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

by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

And we can almost always detect antifragility (and fragility) using a simple test of asymmetry: anything that has more upside than downside from random events (or certain shocks) is antifragile; the reverse is fragile.

complex systems are weakened, even killed, when deprived of stressors.

You get pseudo-order when you seek order; you only get a measure of order and control when you embrace randomness.

Given the unattainability of perfect robustness, we need a mechanism by which the system regenerates itself continuously by using, rather than suffering from, random events,

unpredictable shocks, stressors, and volatility.

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.

the Soviet-Harvard delusion, the (unscientific) overestimation of the reach of scientific knowledge.

modern culture has been increasingly building blindness to the mysterious, the impenetrable, what Nietzsche called the Dionysian, in life.

the benefits are small and visible, and the side effects potentially severe and invisible.

sensitivity of things to volatility

decision making under opacity.

If you want to become antifragile, put yourself in the situation “loves mistakes”—to the right of “hates mistakes”—by making these numerous and small in harm. We will call this process and approach the “barbell” strategy.

Debt always puts you on the left, fragilizes economic systems.

The fragile is the package that would be at best unharmed, the robust would be at best and at worst unharmed. And the opposite of fragile is therefore what is at worst unharmed.

fiscal deficits have proven to be a prime source of fragility in social and economic systems.

one cannot be robust against everything.

Hormesis, a word coined by pharmacologists, is when a small dose of a harmful substance is actually beneficial for the organism, acting as medicine.

that sophistication is born out of hunger (artificia docuit fames).

difficulty is what wakes up the genius (ingenium mala saepe movent),

A system that overcompensates is necessarily in overshooting mode, building extra capacity and strength in anticipation of a worse outcome and in response to information about the possibility of a hazard. And of course such extra capacity or strength may become useful by itself, opportunistically. We saw that redundancy is opportunistic, so such extra strength can be used to some benefit even in the absence of the hazard.

What does “fitness” mean? Being exactly tuned to a given past history of a specific environment, or extrapolating to an environment with stressors of higher intensity?

overcompensation rather than mere “fitness.”

Information is antifragile; it feeds more on attempts to harm it than it does on efforts to promote it.

Some jobs and professions are fragile to reputational harm, something that in the age of the Internet cannot possibly be controlled—these jobs aren’t worth having.

When you don’t have debt you don’t care about your reputation in economics circles—and somehow it is only when you don’t care about your reputation that you tend to have a good one.

It looks like the secret of life is antifragility.

Now the crux of complex systems, those with interacting parts, is that they convey information to these component parts through stressors, or thanks to these stressors:

your body gets information about the environment not through your logical apparatus, your intelligence and ability to reason, compute, and calculate, but through stress, via hormones or other messengers we haven’t discovered yet.

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.

my mood, my sadness, my bouts of anxiety, are a second source of intelligence—perhaps even the first source.

Had Prozac been available last century, Baudelaire’s “spleen,” Edgar Allan Poe’s moods, the poetry of Sylvia Plath, the lamentations of so many other poets, everything with a soul would have been silenced.3…

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.

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.

something deep in your soul likes a certain measure of randomness and disorder.

In a system, the sacrifices of some units—fragile units, that is, or people—are often necessary for the well-being of other units or the whole.

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.

while individual organisms are relatively fragile, the gene pool takes advantage of shocks to enhance its fitness.

So organisms need to die for nature to be antifragile—nature is opportunistic, ruthless, and selfish.

while hormesis corresponds to situations by which the individual organism benefits from direct harm to itself, evolution occurs when harm makes the individual organism perish and the benefits are transferred to others, the surviving ones, and future generations.

The harder you try to harm bacteria, the stronger the survivors will be—unless you can manage to eradicate them completely.

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.

For the economy to be antifragile and undergo what is called evolution, every single individual business must necessarily be fragile, exposed to breaking—evolution needs organisms (or their genes) to die when supplanted by others, in order to achieve improvement, or to avoid reproduction when they are not as fit as someone else.

It is painful to think about ruthlessness as an engine of improvement.

they want local, but not global, overconfidence.

governments typically favor a certain class of firms that are large enough to require being saved in order to avoid contagion to other business.

This is the opposite of healthy risk-taking; it is transferring fragility from the collective to the unfit.

Since the sojourn in the Gulag killed the weakest, one had the illusion of strengthening.

The surviving cohort, clearly, is stronger than the initial one—but not quite the individuals, since the weaker ones died.

and how we hurt systems with the very best of intentions by playing conductor.

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.