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

by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The antifragile gains from prediction errors, in the long run. If you follow this idea to its conclusion, then many things that gain from randomness should be dominating the world today—and things that are hurt by it should be gone. Well, this turns out to be the case. We have the illusion that the world

functions thanks to programmed design, university research, and bureaucratic funding, but there is compelling—very compelling—evidence to show that this is an illusion, the illusion I call lecturing birds how to fly. Technology is the result of antifragility, exploited by risk-takers in the form of tinkering and trial and error, with nerd-driven design confined to the backstage. Engineers and tinkerers develop things while history books are written by academics; we will have to refine historical interpretations of growth, innovation, and many such things.

The fragilista falls for the Soviet-Harvard delusion, the (unscientific) overestimation of the reach of scientific knowledge. Because of such delusion, he is what is called a naive rationalist, a rationalizer, or sometimes just a rationalist, in the sense that he believes that the reasons behind things are automatically accessible to him.

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.

First ethical rule: If you see fraud and do not say fraud, you are a fraud. Just as being nice to the arrogant is no better than being arrogant toward the nice, being accommodating toward anyone committing a nefarious action condones it.

resentments, and conflicts. A nail displaces another nail, with astonishing variety. But academics (particularly in social science) seem to distrust each other; they live in petty obsessions, envy, and icy-cold hatreds, with small snubs developing into grudges, fossilized over time in the loneliness of the transaction with a computer screen and the immutability of their environment. Not to mention a level of envy I have almost never seen in business.… My experience is that money and transactions purify relations;

ideas and abstract matters like “recognition” and “credit” warp them, creating an atmosphere of perpetual rivalry. I grew to find people greedy for credentials nauseating, repulsive, and untrustworthy.

I’ve discovered a trick when giving lectures. I have been told by conference organizers that one needs to be clear, to speak with the fake articulation of TV announcers, maybe even dance on the stage to get the attention of the crowd. Some try sending authors to “speech school”—the first time it was suggested to me I walked out, resolved to change publishers on the spot. I find it better to whisper, not shout. Better to be slightly inaudible, less clear. When I was a pit trader (one of those crazy people who stand in a crowded arena shouting and screaming in a continuous auction), I learned that the noise produced by the person is inverse to the pecking order: as with mafia dons, the most powerful traders were the least audible. One should have enough self-control to make the audience work hard to listen, which causes them to switch into intellectual overdrive. This paradox of attention has been a little bit investigated: there is empirical evidence of the effect of “disfluency.” Mental effort moves us into higher gear, activating more vigorous and more analytical brain machinery.

What we observe in “aging” is a combination of maladjustment and senescence, and it appears that the two are separable—senescence might not be avoidable, and should not be avoided (it would contradict the logic of life, as we will see in the next chapter); maladjustment is avoidable. Much of aging comes from a misunderstanding of the effect of comfort—a disease of civilization: make life longer and longer, while people are more and more sick. In a natural environment, people die without aging—or after a very short period of aging. For instance, some markers, such as blood pressure, that tend to worsen over time for moderns do not change over the life of hunter-gatherers until the very end.

Our antifragilities have conditions. The frequency of stressors matters a bit. Humans tend to do better with acute than with chronic stressors, particularly when the former are followed by ample time for recovery, which allows the stressors to do their jobs as messengers. For instance, having an intense emotional shock from seeing a snake coming out of my keyboard or a vampire entering my room, followed by a period of soothing safety (with chamomile tea and baroque music) long enough for me to regain control of my emotions, would be beneficial for my health, provided of course that I manage to overcome the snake or vampire after an arduous, hopefully heroic fight and have a picture taken next to the dead predator. Such a stressor would be certainly better than the mild but continuous stress of a boss, mortgage, tax problems, guilt over procrastinating with one’s tax return, exam pressures, chores, emails to answer, forms to complete, daily commutes—things that make you feel trapped in life.

This other variety of antifragility is evolutionary, and operates at the informational level—genes are information. Unlike with hormesis, the unit does not get stronger in response to stress; it dies. But it accomplishes a transfer of benefits; other units survive—and those that survive have attributes that improve the collective of units, leading to modifications commonly assigned the vague term “evolution” in textbooks and in the New York Times Tuesday science section. So the antifragility of concern here is not so much that of the organisms, inherently weak, but rather that of their genetic code, which can survive them.

Again, crucially, we are talking of partial, not general, mistakes, small, not severe and terminal ones. This creates a separation between good and bad systems. Good systems such as airlines are set up to have small errors, independent from each other—or, in effect, negatively correlated to each other, since mistakes lower the odds of future mistakes. 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. We need to eliminate the second type of error—the one that produces contagion—in our construction of an ideal socioeconomic system.

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. Finally, a thought. He who has never sinned is less reliable than he who has only sinned once. And someone who has made plenty of errors—though never the same error more than once—is more reliable than someone who has never made any.

