Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (Incerto, #4)

by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The principal disease of abundance can be seen in habituation and jadedness (what biologists currently call dulling of receptors); Seneca: “To a sick person, honey tastes better.”

Iatrogenics has both delayed and invisible consequences. It is hard to see causal links, to fully understand what’s going on. Under such epistemic limitations, skin in the game is the only true mitigator of fragility.

For the Stoics, prudence is connatural to courage—the courage to fight your own impulses

Finally, a new form of courage was born, that of the Socratic Plato, which is the very definition of the modern man: the courage to stand up for an idea, and enjoy death in a state of thrill, simply because the privilege of dying for truth, or standing up for one’s values, had become the highest form of honor.

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. And when you take risks, insults by half-men (small men, those who don’t risk anything) are similar to barks by nonhuman animals: you can’t feel insulted by a dog.

Fat Tony has two heuristics. First, never get on a plane if the pilot is not on board. Second, make sure there is also a copilot.

As in anything with words, it is not the victory of the most correct, but that of the most charming—or the one who can produce the most academic-sounding material.

For Publilius Syrus, he who does not stop a crime is an accomplice.

Never ask anyone for their opinion, forecast, or recommendation. Just ask them what they have—or don’t have—in their portfolio.

The psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer has a simple heuristic. Never ask the doctor what you should do. Ask him what he would do if he were in your place. You would be surprised at the difference.

suckers try to be right, nonsuckers try to make the buck, or: Suckers try to win arguments, nonsuckers try to win. To put it again in other words: it is rather a good thing to lose arguments.

I believe that forcing researchers to eat their own cooking whenever possible solves a serious problem in science. Take this simple heuristic—does the scientific researcher whose ideas are applicable to the real world apply his ideas to his daily life? If so, take him seriously. Otherwise, ignore him.

Another blatant case of insulation. Sometimes the divorce between one’s “tawk” and one’s life can be overtly and convincingly visible: take people who want others to live a certain way but don’t really like it for themselves.

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.

with the exception of, say, drug dealers, small companies and artisans tend to sell us healthy products, ones that seem naturally and spontaneously needed; larger ones—including pharmaceutical giants—are likely to be in the business of producing wholesale iatrogenics, taking our money, and then, to add insult to injury, hijacking the state thanks to their army of lobbyists. Further, anything that requires marketing appears to carry such side effects.

There is no product that I particularly like that I have discovered through advertising and marketing:

These may have been “marketed” in some sense, by making people aware of their existence, but this isn’t how I came to use them—word of mouth is a potent naturalistic filter. Actually, the only filter.

Anything one needs to market heavily is necessarily either an inferior product or an evil one. And it is highly unethical to portray something in a more favorable light than it actually is. One may make others aware of the existence of a product, say a new belly dancing belt, but I wonder why people don’t realize that, by definition, what is being marketed is necessarily inferior, otherwise it would not be advertised.

marketing beyond conveying information is insecurity.

We need to test the direction of the arrow (using the same logic as in our discussion of lecturing birds on flying): Ethics (and Beliefs) → Profession or Profession → Ethics (and Beliefs)

There is a phenomenon called the treadmill effect, similar to what we saw with neomania: you need to make more and more to stay in the same place. Greed is antifragile—though not its victims.

It is a fact that one can rapidly, after a phase of indoctrination, become enslaved to a profession, to the point of having one’s opinions on any subject become self-serving, hence unreliable for the collective.

The point isn’t that making a living in a profession is inherently bad; rather, it’s that such a person becomes automatically suspect when dealing with public affairs, matters that involve others. The definition of the free man, according to Aristotle, is one who is free with his opinions—as a side effect of being free with his time. Freedom in this sense is only a matter of sincerity in political opinions.

It never meant not working; it just meant not deriving your personal and emotional identity from your work, and viewing work as something optional, more like a hobby.

Consider this leap in sophistication from Athens to Brooklyn: if for the Greeks, only he who is free with his time is free with his opinion, for our horizontal friend and advisor, only he who has courage is free with his opinion. Sissies are born, not made. They stay sissies no matter how much independence you give them, no matter how rich they get.

A simple solution, but quite drastic: anyone who goes into public service should not be allowed to subsequently earn more from any commercial activity than the income of the highest paid civil servant. It is like a voluntary cap (it would prevent people from using public office as a credential-building temporary accommodation, then going to Wall Street to earn several million dollars). This would get priestly people into office.

But when general statements about the collective welfare are made, instead, absence of investment is what is required. Via negativa.

One should give more weight to witnesses and opinions when they present the opposite of a conflict of interest.

More data means more information, perhaps, but it also means more false information.

You can hardly trust many statistically oriented sciences—especially when the researcher is under pressure to publish for his career. Yet the claim will be “to advance knowledge.”

Increasingly, data can only truly deliver via negativa–style knowledge—it can be effectively used to debunk, not confirm.

Whenever I hear the phrase “I am ethical” uttered, I get tense. When I hear about classes in ethics, I get even more tense. All I want is to remove the optionality, reduce the antifragility of some at the expense of others. It is simple via negativa. The rest will take care of itself.

Everything in religious law comes down to the refinements, applications, and interpretations of the Golden Rule, “Don’t do unto others what you don’t want them to do to you.” This we saw was the logic behind Hammurabi’s rule. And the Golden Rule was a true distillation, not a Procrustean bed.

Shaiy’s extraction was: Everything gains or loses from volatility. Fragility is what loses from volatility and uncertainty.

Distributed randomness (as opposed to the concentrated type) is a necessity, not an option: everything big is short volatility. So is everything fast. Big and fast are abominations. Modern times don’t like volatility.