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

by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

“The simple one-way relationship which so entrances our politicians and commentators—education spending in, economic growth out—simply doesn’t exist. Moreover, the larger and more complex the education sector, the less obvious any links to productivity become.”

When you are fragile you need to know a lot more than when you are antifragile. Conversely, when you think you know more than you do, you are fragile (to error).

We showed earlier the evidence that classroom education does not lead to wealth as much as it comes from wealth (an epiphenomenon).

it is always best to consider what his detractors say—they will uncover what’s worst in his argument.

Much of all of this is a religious belief in the unconditional power of organized science, one that has replaced unconditional religious belief in organized religion.

Consider blue sky research, whereby research grants and funding are given to people, not projects, and spread in small amounts across many researchers.

Payoffs from research are from Extremistan; they follow a power-law type of statistical distribution, with big, near-unlimited upside but, because of optionality, limited downside.

payoff from research should necessarily be linear to number of trials, not total funds involved in the trials.

Designer drugs

have a main property—they are designed (and are therefore teleological).

Corporations are in love with the idea of the strategic plan. They need to pay to figure out where they are going. Yet there is no evidence that strategic planning works—we even seem to have evidence against it.

planning—it makes the corporation option-blind, as it gets locked into a non-opportunistic course of action.

It turns out, strategic planning is just superstitious babble.

In the antifragile case (of positive asymmetries, positive Black Swan businesses), such as trial and error, the sample track record will tend to underestimate the long-term average; it will hide the qualities, not the defects.

So “empirical evidence” tends to miss positive events and underestimate the total benefits.

(iii) Do not invest in business plans but in people, so look for someone capable of changing six or seven times over his career, or more

Formal thinkers and theorizing theorizers tend to write books; seat-of-the-pants people tend to be practitioners who are often content to get the excitement, make or lose the money, and discourse at the pub.

the statement all that is nonrigorous is nonacademic (assuming one is a sucker and believes it) does not imply that all that is nonacademic is nonrigorous.

Provided we have the right type of rigor, we need randomness, mess, adventures, uncertainty, self-discovery, near-traumatic episodes, all these things that make life worth living, compared to the structured, fake, and ineffective life of an empty-suit CEO with a preset schedule and an alarm clock.

like corporate executives are selected for their ability to put up with the boredom of meetings,

The trick is to be bored with a specific book, rather than with the act of reading.

Nietzsche understood something that I did not find explicitly stated in his work: that growth in knowledge—or in anything—cannot proceed without the Dionysian.

You decide principally based on fragility, not probability.

A Black Swan event and how it affects you—its impact on your finances, emotions, the destruction it

will cause—are not the same “ting.”

the predictors’ reply when we point out their failures has typically been “we need better computation” in order to predict the event better and figure out the probabilities, instead of the vastly more effective “modify your exposure” and learn to get ...

Time is an eraser rather than a builder, and a good one at breaking the fragile—whether buildings or ideas.

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

“economies of scale,” size hurts you at times of stress; it is not a good idea to be large during difficult times.

It is completely wrong to use the calculus of benefits without including the probability of failure.2

The world is getting less and less predictable, and we rely more and more on technologies that have errors and interactions that are harder to estimate, let alone predict.

Global disaster costs are today more than three times what they were in the 1980s, adjusting for inflation. The effect, noted a while ago by the visionary researcher on extreme events Daniel Zajdenweber, seems to be accelerating. The economy can get more and more “efficient,” but fragility is causing the costs of errors to be higher.

It all boils down to the following: figuring out if our miscalculations or misforecasts are on balance more harmful than they are beneficial, and how accelerating the damage is.

one-sidedness brings both underestimation of randomness and underestimation of harm, since one is more exposed to harm than benefit from error.

The notion of average is of no significance when one is fragile to variations—the dispersion in possible thermal outcomes here matters much more.

we know a lot more what is wrong than what is right, or, phrased according to the fragile/robust classification, negative knowledge (what is wrong, what does not work) is more robust to error than positive knowledge (what is right, what works).

And this idea of the power of disconfirmation permeates the way we do hard science.

In political systems, a good mechanism is one that helps remove the bad guy; it’s not about what to do or who to put in.

For the Arab scholar and religious leader Ali Bin Abi-Taleb (no relation), keeping one’s distance from an ignorant person is equivalent to keeping company with a wise man.

Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things.”

As they say in the mafia, just work on removing the pebble in your shoe.

Convincing—and confident—disciplines, say, physics, tend to use little statistical backup, while political science and economics, which have never produced anything of note, are full of elaborate statistics and statistical “evidence” (and you know that once you remove the smoke, the evidence is not evidence).

Antifragility implies—contrary to initial instinct—that the old is superior to the new, and much more than you think.

time is the same as disorder.

the most fragile is the predictive, what is built on the basis of predictability—in other words, those who underestimate Black Swans will eventually exit the population.

Technothinkers tend to have an “engineering mind”—to put it less politely, they have difficulties in social interactions. While they don’t usually wear ties, these types tend, of course, to exhibit all the textbook characteristics of nerdiness—mostly lack of charm, interest in objects instead of persons, causing them to neglect their looks. They love precision at the expense of applicability. And they typically

share an absence of literary culture.

This absence of literary culture is actually a marker of future blindness because it is usually accompanied by a denigration of history, ...

the longer a technology lives, the longer it can be expected to live.

whatever we observe in a randomly selected way is likely to be neither in the beginning nor in the end of its life, most likely in its middle.

Similar to watching movies