Nietzsche’s famous expression “what does not kill me makes me stronger” can be easily misinterpreted as meaning Mithridatization or hormesis. It may be one of these two phenomena, very possible, but it could as well mean “what did not kill me did not make me stronger, but spared me because I am stronger than others; but it killed others and the average population is now stronger because the weak are gone.” In other words, I passed an exit exam. I’ve discussed the problem in earlier writings of the false illusion of causality, with a newspaper article saying that the new mafia members, former Soviet exiles, had been “hardened by a visit to the Gulag” (the Soviet concentration camps). Since the sojourn in the Gulag killed the weakest, one had the illusion of strengthening. Sometimes we see people having survived trials and imagine, given that the surviving population is sturdier than the original one, that these trials are good for them. In other words, the trial can just be a ruthless exam that kills those who fail. All we may be witnessing is that transfer of fragility (rather, antifragility) from the individual to the system that I discussed earlier.

This great variety of people and their wallets are there, in Switzerland, for its shelter, safety, and stability. But all these refugees don’t notice the obvious: the most stable country in the world does not have a government. 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 can usually name the presidents of France or the United States but not their own. Its currency works best (at the time of writing it proved to be the safest), yet its central bank is tiny, even relative to its size.

Economic life, too, seems to prefer war to prison. Lebanon and Northern Syria had very similar wealth per individual (what economists call Gross Domestic Product) about a century ago—and had identical cultures, language, ethnicities, food, and even jokes. Everything was the same except for the rule of the “modernizing” Baath Party in Syria compared to the totally benign state in Lebanon. In spite of a civil war that decimated the population, causing an acute brain drain and setting wealth back by several decades, in addition to every possible form of chaos that rocked the place, today Lebanon has a considerably higher standard of living—between three and six times the wealth of Syria. Nor did the point escape Machiavelli. Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote, citing him: “It seemed, wrote Machiavelli, that in the midst of murders and civil wars, our republic became stronger [and] its citizens infused with virtues.… A little bit of agitation gives resources to souls and what makes the species prosper isn’t peace, but freedom.”

Consider this need to “do something” through an illustrative example. In the 1930s, 389 children were presented to New York City doctors; 174 of them were recommended tonsillectomies. The remaining 215 children were again presented to doctors, and 99 were said to need the surgery. When the remaining 116 children were shown to yet a third set of doctors, 52 were recommended the surgery. Note that there is morbidity in 2 to 4 percent of the cases (today, not then, as the risks of surgery were very bad at the time) and that a death occurs in about every 15,000 such operations and you get an idea about the break-even point between medical gains and detriment. This story allows us to witness probabilistic homicide at work. Every child who undergoes an unnecessary operation has a shortening of her life expectancy. This example not only gives us an idea of harm done by those who intervene, but, worse, it illustrates the lack of awareness of the need to look for a break-even point between benefits and harm. Let us call this urge to help “naive interventionism.”

It is easy to assess iatrogenics when the surgeon amputates the wrong leg or operates on the wrong kidney, or when the patient dies of a drug reaction. But when you medicate a child for an imagined or invented psychiatric disease, say, ADHD or depression, instead of letting him out of the cage, the long-term harm is largely unaccounted for. Iatrogenics is compounded by the “agency problem” or “principal-agent problem,” which emerges when one party (the agent) has personal interests that are divorced from those of the one using his services (the principal). An agency problem, for instance, is present with the stockbroker and medical doctor, whose ultimate interest is their own checking account, not your financial and medical health, respectively, and who give you advice that is geared to benefit themselves.

What scientists call phenomenology is the observation of an empirical regularity without a visible theory for it. In the Triad, I put theories in the fragile category, phenomenology in the robust one.

Physics is privileged; it is the exception, which makes its imitation by other disciplines similar to attempts to make a whale fly like an eagle. Errors in physics get smaller from theory to theory—so saying “Newton was wrong” is attention grabbing, good for lurid science journalism, but ultimately mendacious; it would be far more honest to say “Newton’s theory is imprecise in some specific cases.” Predictions made by Newtonian mechanics are of astonishing precision except for items traveling close to the speed of light, something you don’t expect to do on your next vacation. We also read nonsense-with-headlines to the effect that Einstein was “wrong” about that speed of light—and the tools used to prove him wrong are of such complication and such precision that they’ve demonstrated how inconsequential such a point will be for you and me in the near and far future.

Alas, it has been hard for me to fit these ideas about fragility and antifragility within the current U.S. political discourse—that beastly two-fossil system. Most of the time, the Democratic side of the U.S. spectrum favors hyper-intervention, unconditional regulation, and large government, while the Republican side loves large corporations, unconditional deregulation, and militarism—both are the same to me here.

The doctor who refrains from operating on a back (a very expensive surgery), instead giving it a chance to heal itself, will not be rewarded and judged as favorably as the doctor who makes the surgery look indispensable, then brings relief to the patient while exposing him to operating risks, while accruing great financial rewards to himself. The latter will be driving the pink Rolls-Royce. The corporate manager who avoids a loss will not often be rewarded. The true hero in the Black Swan world is someone who prevents a calamity and, naturally, because the calamity did not take place, does not get recognition—or a bonus—for it.

