Antifragile by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Things that gain from disorder
[An iconoclast indeed!)
Wind extinguishes a candle and energizes fire. Likewise with
randomness, uncertainty, chaos: you want to use them,not hide from them. You
want to be the fire and wish for the wind. This summarizes this author’s
nonmeek attitude to randomness and uncertainty. The mission is how to
domesticate, even dominate, even conquer, the unseen, the opaque, and the
inexplicable.
It is far easier to figure out if something is fragile than to
predict the occurrence of an event that may harm it. Fragility can be measured;
risk is not measurable.
In every domain or area of application, we propose rules for
moving from the fragile toward the antifragile, through reduction of fragility
or harnessing antifragility. And we can almost always detect antifragility (and
fragility) using a simple test of asymmetry: anything that has more upside than
downside from random events (or certain shocks) is antifragile; the reverse is
fragile.
(First ethical rule: If you see fraud and do not say fraud, you
are a fraud.)
Antifragile is composed of seven books and a notes section.
Book I, The Antifragile: An Introduction, presents the new
property and discusses evolution and the organic as the typical antifragile
system. It also looks at the tradeoff between the antifragility of the collective
and the fragility of the individual.
Book II, Modernity and the Denial of Antifragility, describes what
happens when we starve systems— mostly political systems— of volatility. It
discusses this invention called the nation- state, as well as the idea of harm
done by the healer, someone who tries to help you and ends up harming you very
badly.
Book III, A Nonpredictive View of the World, introduces Fat Tony
and his intuitive detection of fragility and presents the foundational
asymmetry of things grounded in the writings of Seneca, the Roman philosopher
and doer.
Book IV, Optionality, Technology, and the Intelligence of
Antifragility, presents the mysterious property of the world, by which a
certain asymmetry is behind things, rather than human “intelligence,” and how
optionality drove us here. It is opposed to what I call the Soviet- Harvard
method. And Fat Tony argues with Socrates about how we do things one cannot
quite explain.
Book V, The Nonlinear and the Nonlinear (sic), is about the philosopher’s
stone and its opposite: how to turn lead into gold, and gold into lead. Two
chapters constitute the central technical section— the plumbing of the book—
mapping fragility (as nonlinearity, more specifi cally, convexity effects) and
showing the edge coming from a certain class of convex strategies (skipped from
summary)
Book VI, Via Negativa, shows the wisdom and effectiveness of
subtraction over addition (acts of omission over acts of commission). This
section introduces the notion of convexity effects. Of course the first
application is to medicine. I look at medicine only from an epistemological,
risk- management approach— and it looks different from there.
Book VII, The Ethics of Fragility and Antifragility, grounds
ethics in transfers of fragility, with one party getting the benefits and the
other one the harm, and points out problems arising from absence of skin in the
game.
(The only modern dictum I follow is one by George Santayana: A man
is morally free when . . . he judges the world, and judges other men, with
uncompromising sincerity. This is not just an aim but an obligation.)
Book I
To counter success, you need a high offsetting dose of robustness,
even high doses of antifragility. You want to be Phoenix, or possibly Hydra.
Otherwise the sword of Damocles will get you.
It is not well known that many colors we take for granted had no
name for a long time, and had no names in the central texts in Western culture.
Ancient Mediterranean texts, both Greek and Semitic, also had a reduced
vocabulary of a small number of colors polarized around the dark and the
light—Homer and his contemporaries were limited to about three or four main
colors: black, white, and some indeterminate part of the rainbow, often
subsumed as red, or yellow..
How do you innovate? Naturally, there are classical thoughts on
the subject,with a Latin saying that sophistication is born out of hunger
(artificia docuit fames).The idea pervades classical literature: in Ovid,
difficulty is what wakes up the genius. The excess energy released from
overreaction to setbacks is what innovates!
This message from the ancients is vastly deeper than it seems. It
contradicts modern methods and ideas of innovation and progress on many levels,
as we tend to think that innovation comes from bureaucratic funding, through
planning, or by putting people through a Harvard Business School class by one
Highly Decorated Professor of Innovation and Entrepreneurship (who never
innovated anything) or hiring a consultant (who never innovated anything). This
is a fallacy—note for now the disproportionate contribution of uneducated
technicians and entrepreneurs to various technological leaps, from the
Industrial Revolution to the emergence of Silicon Valley, and you will
see what I mean.
It is said that the best horses lose when they compete with slower
ones, and win against better rivals. Undercompensation from the absence of a
stressor, inverse hormesis, absence of challenge, degrades the best of the
best. In Baudelaire’s poem, “The albatross’s giant wings prevent him from
walking”—many do better in Calculus 103 than Calculus 101.
This mechanism of overcompensation hides in the most unlikely
places. If tired after an intercontinental flight, go to the gym for some
exertion instead of resting. Also, it is a well-known trick that if you need
something urgently done, give the task to the busiest (or second busiest)
person in the office. Most humans manage to squander their free time, as free
time makes them dysfunctional, lazy, and unmotivated—the busier they get, the
more active they are at other tasks. Overcompensation, here again.
