Antifragile
Prologue
...if antifragility is the property of all those natural (and complex) systems that have survived, depriving these systems of volatility, randomness, and stressors will harm them. They will weaken, die, or blow up. We have been fragilizing the economy, our health, political life, education, almost everything … by suppressing randomness and volatility.
He is often involved in a strange ritual, something commonly called “a meeting.” Now, in addition to these traits, he defaults to thinking that what he doesn’t see is not there, or what he does not understand does not exist. At the core, he tends to mistake the unknown for the nonexistent.
He is often involved in a strange ritual, something commonly called “a meeting.” Now, in addition to these traits, he defaults to thinking that what he doesn’t see is not there, or what he does not understand does not exist. At the core, he tends to mistake the unknown for the nonexistent.
A complex system, contrary to what people believe, does not require complicated systems and regulations and intricate policies. The simpler, the better. Complications lead to multiplicative chains of unanticipated effects.
Yet simplicity has been difficult to implement in modern life because it is against the spirit of a certain brand of people who seek sophistication so they can justify their profession.
Time is functionally similar to volatility: the more time, the more events, the more disorder.
Only distilled ideas, ones that sit in us for a long time, are acceptable—and those that come from reality.
And many of the problems of society come from the argument “other people are doing it.”
Book I
...perhaps being deprived of poison makes us fragile and that the road to robustification starts with a modicum of harm.
Redundancy is ambiguous because it seems like a waste if nothing unusual happens.
Redundancy is ambiguous because it seems like a waste if nothing unusual happens.
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?
...some thoughts are so antifragile that you feed them by trying to get rid of them, turning them into obsessions.
For the nonorganic, noncomplex, say, an object on the table, equilibrium (as traditionally defined) happens in a state of inertia. So for something organic, equilibrium (in that sense) only happens with death.
For them, a state of normalcy requires a certain degree of volatility, randomness, the continuous swapping of information, and stress, which explains the harm they may be subjected to when deprived of volatility.
What a tourist is in relation to an adventurer, or a flâneur, touristification is to life; it consists in converting activities, and not just travel, into the equivalent of a script like those followed by actors. We will see how touristification castrates systems and organisms that like uncertainty by sucking randomness out of them to the last drop—while providing them with the illusion of benefit.
...if you are alive—something deep in your soul likes a certain measure of randomness and disorder.
...if you are alive—something deep in your soul likes a certain measure of randomness and disorder.
Writing is only worth it when it provides us with the tingling effect of adventure,
...machines are harmed by low-level stressors (material fatigue), organisms are harmed by the absence of low-level stressors (hormesis).
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.
In fact, the most interesting aspect of evolution is that it only works because of its antifragility; it is in love with stressors, randomness, uncertainty, and disorder—while individual organisms are relatively fragile, the gene pool takes advantage of shocks to enhance its fitness.
Evolution benefits from randomness by two different routes: randomness in the mutations, and randomness in the environment—both act in a similar way to cause changes in the traits of the surviving next generations.
...if random mutations occur at too high a rate, then the fitness gain might not stick, might perhaps even reverse thanks to a new mutation.
...if random mutations occur at too high a rate, then the fitness gain might not stick, might perhaps even reverse thanks to a new mutation.
...the random element in trial and error is not quite random, if it is carried out rationally, using error as a source of information. 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. And of course you make discoveries along the way.
Book II
...how we hurt systems with the very best of intentions by playing conductor.
Where simplifications fail, causing the most damage, is when something nonlinear is simplified with the linear as a substitute.
On a large scale, others are abstract items; given the lack of social contact with the people concerned, the civil servant’s brain leads rather than his emotions—with numbers, spreadsheets, statistics, more spreadsheets, and theories.
On a large scale, others are abstract items; given the lack of social contact with the people concerned, the civil servant’s brain leads rather than his emotions—with numbers, spreadsheets, statistics, more spreadsheets, and theories.
...but you never have a generalized restaurant crisis—unlike, say, the banking business. Why? Because it is composed of a lot of independent and competing small units that do not individually threaten the system and make it jump from one state to another. Randomness is distributed rather than concentrated.