In a thick and captivating book, La rebellion française, the historian Jean Nicolas shows how the culture of rioting was extremely sophisticated—historically, it counts as the true French national sport.

Fat Tony did not believe in predictions. But he made big bucks predicting that some people—the predictors—would go bust. Isn’t that paradoxical? At conferences, Nero used to meet physicists from the Santa Fe Institute who believed in predictions and used fancy prediction models while their business ventures based on predictions did not do that well—while Fat Tony, who did not believe in predictions, got rich from prediction. 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. An overconfident pilot will eventually crash the plane. And numerical prediction leads people to take more risks.

To become a successful philosopher king, it is much better to start as a king than as a philosopher,

Seen this way, 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.

So far, that story is well known, and we have learned to move from the left of the Triad (fragile) to the center (robust). But Seneca went beyond. He said that wealth is the slave of the wise man and master of the fool. Thus he broke a bit with the purported Stoic habit: he kept the upside. In my opinion, if previous Stoics claimed to prefer poverty to wealth, we need to be suspicious of their attitude, as it may be just all talk. Since most were poor, they might have fit a narrative to the circumstances (we will see with the story of Thales of Miletus the notion of sour grapes—cognitive games to make yourself believe that the grapes that you can’t reach taste sour). Seneca was all deeds, and we cannot ignore the fact that he kept the wealth. It is central that he showed his preference of wealth without harm from wealth to poverty.

Incidentally, it is not Aristotle whom Aquinas is quoting—he calls him the Philosopher—but the Arab synthesizer of Aristotle’s thinking, Ibn Rushd, also known as Averroes, whom Aquinas calls the Commentator. And the Commentator has caused a great deal of damage. For Western thought is vastly more Arabian than is recognized, while post-Medieval Arabs have managed to escape medieval rationalism.

So let us call here the teleological fallacy the illusion that you know exactly where you are going, and that you knew exactly where you were going in the past, and that others have succeeded in the past by knowing where they were going.

(for which humans correct, thanks to common sense), can be measured as the

My first conversation with an expert was with a fellow called B. Something-that-ends-with-a-vowel dressed in a handmade Brioni suit. I was told that he was the biggest Swiss franc trader in the world, a legend in his day—he had predicted the big dollar collapse in the 1980s and controlled huge positions. But a short conversation with him revealed that he could not place Switzerland on the map—foolish as I was, I thought he was Swiss Italian, yet he did not know there were Italian-speaking people in Switzerland. He had never been there. When I saw that he was not the exception, I started freaking out watching all these years of education evaporating in front of my eyes. That very same day I stopped reading economic reports. I felt nauseous for a while during this enterprise of “deintellectualization”—in fact I may not have recovered yet. If New York was blue collar in origin, London was sub–blue collar, and even more successful. The players were entirely cockney, even more separated from sentence-forming society. They were East Londoners, street people (extremely street) with a distinctive accent, using their own numbering system. Five is “Lady Godiva” or “ching,” fifteen is a “commodore,” twenty-five is a “pony,” etc. I had to learn cockney just to communicate, and mostly to go drinking, with my colleagues during my visits there; at the time, London traders got drunk almost every day at lunch, especially on Friday before New York opened. “Beer turns you into a lion,” one f...

my take is that this evolution is not a competition between ideas, but between humans and systems based on such ideas. An idea does not survive because it is better than the competition, but rather because the person who holds it has survived! Accordingly, wisdom you learn from your grandmother should be vastly superior (empirically, hence scientifically) to what you get from a class in business school (and, of course, considerably cheaper).

It has been difficult for people to understand that, historically, skepticism has been mostly skepticism of expert knowledge rather than skepticism about abstract entities like God, and that all the great skeptics have been largely either religious or, at least, pro-religion (that is, in favor of others being religious).

Only the autodidacts are free.

There was such a difference between the shelves of the library and the narrow school material; so I realized that school was a plot designed to deprive people of erudition by squeezing their knowledge into a narrow set of authors.

(only suckers wait for answers; questions are not made for answers):

Textbook “knowledge” misses a dimension, the hidden asymmetry of benefits—just like the notion of average. The need to focus on the payoff from your actions instead of studying the structure of the world (or understanding the “True” and the “False”) has been largely missed in intellectual history. Horribly missed. The payoff, what happens to you (the benefits or harm from it), is always the most important thing, not the event itself.

Let me reexpress my previous rule: For the fragile, the cumulative effect of small shocks is smaller than the single effect of an equivalent single large shock. This leaves me with the principle that the fragile is what is hurt a lot more by extreme events than by a succession of intermediate ones. Finito—and there is no other way to be fragile.

Because travel time cannot be really negative, uncertainty tends to cause delays, making arrival time increase, almost never decrease. Or it makes arrival time decrease by just minutes, but increase by hours, an obvious asymmetry. Anything unexpected, any shock, any volatility, is much more likely to extend the total flying time. This also explains the irreversibility of time, in a way, if you consider the passage of time as an increase in disorder.