Antifragile

Antifragile (Nassim Taleb)

  • Wind extinguishes a candle and energized fire. You want to be the fire and wish for wind.
  • We are largely better at doing than we are at thinking, thanks to antifragility. Id rather be dumb and antifragile than extremely smart and fragile.
  • It is far easier to figure out if something is fragile than to predict the occurrence of an event that may harm it. Test for (anti)fragility: does it have more upside than downside from random events?
  • We have been fragilizing almost everything: the economy, our health, politics, education… by suppressing randomness and volatility. Tragedy of modernity: those trying to help are often hurting us the most.
  • In the past people of rank or status where the only ones who took risks: Heroes. Today we are witnessing the rise of a new class of inverse heroes, with too much power and no real downside and/or accountability. At no point in history have so many non-risk takers exerted so much control.
  • Most of history comes from Black swans events.
  • Less is more and is usually more effective.
  • Time is functionally similar to volatility: the more time, the more events, the more disorder.
  • If you see a fraud and do not say fraud, you are a fraud. (Being nice to the arrogant is no better than being arrogant to the nice.)
  • The richer we become, the harder it is for us to live within our means. Abundance is harder for us to handle than scarcity.
  • If you need something done urgently give it to the busiest person in the office.
  • Risk management professionals use the works-case scenario of the past to estimate future risks. However, this work-case event, when it happened exceeded the worst case at the time.
  • Argument against government indebtedness: When you dont have debt you dont care about your reputation in economic circles. It is only when you dont care about your reputation that you have a good one. People lend the most to the people who need it the least.
  • You may never know what type of person someone is unless they are given opportunities to violate moral or ethical codes.
  • Someone who has made plenty of errors though never the same error more than once – is more reliable than someone who has never made any.
  • The avoidance of small mistakes makes the large one more severe.
  • Government is needed most to enforce contracts.
  • Some people have fallen for the naive belief that the world is getting safer: it is exactly like saying that nuclear bombs are safer b/c they explode less often.
  • iatrogenics are harmful unintended side effects
  • Iatrogenics is, should be, an important part of political science, economics, urban planning, education … Iatrogenics of newspapers: They need to fill their pages everyday with a set of news items. Newspapers should be of two-line length on some days, and two hundred pages on other.
  • Those who do too much somewhere do too little elsewhere. Those who tend to over edit also tend to miss the real typos.
  • Hard to find heroes who became heroes for non-action.
  • Procrastination is our natural defense, letting things take care of themselves and exercise their antifragility. Taleb uses procrastination as a message from his inner self to figure out what is worth writing about: "I write only if I feel like it and only on a subject I feel like writing about – and the reader is no fool"
  • Buffet: Invest in businesses that are "so wonderful that an idiot can run them. Because sooner or later, one will.
  • Wisdom in decision making is vastly more important than knowledge. BeTheGood - Intelligent ACTION is power
  • Invest in good actions. Things can be taken away from us – not good deeds and acts of virtue.
  • Upside in good deeds: All good deeds are expenditure; if any one returns it, that is a clear GAIN; if he does not return it, it is not lost, you gave for the sake of giving.
  • The first step toward antifragility consists in first decreasing downside by lowering exposure to negative Black Swans and letting natural antifragility work by itself.
  • Antifragility: aggressiveness plus paranoia : clip your downside, protect yourself from extreme harm, and let the upside, the positive Black swans, take care of itself.
  • An option is what makes you antifragile and allows you to benefit from the positive side of uncertainty, without a corresponding harm from the negative side.
  • Nature is all about the exploitation of optionality; it illustrates how optionality is a substitute for intelligence.
  • The only way to domesticate uncertainty, to work rationally without understanding the future is to have an asymmetry with large benefits and benign harm. This is the exact opposite of reliance on narratives. You cannot look at the future by naive projection of the past.
  • Religious stories might have no value as narratives, but they get you to do something antifragile you otherwise would not do, like mitigate risks.
  • When you are fragile you need to know a lot more than when you are antifragile.
  • There is no evidence that abilities in chess lead to better reasoning off the chessboard
  • The trick is to be bored with a specific book, rather than with the act of reading. So the number of pages absorbed could grow faster than otherwise.
  • Avoidance of boredom is the only worthy mode of action. Life otherwise is not worth living.
  • Much of what other people know isn't worth knowing.
  • The most severe mistake in life is to mistake the unintelligible for the unintelligent.
  • Obvious decisions require no more than a single reason. The French army had a heuristic to reject excuses for absenteeism for more than once reason.
  • In a mature market there is no free lunch anymore, and what appears as a free lunch has a hidden risk, it is most likely that there is a concealed trap somewhere.
  • We ingest probiotics because we dont eat enough dirt anymore.
  • Food is not just a source of energy but a source of information about the environment. Complex systems have feedback loops, what you "burn" depends on what you consume, and how you consume it.
  • We are built to be dupes for theories. Theories come and go; experience stays.
  • Telling people not to smoke seems to be the greatest medical contribution of the last 60 years.
  • Reliance on pain killers encourages people to avoid addressing the cause of the headache with trial and error. it allows them to keep destroying themselves.
  • "I drink no liquid that is not at least 1000 years old"
  • We are likely antifragile to randomness in food delivery and composition, over a certain range or number of days.
  • Breaking a fast feels like the exact opposite of a hangover.
  • Claim: that walking effortlessly will be seen later as just as necessary as sleep.
  • The worst problem of modernity is in the transfer of fragility and antifragility from one party to another, with one getting the benefits and the other (unwittingly) getting the harm. Growing wedge between the ethical and the legal.

  • Code of Hammurabi: If a builder builds a house and the house collapses and causes the death of the owner of the house – the builder shall be put to death. The entire idea is that the builder know more, a lot more than any safety inspector,

    Ralph Nader rule: people voting for war need to have at least one descendant exposed to combat.

  • Thomas Feiedman help caused the Iraq war with is op-eds in the Ny times, yet paid no price for the mistake. He got the upside and others got the downside.
  • Never ask anyone for their opinion, forecast, or recommendation. Just ask them what they have – or dont – in their portfolio.
  • Never ask a doctor what YOU should do, ask him what HE would do if he were in your place.
  • The incentive of a regulator is to have complex regulation.
  • Re climate change: we are doing something new on the planet, the burden of evidence is on those who disturb the natural system.
  • Agency problem: situation where the manager of a business is not the true owner, there are strategies that make them antifragile at the expense of the fragility of the owner.
  • Alan Blinder problem: Violating moral rules while complying perfectly with the law; confusion of ethical and legal.
  • Symmetry is very, very rare empirically and yet all statistical distributions tend to simplify by using it.
  • Fat tails mean incomputability of tail events, little else.

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