When a currency never varies, a slight, very slight move makes people believe that the world is ending. Injecting some confusion stabilizes the system.
Weak SOS signals, too weak to get picked up by remote receptors, can become audible in the presence of background noise and random interference.
When a currency never varies, a slight, very slight move makes people believe that the world is ending. Injecting some confusion stabilizes the system.
Weak SOS signals, too weak to get picked up by remote receptors, can become audible in the presence of background noise and random interference.
Variations also act as purges. Small forest fires periodically cleanse the system of the most flammable material, so this does not have the opportunity to accumulate.
For a theory is a very dangerous thing to have.
interventionism depletes mental and economic resources; it is rarely available when it is needed the most.
Motorists need the stressors and tension coming from the feeling of danger to feed their attention and risk controls, rather than some external regulator—fewer pedestrians die jaywalking than using regulated crossings.
interventionism depletes mental and economic resources; it is rarely available when it is needed the most.
Motorists need the stressors and tension coming from the feeling of danger to feed their attention and risk controls, rather than some external regulator—fewer pedestrians die jaywalking than using regulated crossings.
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.
It’s much easier to sell “Look what I did for you” than “Look what I avoided for you.”
It’s much easier to sell “Look what I did for you” than “Look what I avoided for you.”
...procrastination is our natural defense, letting things take care of themselves and exercise their antifragility; it results from some ecological or naturalistic wisdom, and is not always bad—at an existential level, it is my body rebelling against its entrapment.
In business and economic decision making, reliance on data causes severe side effects—data is now plentiful thanks to connectivity, and the proportion of spuriousness in the data increases as one gets more immersed in it. A very rarely discussed property of data: it is toxic in large quantities—even in moderate quantities.
...yearly frequency, (half noise, half signal)—this means that about half the changes are real improvements or degradations, the other half come from randomness. This ratio is what you get from yearly observations. But if you look at the very same data on a daily basis, the composition would change to 95 percent noise, 5 percent signal.
The best solution is to only look at very large changes in data or conditions, never at small ones.
...yearly frequency, (half noise, half signal)—this means that about half the changes are real improvements or degradations, the other half come from randomness. This ratio is what you get from yearly observations. But if you look at the very same data on a daily basis, the composition would change to 95 percent noise, 5 percent signal.
The best solution is to only look at very large changes in data or conditions, never at small ones.
Just as we are not likely to mistake a bear for a stone (but likely to mistake a stone for a bear), it is almost impossible for someone rational, with a clear, uninfected mind, someone who is not drowning in data, to mistake a vital signal, one that matters for his survival, for noise—unless he is overanxious, oversensitive, and neurotic, hence distracted and confused by other messages.
...by presenting us with explanations and theories, the media induce an illusion of understanding the world.
...we are living in a more and more fragile world, while thinking it is more and more understandable.
...the best way to mitigate interventionism is to ration the supply of information, as naturalistically as possible.
...a larger than expected share of famine over the past century has occured in economies with central planning.
But often it is the state’s incompetence that can help save us from the grip of statism and modernity—inverse iatrogenics. The insightful author Dmitri Orlov showed how calamities were avoided after the breakdown of the Soviet state because food production was inefficient and full of unintentional redundancies, which ended up working in favor of stability. ... lack of specialization allowed people to have access to all varieties of food in spite of the severe breakdown of the institutions. In the United States, we burn twelve calories in transportation for every calorie of nutrition; in Soviet Russia, it was one to one.
...failure is never seen as the result of fragility. Rather, such failure is interpreted as the product of poor forecasting.
Our sophistication continuously puts us ahead of ourselves, creating things we are less and less capable of understanding.
Book III
Curiosity is antifragile, like an addiction, and is magnified by attempts to satisfy it—books have a secret mission and ability to multiply, as everyone who has wall-to-wall bookshelves knows well.
...fragile to the emotional toll from the compliments they did not get, the ones others got, and from what someone of lower intellect stole from them.
...of a combination of extremes kept separate, with avoidance of the middle.
Professions can be serial: something very safe, then something speculative.
Professions can be serial: something very safe, then something speculative.
Book IV
It gains from dispersion, hence is antifragile.
...explicit options tend to be expensive to purchase.