I find it better to whisper, not shout. Better to be slightly
inaudible, less clear. One should have enough self-control to make the audience
work hard to listen, which causes them to switch into intellectual
overdrive.The management guru Peter Drucker and the psychoanalyst Jacques
Lacan, two persons who mesmerized the crowds the most in their respective
areas, were the antithesis of the polished-swanky speaker or the
consonant-trained television announcer.
Layers of redundancy are the central risk management property of
natural systems. We humans have two kidneys (this may even include
accountants), extra spare parts, and extra capacity in many, many things (say,
lungs, neural system, arterial apparatus), while human design tends to be spare
and inversely redundant, so to speak—we have a historical track record of
engaging in debt, which is the opposite of redundancy (fifty thousand in extra
cash in the bank or, better, under the mattress, is redundancy; owing the bank
an equivalent amount, that is, debt, is the opposite of redundancy). Redundancy
is ambiguous because it seems like a waste if nothing unusual happens. Except
that something unusual happens—usually.
The dictum by Seneca in De clemencia about the inverse effect of
punishments. He wrote: “Repeated punishment, while it crushes the hatred of a
few, stirs the hatred of all … just as trees that have been trimmed throw out
again countless branches.” There is an Irish revolutionary song that
encapsulates the effect:The higher you build your barricades, the stronger we
become.
The crowds, at some point, mutate, blinded by anger and a sense of
outrage, fueled by the heroism of a few willing to sacrifice their lives for
the cause and hungry for the privilege to become martyrs. It is that political
movements and rebellions can be highly antifragile, and the sucker game is to
try to repress them using brute force rather than manipulate them, give in, or
find more astute ruses, as Heracles did with Hydra.
Like tormenting love, some thoughts are so antifragile that you feed
them by trying to get rid of them, turning them into obsessions. Psychologists
have shown the irony of the process of thought control: the more energy you put
into trying to control your ideas and what you think about, the more your ideas
end up controlling you.
The wily Venetians knew how to spread information by disguising it
as a secret. Try it out with the following experiment in spreading gossip: tell
someone a secret and qualify it by insisting that it is a secret, begging your
listener “not to tell anyone”; the more you insist that it remain a secret, the
more it will spread.
With complex systems, interdependencies are severe. You need to
think in terms of ecology: if you remove a specific animal you disrupt a food
chain: its predators will starve and its prey will grow unchecked, causing
complications and series of cascading side effects. Lions are exterminated by
the Canaanites, Phoenicians, Romans, and later inhabitants of Mount Lebanon,
leading to the proliferation of goats who crave tree roots, contributing to the
deforestation of mountain areas, consequences that were hard to see ahead of
time.
I feel anger and frustration when I think that one in ten
Americans beyond the age of high school is on some kind of antidepressant, such
as Prozac.There may be a few good reasons to be on medication, in severely
pathological cases,but my mood, my sadness, my bouts of anxiety, are a second
source of intelligence—perhaps even the first source. Had Prozac been available
last century, Baudelaire’s “spleen,” Edgar Allan Poe’s moods, the poetry of
Sylvia Plath, the lamentations of so many other poets, everything with a soul
would have been silenced.… There is another danger: in addition to harming
children, we are harming society and our future. Measures that aim at reducing
variability and swings in the lives of children are also reducing variability
and differences within our said to be Great Culturally Globalized Society.
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. Every plane
crash brings us closer to safety, improves the system, and makes the next
flight safer—those who perish contribute to the overall safety of others. Both
your failures and your successes will give you information. But, and this is
one of the good things in life, sometimes you only know about someone’s
character after you harm them with an error for which you are solely
responsible.
Book II
The more variability you observe in a system, the less Black
Swan–prone it is. Let us now examine how this applies to political systems with
the story of Switzerland.
Switzerland is the most antifragile place on the planet; it
benefits from shocks that take place in the rest of the world. The most stable
country in the world does not have a large central government. And it is not
stable in spite of not having a government; it is stable because it does not
have one. Ask random Swiss citizens to name their president, and count the
proportion of people who can do so— they can usually name the presidents of
France or the United States but not their own. Its currency works best (at the
time of writing it proved to be the safest), yet its central bank is tiny, even
relative to its size. It is perhaps the most successful country in history, yet
it has traditionally had a very low level of university education compared to
the rest of the rich nations. Its system, even in banking during my days, was
based on apprenticeship models, nearly vocational rather than the theoretical
ones. In other words, on techne (crafts and know how), not episteme (book
knowledge, know what).
A turkey is fed for a thousand days by a butcher; every day
confirms to its staff of analysts that butchers love turkeys “with increased
statistical confidence.” The butcher will keep feeding the turkey until a few
days before Thanksgiving. The key here is that such a surprise will be a Black
Swan event; but just for the turkey, not for the butcher. So our mission in
life becomes simply “how not to be a turkey,” or, if possible, how to be a
turkey in reverse—antifragile, that is. “Not being a turkey” starts with
figuring out the difference between true and manufactured stability.
