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

by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

In short, the fragilista (medical, economic, social planning) is one who makes you engage in policies and actions, all artificial, in which the benefits are small and visible, and the side effects potentially severe and invisible.

If you see fraud and do not say fraud, you are a fraud.

A man is morally free when … he judges the world, and judges other men, with uncompromising sincerity.

What Erasmus called ingratitudo vulgi, the ingratitude of the masses, is increasing in the age of globalization and the Internet.

“I have noticed that the more people glorify the entrepreneur as an abstraction, the more they will scorn an actual one they meet.”

“Stalin could not have existed in a municipality.”

It is hard to explain to naive data-driven people that risk is in the future, not in the past.

What is plaguing us in the United States is not the two-party system, but being stuck with the same two parties.

Modernity starts with the state monopoly on violence, and ends with the state’s monopoly on fiscal irresponsibility.

Perhaps the idea behind capitalism is an inverse-iatrogenic effect, the unintended-but-not-so-unintended consequences: the system facilitates the conversion of selfish aims (or, to be correct, not necessarily benevolent ones) at the individual level into beneficial results for the collective.

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.

You can’t predict in general, but you can predict that those who rely on predictions are taking more risks, will have some trouble, perhaps even go bust. Why? Someone who predicts will be fragile to prediction errors.

Stoicism is about the domestication, not necessarily the elimination, of emotions. It is not about turning humans into vegetables. My idea of the modern Stoic sage is someone who transforms fear into prudence, pain into information, mistakes into initiation, and desire into undertaking.

Never ask people what they want, or where they want to go, or where they think they should go, or, worse, what they think they will desire tomorrow. The strength of the computer entrepreneur Steve Jobs was precisely in distrusting market research and focus groups—those based on asking people what they want—and following his own imagination. His modus was that people don’t know what they want until you provide them with it.

“In theory there is no difference between theory and practice; in practice there is.”

The Procrustean bed in life consists precisely in simplifying the nonlinear and making it linear—the simplification that distorts.

“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.”

To understand the future, you do not need technoautistic jargon, obsession with “killer apps,” these sort of things. You just need the following: some respect for the past, some curiosity about the historical record, a hunger for the wisdom of the elders, and a grasp of the notion of “heuristics,” these often unwritten rules of thumb that are so determining of survival. In other words, you will be forced to give weight to things that have been around, things that have survived.

As to liquid, my rule is drink no liquid that is not at least a thousand years old—so its fitness has been tested. I drink just wine, water, and coffee. No soft drinks. Perhaps the most possibly deceitfully noxious drink is the orange juice we make poor innocent people imbibe at the breakfast table while, thanks to marketing, we convince them it is “healthy.” (Aside from the point that the citrus our ancestors ingested was not sweet, they never ingested carbohydrates without large, very large quantities of fiber. Eating an orange or an apple is not biologically equivalent to drinking orange or apple juice.) From such examples, I derived the rule that what is called “healthy” is generally unhealthy, just as “social” networks are antisocial, and the “knowledge”-based economy is typically ignorant.

if I had to find the anti-me, the person with diametrically opposite ideas and lifestyle on the planet, it would be that Ray Kurzweil fellow. It is not just neomania. While I propose removing offensive elements from people’s diets (and lives), he works by adding, popping close to two hundred pills daily. Beyond that, these attempts at immortality leave me with deep moral revulsion.

We are witnessing a fundamental change. Consider older societies—those societies that have survived. The main difference between us and them is the disappearance of a sense of heroism; a shift away from a certain respect—and power—to those who take downside risks for others. For heroism is the exact inverse of the agency problem: someone elects to bear the disadvantage (risks his own life, or harm to himself, or, in milder forms, accepts to deprive himself of some benefits) for the sake of others. What we have currently is the opposite: power seems to go to those, like bankers, corporate executives (nonentrepreneurs), and politicians, who steal a free option from society.

Thomas Friedman was a bit responsible for the Iraq invasion of 2003, and not only paid no penalty for it but continues to write for the op-ed page of The New York Times, confusing innocent people. He got—and kept—the upside, others get the downside. A writer with arguments can harm more people than any serial criminal. I am singling him out here because, at the core, the problem is his promotion of the misunderstanding of iatrogenics in complex systems. He promoted the “earth is flat” idea of globalization without realizing that globalization brings fragilities, causes more extreme events as a side effect, and requires a great deal of redundancies to operate properly. And the very same error holds with the Iraq invasion: in such a complex system, the predictability of the consequences is very low, so invading was epistemologically irresponsible.

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 win arguments, nonsuckers try to win.

We accept that people who boast are boastful and turn people off. How about companies? Why aren’t we turned off by companies that advertise how great they are?