But because of the domain dependence of our minds, we don’t recognize it in other places, where these options tend to remain underpriced or not priced at all.
We use randomness to spoon-feed us with discoveries.
For randomness plays a role at two levels: the invention and the implementation. ... implementation does not necessarily proceed from invention.
For randomness plays a role at two levels: the invention and the implementation. ... implementation does not necessarily proceed from invention.
Just taking something to market requires struggling against a collection of naysayers, administrators, empty suits, formalists, mountains of details that invite you to drown, and one’s own discouraged mood on occasion.
...the simpler and more obvious the discovery, the less equipped we are to figure it out by complicated methods.
It may be that academia helps science and technology, which in turn help practice, but in unintended, nonteleological ways.
...illusions of contribution result largely from confirmation fallacies: in addition to the sad fact that history belongs to those who can write about it (whether winners or losers), a second bias appears, as those who write the accounts can deliver confirmatory facts (what has worked) but not a complete picture of what has worked and what has failed.
...life is lived forward but remembered backward, as Kierkegaard observed, then books exacerbate this effect—our own memories, learning, and instinct have sequences in them. Someone standing today looking at events without having lived them would be inclined to develop illusions of causality, mostly from being mixed-up by the sequence of events.
All this does not mean that tinkering and trial and error are devoid of narrative: they are just not overly dependent on the narrative being true—the narrative is not epistemological but instrumental.
An idea does not survive because it is better than the competition, but rather because the person who holds it has survived.
All this does not mean that tinkering and trial and error are devoid of narrative: they are just not overly dependent on the narrative being true—the narrative is not epistemological but instrumental.
An idea does not survive because it is better than the competition, but rather because the person who holds it has survived.
No, we don’t put theories into practice. We create theories out of practice.
...since you cannot forecast collaborations and cannot direct them, you cannot see where the world is going. All you can do is create an environment that facilitates these collaborations, and lay the foundation for prosperity.
...for the antifragile, good news tends to be absent from past data, and for the fragile it is the bad news that doesn’t show easily.
You select people on their ability to hang around, as a filter, and studious people were not good at hanging around: they needed to have a clear task.
You select people on their ability to hang around, as a filter, and studious people were not good at hanging around: they needed to have a clear task.
People who build their strength using these modern expensive gym machines can lift extremely large weights, show great numbers and develop impressive-looking muscles, but fail to lift a stone; they get completely hammered in a street fight by someone trained in more disorderly settings. Their strength is extremely domain-specific and their domain doesn’t exist outside of ludic—extremely organized—constructs.
I thought it was the same with people who were selected for trying to get high grades in a small number of subjects rather than follow their curiosity: try taking them slightly away from what they studied and watch their decomposition, loss of confidence, and denial.
...logic excludes—by definition—nuances, and since truth resides exclusively in the nuances, it is “a useless instrument for finding Truth in the moral and political sciences.”
The payoff, what happens to you (the benefits or harm from it), is always the most important thing, not the event itself.
Scientists have something called “confidence level”; a result obtained with a 95 percent confidence level means that there is no more than a 5 percent probability of the result being wrong. The idea of course is inapplicable as it ignores the size of the effects, which of course, makes things worse with extreme events.
Some of them had great courage—not just the courage to put forth their ideas, but the courage to accept to live in a world they knew they did not understand.
Time is an eraser rather than a builder, and a good one at breaking the fragile—whether buildings or ideas.
Scientists have something called “confidence level”; a result obtained with a 95 percent confidence level means that there is no more than a 5 percent probability of the result being wrong. The idea of course is inapplicable as it ignores the size of the effects, which of course, makes things worse with extreme events.
Some of them had great courage—not just the courage to put forth their ideas, but the courage to accept to live in a world they knew they did not understand.
Time is an eraser rather than a builder, and a good one at breaking the fragile—whether buildings or ideas.
Book V
The fragility that comes from linearity is immediately visible, so we rule it out because the object would be already broken.
Accordingly, we are necessarily immune to the cumulative effect of small deviations, or shocks of very small magnitude, which implies that these affect us disproportionally less (that is, nonlinearly less) than larger ones.
