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

by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

impulses to buy new things that will eventually lose their novelty, particularly when compared to newer things, are called treadmill effects.

we don’t incur the same treadmilling techno-dissatisfaction with classical art, older furniture—whatever we do not put in the category of the technological.

The classical role of the prophet, at least in the Levantine sense, is not to look into the future but to talk about the present.

veritas odium parit—truth brings hatred.

People in risk management only consider risky things that have hurt them in the past (given their focus on “evidence”), not realizing that, in the past, before these events took place, these occurrences that hurt them severely were completely without precedent, escaping standards.

In the middle of the pain, it hit me that the swelling that Mother Nature gave me was most certainly not directly caused by the trauma. It was my own body’s response to the injury. It seemed to me that it was an insult to Mother Nature to override her programmed reactions unless we had a good reason to do so, backed by proper empirical testing to show that we humans can do better; the burden of evidence falls on us humans.

the comfortable is what fragilizes.

iatrogenics, being a cost-benefit situation, usually results from the treacherous condition in which the benefits are small, and visible—and the costs very large, delayed, and hidden.

Evolution proceeds by undirected, convex bricolage or tinkering, inherently robust, i.e., with the achievement of potential stochastic gains thanks to continuous, repetitive, small, localized mistakes. What men have done with top-down, command-and-control science has been exactly the reverse: interventions with negative convexity effects, i.e., the achievement of small certain gains through exposure to massive potential mistakes.

“No doctor derives pleasure from the health of his friends, wrote the ancient Greek satirist, no soldier from the peace of his city, etc.”

the magnitude of the result, the importance of the effect, is not captured by what is called “statistical significance,” something that tends to deceive specialists.

the great statistician and debunker of statistical misinterpretation David Freedman showed (very convincingly) with a coauthor that the link everyone is obsessing about between salt and blood pressure has no statistical basis.

tame the iatrogenics of abundance—fasting makes you lose your sense of entitlement. But there are more subtle aspects.

Let us remember that we are not designed to be receiving foods from the delivery person.

skin in the game is the only true mitigator of fragility.

We need to understand the everlasting solidity of such a solution.

Skin in the Game: Antifragility and Optionality at the Expense of 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.

For the Stoics, prudence is connatural to courage—the courage to fight your own impulses

you can’t feel insulted by a dog.

The entire idea is that the builder knows more, a lot more, than any safety inspector, particularly about what lies hidden in the foundations—making it the best risk management rule ever, as the foundation, with delayed collapse, is the best place to hide risk.

save lives by providing up-front disincentive in case of harm to others during the fulfillment of one’s profession.

You express your opinion; it can hurt others (who rely on it), yet you incur no liability. Is this fair?

The “knowledge world” causes separation of knowing and doing (within the same person) and leads to the fragility of society.

globalization brings fragilities, causes more extreme events as a side effect, and requires a great deal of redundancies to operate properly.

Actions are symmetric, do not allow cherry-picking, remove the free option.

I want predictors to have visible scars on their body from prediction errors, not distribute these errors to society.

An intangible victory has no value.

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.

forcing researchers to eat their own cooking whenever possible solves a serious problem in science.

Corporate managers have incentives without disincentives—something

The asymmetry is visibly present: volatility benefits managers since they only get one side of the payoffs.

my experience of company executives, as evidenced by their appetite for spending thousands of hours in dull meetings or reading bad memos, is that they cannot possibly be remarkably bright.

The mechanism of cheapest-to-deliver-for-a-given-specification pervades whatever you see on the shelves.

Anything one needs to market heavily is necessarily either an inferior product or an evil one.

We accept that people who boast are boastful and turn people off. How about companies?

A corporation does not have natural ethics; it just obeys the balance sheet.

A (publicly listed) corporation does not feel shame.

A corporation does not feel pity.

A corporation does not have a sense of honor—while,

A corporation does not have ...

All of these defects are the result of the absence of skin in the game, cultural or biological—an asymmetry that harms others for their benefit.

“Nero, you sucker. Don’t be fooled by money. These are just numbers. Being self-owned is a state of mind.”

The point isn’t that making a living in a profession is inherently bad; rather, it’s that such a person becomes automatically suspect when dealing with public affairs, matters that involve others. The definition of the free man, according to Aristotle, is one who is free with his opinions—as a side effect of being free with his time.

in the modern world, there seems to be an inverse agency problem for those who do the right thing: you pay for your service to the public with smear campaigns and harassment.

Falsity grows faster than information;

Modernity provides too many variables (but too little data per variable), and the spurious relationships grow much, much faster than real information, as noise is convex and information is concave.

data can only truly deliver via negativa–style knowledge—it can be effectively used to debunk, not confirm.

Vulnerability (fragility) is connectivity without responsiveness. Responsiveness enables connectivity to lead to opportunity.