennia should be around for quite a bit of time, and so forth.

Now try to get the proceedings of a random conference about the subject matter concerned that took place five years ago. Odds are it will feel no different from a five-year-old newspaper, perhaps even less interesting.

It seemed to me that it was an insult to Mother Nature to override her programmed reactions unless we had a good reason to do so, backed by proper empirical testing to show that we humans can do better; the burden of evidence falls on us humans.

The hidden costs of health care are largely in the denial of antifragility.

Chemists assumed that they could produce a fat replacement that was superior to lard or butter from so many standpoints.

Today trans fat is widely banned as it turned out that it kills people, as it is behind heart disease and cardiovascular problems.

they should focus for their own benefit on extreme diseases, not on reclassifications or pressuring doctors to prescribe medicines. Indeed, pharma plays on the interventionism of doctors.

talking about radiation, few wonder why, after hundreds of million of years of having our skins exposed to sun rays, we suddenly need so much protection from them—is it that our exposure is more harmful than before because of changes in the atmosphere, or populations living in an environment mismatching the pigmentation of their skin—or rather, that makers of sun protection products need to make some profits?

Antibiotics. Every time you take an antibiotic, you help, to some degree, the mutation of germs into antibiotic-resistant strains. Add to that the toying with your immune system. You transfer the antifragility from your body to the germ.

Hygiene, or excessive hygiene, has the same effect, particularly when people clean their hands with chemicals after every social exposure.

doctors claimed responsibility for success and blamed failure on nature, or on some external cause. The very same idea was rediscovered by psychologists some twenty-four centuries later, and applied to stockbrokers, doctors, and managers of companies.

to go to silent, barren, empty spaces. And of course, with mandatory fasting,

religion’s benefits in limiting the intervention bias and its iatrogenics: in a large set of circumstances (marginal disease), anything that takes you away from the doctor and allows you to do nothing (hence gives nature a chance to do its work) will be beneficial

we have ample evidence that intermittently (and only intermittently) depriving organisms of food has been shown to engender beneficial effects on many functions—Valter

religions with ritual fasts have more answers than assumed by those who look at them too literally. In fact what these ritual fasts do is try to bring nonlinearities in consumption to match biological properties.

may or may not be true that walking effortlessly is as necessary as sleep, but since all my ancestors until the advent of the automobile spent much of their time walking around (and sleeping), I try to just follow the logic, even before some medical journal catches up to the idea and produces what referees of medical journals call “evidence.”

antifragility of a system comes from the mortality of its components—and I am part of that larger population called humans.

Then say goodbye, have a nice funeral in St. Sergius (Mar Sarkis) in Amioun, and, as the French say, place aux autres—make room for others.

A half-man (or, rather, half-person) is not someone who does not have an opinion, just someone who does not take risks for it.

My greatest lesson in courage came from my father—as a child, I had admired him before for his erudition, but was not overly fazed since erudition on its own does not make a man. He had a large ego and immense dignity, and he demanded respect.

dignity is worth nothing unless you earn it, unless you are willing to pay a price for it.

If you take risks and face your fate with dignity, there is

nothing you can do that makes you small; if you don’t take risks, there is nothing you can do that makes you grand, nothing.

If a builder builds a house and the house collapses and causes the death of the owner of the house—the builder shall be put to death. If it causes the death of the son of the owner of the house, a son of that builder shall be put to death. If it causes the death of a slave of the owner of the house—he shall give to the owner of the house a slave of equal value.

The first heuristic addresses the asymmetry in rewards and punishment, or transfer of fragility between individuals. Ralph Nader has a simple rule: people voting for war need to have at least one descendant (child or grandchild) exposed to combat.

engineers needed to spend some time under the bridge they built—something

We closed Book I by arguing that we need to put entrepreneurs and risk takers, “failed” or not, on top of the pyramid, and, unless they take personal risks when they expose others,

(I’ve stated my own version of this in the prologue, which needs to be reiterated: if you see fraud and don’t say fraud, you are a fraud.)

the problem with people who do not incur harm is that they can cherry-pick from statements they’ve made in the past, many of them contradictory, and end up convincing themselves of their intellectual lucidity on the way to the World Economic Forum at Davos.