For the fragile, the cumulative effect of small shocks is smaller than the single effect of an equivalent single large shock.
For the antifragile, shocks bring more benefits (equivalently, less harm) as their intensity increases (up to a point).
Lifting one hundred pounds once brings more benefits than lifting fifty pounds twice, and certainly a lot more than lifting one pound a hundred times. Benefits here are in weight-lifter terms: strengthening the body, muscle mass, and bar-fight looks rather than resistance and the ability to run a marathon.
Look at the convexity effect at work: the average number of cars on the road does not matter at all for traffic speed. If you have 90,000 cars for one hour, then 110,000 cars for another hour, traffic would be much slower than if you had 100,000 cars for two hours. Note that travel time is a negative, so I count it as a cost, like an expense, and a rise is a bad thing.
It turns out that the effect of variability in food sources and the nonlinearity in the physiological response is central to biological systems. Consuming no protein at all on Monday and catching up on Wednesday seemingly causes a different—better—physiological response, possibly because the deprivation, as a stressor, activates some pathways that facilitate the subsequent absorption of the nutrients (or something similar).
Bent Flyvbjerg has shown firm evidence that an increase in the size of projects maps to poor outcomes and higher and higher costs of delays as a proportion of the total budget. ... But there is a nuance: it is the size per segment of the project that matters, not the entire project—some projects can be divided into pieces, not others.
Bent Flyvbjerg has shown firm evidence that an increase in the size of projects maps to poor outcomes and higher and higher costs of delays as a proportion of the total budget. ... But there is a nuance: it is the size per segment of the project that matters, not the entire project—some projects can be divided into pieces, not others.
Bridge and tunnel projects involve monolithic planning, as these cannot be broken up into small portions; their percentage costs overruns increase markedly with size. Same with dams. For roads, built by small segments, there is no serious size effect, as the project managers incur only small errors and can adapt to them. Small segments go one small error at the time, with no serious role for squeezes.
Simply do a small change in the assumptions, and look at how large the effect, and if there is acceleration of such effect.
The notion of average is of no significance when one is fragile to variations.
The hidden benefit of antifragility is that you can guess worse than random and still end up outperforming. Here lies the power of optionality—your function of something is very convex, so you can be wrong and still do fine—the more uncertainty, the better.
The hidden benefit of antifragility is that you can guess worse than random and still end up outperforming. Here lies the power of optionality—your function of something is very convex, so you can be wrong and still do fine—the more uncertainty, the better.
Convexity is about acceleration.
Book VI
There are many things without words, matters that we know and can act on but cannot describe directly, cannot capture in human language or within the narrow human concepts that are available to us. Almost anything around us of significance is hard to grasp linguistically—and in fact the more powerful, the more incomplete our linguistic grasp.
...if we cannot express what something is exactly, we can say something about what it is not—the indirect rather than the direct expression.
Acts of omission, not doing something, are not considered acts and do not appear to be part of one’s mission.
Acts of omission, not doing something, are not considered acts and do not appear to be part of one’s mission.
...negative knowledge (what is wrong, what does not work) is more robust to error than positive knowledge (what is right, what works).
...since one small observation can disprove a statement, while millions can hardly confirm it, disconfirmation is more rigorous than confirmation.
It does not mean that one reason is better than two, just that by invoking more than one reason you are trying to convince yourself to do something. ... Obvious decisions (robust to error) require no more than a single reason.
When asked to imagine the future, we have the tendency to take the present as a baseline, then produce a speculative destiny by adding new technologies and products to it and what sort of makes sense, given an interpolation of past developments. ... Technology is at its best when it is invisible.
For instance, the absence of paperwork makes bureaucracy—something modernistic—more palatable than it was in the days of paper files. With a little bit of luck a computer virus will wipe out all records and free people from their past mistakes.
The shoe industry, after spending decades “engineering” the perfect walking and running shoe, with all manner of “support” mechanisms and material for cushioning, is now selling us shoes that replicate being barefoot—they want to be so unobtrusive that their only claimed function is to protect our feet from the elements, not to dictate how we walk as the more modernistic mission was.
For the perishable, every additional day in its life translates into a shorter additional life expectancy. For the nonperishable, every additional day may imply a longer life expectancy.
