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November 9 - November 29, 2018
Measures that aim at reducing variability and swings in the lives of children are also reducing variability and differences within our said to be Great Culturally Globalized Society.
touristification. This is my term for an aspect of modern life that treats humans as washing machines, with simplified mechanical responses—and a detailed user’s manual. It is the systematic removal of uncertainty and randomness from things, trying to make matters highly predictable in their smallest details. All that for the sake of comfort, convenience, and efficiency.
But the worse touristification is the life we moderns have to lead in captivity, during our leisure hours: Friday night opera, scheduled parties, scheduled laughs. Again, golden jail.
Ancestral life had no homework, no boss, no civil servants, no academic grades, no conversation with the dean, no consultant with an MBA, no table of procedure, no application form, no trip to New Jersey, no grammatical stickler, no conversation with someone boring you: all life was random stimuli and nothing, good or bad, ever felt like work.4 Dangerous, yes, but boring, never.
Restaurants are fragile; they compete with each other, but the collective of local restaurants is antifragile for that very reason. Had restaurants been individually robust, hence immortal, the overall business would be either stagnant or weak, and would deliver nothing better than cafeteria food—and I mean Soviet-style cafeteria food. Further, it would be marred with systemic shortages, with, once in a while, a complete crisis and government bailout. All that quality, stability, and reliability are owed to the fragility of the restaurant itself.
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.
To satisfy the conditions for such immortality, the organisms need to predict the future with perfection—near perfection is not enough. But by letting the organisms go one lifespan at a time, with modifications between successive generations, nature does not need to predict future conditions beyond the extremely vague idea of which direction things should be heading. Actually, even a vague direction is not necessary.
Further, the random element in trial and error is not quite random, if it is carried out rationally, using error as a source of information. If every trial provides you with information about what does not work, you start zooming in on a solution—so every attempt becomes more valuable, more like an expense than an error. And of course you make discoveries along the way.
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
This is one way to see how one environment can be antifragile (aviation) and the other fragile (modern economic life with “earth is flat” style interconnectedness). If every plane crash makes the next one less likely, every bank crash makes the next one more likely.
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.
T
He who has never sinned is less reliable than he who has only sinned once.
People have difficulty realizing that the solution is building a system in which nobody’s fall can drag others down—for continuous failures work to preserve the system. Paradoxically, many government interventions and social policies end up hurting the weak and consolidating the established.
Heroism and the respect it commands is a form of compensation by society for those who take risks for others. And entrepreneurship is a risky and heroic activity, necessary for growth
It is also necessarily collective on epistemological grounds—to facilitate the development of expertise. Someone who did not find something is providing others with knowledge, the best knowledge, that of absence (what does not work)—yet he gets little or no credit for it. He is a central part of the process with incentives going to others and, what is worse, gets no respect.
What Erasmus called ingratitudo vulgi, the ingratitude of the masses, is increasing in the age of globalization and the Internet.
Most of you will fail, disrespected, impoverished, but we are grateful for the risks you are taking and the sacrifices you are making for the sake of the economic growth of the planet and pulling others out of poverty. You are at the source of our antifragility. Our nation thanks you.
what is made to fly will not do well trapped on the ground, where it is forced to traipse. And
comes from volare, “to fly” in Latin. Depriving political (and other) systems of volatility
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.
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.
One has the illusion of stability, but is fragile; the other one the illusion of variability, but is robust and even antifragile.
The more variability you observe in a system, the less Black Swan–prone it is. Let us now examine how this applies to political
Switzerland is the most antifragile place on the planet; it benefits from shocks that take place in the rest of the world.
These (dull) people are not looking for personal shelter: it is their assets that are seeking refuge.
And it is not stable in spite of not having a government; it is stable because it does not have one. Ask random Swiss citizens to name their president, and count the proportion of people who can do so—they
At the present time, one person is dying of diabetes every seven seconds, but the news can only talk about victims of hurricanes with houses flying in the air.
on techne (crafts and know how), not episteme (book knowledge, know what).
mediocrity cannot handle more than one enemy, so war here turns into an alliance there.
When we look at risks in Extremistan, we don’t look at evidence (evidence comes too late), we look at potential damage: never has the world been more prone to more damage; never.
Likewise, the risk characteristic of a centralized system is different from that of a messy municipally-led confederation. The second type is stable in the long run because of some dose of volatility.
Indeed, 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,
So far we have argued that preventing randomness in an antifragile system is not always a good idea.
We need to learn to think in second steps, chains of consequences, and side effects.
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).
We, at some point, had free-range humans and free-range children before the advent of the golden period of the soccer mom.
every time you visit a doctor and get a treatment, you incur risks of such medical harm, which should be analyzed the way we analyze other trade-offs: probabilistic benefits minus probabilistic costs.
The famously mistreated Austro-Hungarian doctor Ignaz Semmelweis had observed that more women died giving birth in hospitals than giving birth on the street.
medical error still currently kills between three times (as accepted by doctors) and ten times as many people as car accidents in the United States.
anything in which there is naive interventionism, nay, even just intervention, will have iatrogenics.
In the Triad, I put theories in the fragile category, phenomenology in the robust one. Theories are superfragile; they come and go, then come and go, then come and go again; phenomenologies stay, and I can’t believe people don’t realize that phenomenology is “robust” and usable, and theories, while overhyped, are unreliable for decision making—outside physics.
Experiments show that alertness is weakened when one relinquishes control to the system (again, lack of overcompensation). Motorists need the stressors and tension coming from the feeling of danger to feed their attention and risk
The benefits of procrastination apply similarly to medical procedures: we saw that procrastination protects you from error as it gives nature a chance to do its job, given the inconvenient fact that nature is less error-prone than scientists.
Using my ecological reasoning, someone who procrastinates is not irrational; it is his environment that is irrational. And the psychologist or economist calling him irrational is the one who is beyond irrational.
The supply of information to which we are exposed thanks to modernity is transforming humans from the equable second fellow into the neurotic first one. For the purpose of our discussion, the second fellow only reacts to real information, the first largely to noise.
If you want to accelerate someone’s death, give him a personal doctor. I don’t mean provide him with a bad doctor: just pay for him to choose his own. Any doctor will do.
The more frequently you look at data, the more noise you are disproportionally likely to get (rather than the valuable part, called the signal); hence the higher the noise-to-signal ratio.
the split becomes 99.5 percent noise to 0.5 percent signal. That is two hundred times more noise than signal—which is why anyone who listens to news (except when very, very significant events take place) is one step below sucker.
Consider that every day, 6,200 persons die in the United States, many of preventable causes. But the media only report the most anecdotal and sensational cases (hurricanes, freak accidents, small plane crashes), giving us a more and more distorted map of real risks.
