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

by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

avoidance of small mistakes makes the large ones more severe.

We humans scorn what is not concrete. We are more easily swayed by a crying baby than by thousands of people dying elsewhere

stability is achieved by managing noise, having a mechanism for letting it run its natural course, not by minimizing it.

Switzerland: it is perhaps the most successful country in history, yet it has traditionally had a very low level of university education

mistaking absence of evidence (of harm) for evidence of absence,

The secular drop in premature deaths in society has deprived us of a naturalistic managerial turnover.

the problem with artificially suppressed volatility is not just that the system tends to become extremely fragile; it is that, at the same time, it exhibits no visible risks.

Modernity corresponds to the systematic extraction of humans from their randomness-laden ecology—physical and social, even epistemological.

And the final lesson is that one should not expect laurels for bringing the truth.

It’s much easier to sell “Look what I did for you” than “Look what I avoided for you.”

wu-wei, “passive achievement.”

Governments are wasting billions of dollars on attempting to predict events that are produced by interdependent systems and are therefore not statistically understandable at the individual level.

Political and economic “tail events” are unpredictable, and their probabilities are not scientifically measurable.

No matter how many dollars are spent on research, predicting revolutions is not the same as counting cards; humans will never be able to turn politics and economics into the tractable randomness of blackjack.

Fragility-Robustness-Antifragility as a replacement for predictive methods.

There are ample empirical findings to the effect that providing someone with a random numerical forecast increases his risk taking, even if the person knows the projections are random.

antifragility is necessarily how things move forward under the mother of all stressors, called time.

some people in the nuclear industry seem to be among the rare ones to have gotten the point and taken it to its logical consequence.

these intelligent nuclear firms are now aware that they should instead focus on exposure to failure—making the prediction or nonprediction of failure quite irrelevant.

There is, in the Black Swan zone, a limit to knowledge that can never be reached, no matter how sophisticated statistical and risk management science ever gets.

Excess wealth, if you don’t need it, is a heavy burden.

to the need to focus on actions and avoid words: the health-eroding dependence on external recognition.

Stay robust to how others treat you.

A man is honorable in proportion to the personal risks he takes for his opinion—in other words, the amount of downside he is exposed to.

Someone who predicts will be fragile to prediction errors.

Fat Tony’s model is quite simple. He identifies fragilities, makes a bet on the collapse of the fragile unit, lectures Nero and trades insults with him about sociocultural matters, reacts to Nero’s jabs at New Jersey life, collects big after the collapse. Then he has lunch.

To become a successful philosopher king, it is much better to start as a king than as a philosopher, as illustrated in the following contemporary story.

Success brings an asymmetry: you now have a lot more to lose than to gain. You are hence fragile.

Stoicism is about the domestication, not necessarily the elimination, of emotions.

You are antifragile for a source of volatility if potential gains exceed potential losses (and vice versa).

A Stoic is a Buddhist with attitude, one who says “f*** you” to fate.

if something is fragile, its risk of breaking makes anything you do to improve it or make it “efficient” inconsequential unless you first reduce that risk of breaking.

For antifragility is the combination aggressiveness plus paranoia—clip

middle, I prefer the flight attendants to be maximally optimistic and the pilot to be maximally pessimistic or, better, paranoid.

Many of the “doers” turned “thinkers” like Montaigne have done a serial barbell: pure action, then pure reflection.

But the optimal policy is to avoid alcohol three times a week (hence give the liver a lengthy vacation) then drink liberally the remaining four.

So just as Stoicism is the domestication, not the elimination, of emotions, so is the barbell a domestication, not the elimination, of uncertainty.

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.

option is what makes you antifragile and allows you to benefit from the positive side of uncertainty, without a corresponding serious harm from the negative side.

America’s asset is, simply, risk taking and the use of optionality, this remarkable ability to engage in rational forms of trial and error, with no comparative shame in failing, starting again, and repeating failure.

the edge from optionality is in the larger payoff when you are right, which makes it unnecessary to be right too often.

Authors, artists, and even philosophers are much better off having a very small number of fanatics behind them than a large number of people who appreciate their work.

you are better off having a high percentage of people disliking you and your message (even intensely), combined with a low percentage of extremely loyal and enthusiastic supporters.

growth in society may not come from raising the average the Asian way, but from increasing the number of people in the “tails,” that small, very small number of risk takers crazy enough to have ideas of their own, those endowed with that very rare ability called imagination, that rarer quality called courage, and who make things happen.

An option is the weapon of antifragility.

For randomness plays a role at two levels: the invention and the implementation.

one needs to be rational in not making trial and error completely random.

The error of naive rationalism leads to overestimating the role and necessity of the second type, academic knowledge, in human affairs—and

greed is much older than systemic fragility.

Academia is well equipped to tell us what it did for us, not what it did not—hence how indispensable its methods are.