Consider the difference between the artisanal—the other category—and the industrial. What is artisanal has the love of the maker infused in it, and tends to satisfy—we don’t have this nagging impression of incompleteness we encounter with electronics.
Urban planning, incidentally, demonstrates the central property of the so-called top-down effect: top-down is usually irreversible, so mistakes tend to stick, whereas bottom-up is gradual and incremental, with creation and destruction along the way, though presumably with a positive slope. ... Further, things that grow in a natural way, whether cities or individual houses, have a fractal quality to them.
This lack of recursive thinking applies not just to prophecy, but to other human activities as well: if you believe that what will work and do well is going to be a new idea that others did not think of, what we commonly call “innovation,” then you would expect people to pick up on it and have a clearer eye for new ideas without too much reference to the perception of others. But they don’t: something deemed “original” tends to be modeled on something that was new at the time but is no longer new.
There are secrets to our world that only practice can reveal, and no opinion or analysis will ever capture in full. This secret property is, of course, revealed through time, and, thankfully, only through time.
Compare such robustness to the lifespan of electronic documents: some of the computer files of my manuscripts that are less than a decade old are now irretrievable.
Via negativa, of course (by removal of the unnatural): only resort to medical techniques when the health payoff is very large (say, saving a life) and visibly exceeds its potential harm, such as incontrovertibly needed surgery or lifesaving medicine (penicillin).
The “do you have evidence” fallacy, mistaking evidence of no harm for no evidence of harm, is similar to the one of misinterpreting NED (no evidence of disease) for evidence of no disease.
...under nonlinearities, the simple statements “harmful” or “beneficial” break down: it is all in the dosage.
And there is a simple statistical reason that explains why we have not been able to find drugs that make us feel unconditionally better when we are well (or unconditionally stronger, etc.): nature would have been likely to find this magic pill by itself. ... But consider that illness is rare, and the more ill the person the less likely nature would have found the solution by itself, in an accelerating way.
That’s how our lungs function when healthy: with variations and “noise” rather than steady airflow. Humans are antifragile to lung pressure. And this arises directly from the nonlinearity of the response since as we saw everything convex is antifragile, up to a certain dosage.
That’s how our lungs function when healthy: with variations and “noise” rather than steady airflow. Humans are antifragile to lung pressure. And this arises directly from the nonlinearity of the response since as we saw everything convex is antifragile, up to a certain dosage.
Metric-lowering drugs are particularly vicious because of a legal complexity. The doctor has the incentive to prescribe it because should the patient have a heart attack, he would be sued for negligence; but the error in the opposite direction is not penalized at all, as side effects do not appear at all as being caused by the medicine.
If there is something in nature you don’t understand, odds are it makes sense in a deeper way that is beyond your understanding. So there is a logic to natural things that is much superior to our own. Just as there is a dichotomy in law: innocent until proven guilty as opposed to guilty until proven innocent, let me express my rule as follows: what Mother Nature does is rigorous until proven otherwise; what humans and science do is flawed until proven otherwise.
We sacrifice ourselves in favor of our genes, trading our fragility for their survival. We age, but they stay young and get fitter and fitter outside us. Things break on a small scale all the time, in order to avoid large-scale generalized catastrophes.
This random variability is often mistaken for information, hence leading to intervention.
If we live longer, it is thanks to medicine’s benefits in cases that are lethal, in which the condition is severe—hence low iatrogenics, as we saw, the convex cases. So it is a serious error to infer that if we live longer because of medicine, that all medical treatments make us live longer.
Further, to account for the effect of “progress,” we need to deduct of course, from the gains in medical treatment, the costs of the diseases of civilization (primitive societies are largely free of cardiovascular disease, cancer, dental cavities, economic theories, lounge music, and other modern ailments); advances in lung cancer treatment need to be offset by the effect of smoking.
Subtraction of a substance not seasoned by our evolutionary history reduces the possibility of Black Swans while leaving one open to improvements. Should the improvements occur, we can be pretty comfortable that they are as free of unseen side effects as one can get.
Indeed we rarely look at religion’s benefits in limiting the intervention bias and its iatrogenics: in a large set of circumstances (marginal disease), anything that takes you away from the doctor and allows you to do nothing (hence gives nature a chance to do its work) will be beneficial.
Among other things the role of religion is to tame the iatrogenics of abundance—fasting makes you lose your sense of entitlement.
But such ability to be omnivorous had to come in response to more variegated environments with unplanned, haphazard, and, what is key, serial availability of sources—specialization is the response to a very stable habitat free of abrupt changes, redundancy of pathways the response to a more variegated one. Diversification of function had to come in response to variety. And a variety of a certain structure.
Giving people food before they expend energy would certainly confuse their signaling process.
Some people claim that we need more fat than carbohydrates; others offer the opposite (they all tend to agree on protein, though few realize we need to randomize protein intake). Both sides still advocate nonrandomness in the mixing and ignore the nonlinearities from sequence and composition.
Book VII
A writer with arguments can harm more people than any serial criminal.
The asymmetry (antifragility of postdictors): postdictors can cherry-pick and produce instances in which their opinions played out and discard mispredictions into the bowels of history. ... This would be fine, as someone may evolve and contradict earlier beliefs, but then the earlier “result” should be withdrawn from circulation and superseded with a new one—with books, the new edition supersedes the preceding one.
Being self-owned is a state of mind.
...the more complex the regulation, the more bureaucratic the network, the more a regulator who knows the loops and glitches would benefit from it later, as his regulator edge would be a convex function of his differential knowledge. This is a franchise, an asymmetry one has at the expense of others.
...the more complex the regulation, the more bureaucratic the network, the more a regulator who knows the loops and glitches would benefit from it later, as his regulator edge would be a convex function of his differential knowledge. This is a franchise, an asymmetry one has at the expense of others.
...people fit their beliefs to actions rather than fit their actions to their beliefs.
One should give more weight to witnesses and opinions when they present the opposite of a conflict of interest. A pharmacist who advocates starvation and via negativa methods to cure diabetes would be more credible than another one who favors the ingestion of drugs.
More data means more information, perhaps, but it also means more false information.
Mistakes made collectively, not individually, are the hallmark of organized knowledge—and the best argument against it. The argument “because everyone is doing it” or “that’s how others do it” abounds. It is not trivial: people who on their own would not do something because they find it silly now engage in the same thing but in groups. And this is where academia in its institutional structure tends to violate science.
...we may never get to know x, but we can play with the exposure to x, barbell things to defang them; we can control a function of x, f(x), even if x remains vastly beyond our understanding.
...food would not have a taste if it weren’t for hunger; results are meaningless without effort, joy without sadness, convictions without uncertainty, and an ethical life isn’t so when stripped of personal risks.
~~~
- post-traumatic growth
- allows the stressors to do their jobs as messengers
- mistaking absence of evidence (of harm) for evidence of absence
- mediocrity cannot handle more than one enemy
- fluctuat nec mergitur (fluctuates, or floats, but does not sink)
- absence of randomness equals guaranteed death
- over-intervention comes with under-intervention
- alertness is weakened when one relinquishes control to the system
- access to data increases intervention
- noise and randomness can also use and take advantage of you
- daily news and sugar confuse our system
- the more data you get, the less you know what’s going on
- make things more robust to defects and forecast errors, or even exploit these errors
- making the prediction or nonprediction of failure quite irrelevant
- smell cannot be conveyed in a catalogue
- the health-eroding dependence on external recognition
- a certain indifference to fate
- fear into prudence, pain into information, mistakes into initiation
- aggressiveness plus paranoia
- pure action, then pure reflection
- no penalty for simplicity
- significant can only be revealed through practice
- things can be looking at us for a long time
- some things need to break for the system to improve
- sophistication is born of need, and success of difficulties
- the quality lies in their product, not their conversation
- mistake the unintelligible for the unintelligent
- killing the things we can know but not express
- taking the joy of ignorance out of the things we don’t understand
- linear—the simplification that distorts
- how many things one should disregard in order to act
- retrospective distortion
- a natural property of technology to only want to be displaced by itself
- time can act as a cleanser of noise by confining to its dustbins all these overhyped works
- is not to look into the future but to talk about the present
- as if reality cared about opinions and narratives