The northern Levant, roughly today’s northern part of Syria and
Lebanon, stayed perhaps the most prosperous province in the history of mankind,
over the long, very long stretch of time from the pre-pottery Neolithic until
very modern history, the middle of the twentieth century. That’s twelve
thousand years—compared to, say, England, which has been prosperous for about
five hundred years, or Scandinavia, now only prosperous for less than three
hundred years. Few areas on the planet have managed to thrive with so much
continuity over any protracted stretch of time, what historians call longue
durée. Other cities came and went; Aleppo, Emesa (today Homs), and Laodicea
(Lattakia) stayed relatively affluent.The northern Levant was since ancient
times dominated by traders, largely owing to its position as a central spot on
the Silk Road, and by agricultural lords, as the province supplied wheat
to much of the Mediterranean world, particularly Rome.
Then two events took place. First, after the Great War, one part
of the northern Levant was integrated into the newly created nation of Syria,
separated from its other section, now part of Lebanon. The entire area had been
until then part of the Ottoman Empire, but functioned as somewhat autonomous
regions. Then, a few decades into the life of Syria, the modernist Baath Party
came to further enforce utopias. As soon as the Baathists centralized the place
and enforced their statist laws, Aleppo and Emesa went into instant decline
There is a Latin expression festina lente, “make haste slowly.”
The Romans were not the only ancients to respect the act of voluntary omission.
The Chinese thinker Lao Tzu coined the doctrine of wu-wei, “passive
achievement.”
In the United States, we burn twelve calories in transportation
for every calorie of nutrition; in Soviet Russia, it was one to one. One can
imagine what could happen to the United States (or Europe) in the event of food
disruptions. Further, because of the inefficiency of housing in the Soviet
state, people had been living in close quarters for three generations, and had
tight bonds that ensured—as in the Lebanese war—that they stayed close to each
other and lent to each other. People had real links, unlike in social networks,
and fed their hungry friends, expecting that some friend (most likely another
one) would help them should they get in dire circumstances.
Most explanations that are offered for episodes of turmoil follow
the catalysts-ascauses confusion. Take the “Arab Spring” of 2011. The riots in
Tunisia and Egypt were initially attributed to rising commodity prices, not to
stifling and unpopular dictatorships. But Bahrain and Libya were wealthy
countries that could afford to import grain and other commodities. Further, we
had had considerably higher commodity prices a few years earlier without any
uprising at all. Again, the focus is wrong even if the logic is comforting. It
is the system and its fragility, not events, that must be studied —what
physicists call “percolation theory,” in which the properties of the randomness
of the terrain are studied, rather than those of a single element of the
terrain.
Book III
When you become rich, the pain of losing your fortune exceeds the
emotional gain of getting additional wealth, so you start living under
continuous emotional threat.
Seneca said that wealth is the slave of the wise man and master of
the fool. Provide for the worst; the best can take care of itself
Fragility implies more to lose than to gain, equals more downside
than upside, equals (unfavorable) asymmetry and Antifragility implies more to
gain than to lose, equals more upside than downside, equals (favorable)
asymmetry.
(In finance, I stood in 2008 for banks to be nationalized rather
than bailed out, and other forms of speculation not entailing taxpayers left
free.)
What do we mean by barbell? The barbell (a bar with weights on
both ends that weight lifters use) is meant to illustrate the idea of a
combination of extremes kept separate, with avoidance of the middle. In our
context it is not necessarily symmetric: it is just composed of two extremes,
with nothing in the center. A barbell can be any dual strategy composed of
extremes, without the corruption of the middle—somehow they all result in
favorable asymmetries.
So just as Stoicism is the domestication, not the elimination, of
emotions, so is the barbell a domestication, not the elimination, of
uncertainty.
Book IV
Harvard’s former president Larry Summers got in trouble (clumsily)
explaining a version of the point and lost his job in the aftermath of the
uproar. He was trying to say that males and females have equal intelligence,
but the male population has more variations and dispersion (hence volatility),
with more highly unintelligent men, and more highly intelligent ones. For
Summers, this explained why men were overrepresented in the scientific and
intellectual community (and also why men were overrepresented in jails or
failures). The number of successful scientists depends on the “tails,” the
extremes, rather than the average.
Steve Jobs at a famous speech: “Stay hungry, stay foolish.” He
probably meant “Be crazy but retain the rationality of choosing the upper bound
when you see it.” Any trial and error can be seen as the expression of an
option, so long as one is capable of identifying a favorable result and
exploiting it
Option = asymmetry + rationality
in business, people pay for the option when it is identified and
mapped in a contract, so explicit options tend to be expensive to purchase,
much like insurance contracts. They are often overhyped. 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 had been putting our suitcases on top of a cart with wheels,
but nobody thought of putting tiny wheels directly under the suitcase. Can you
imagine that it took close to six thousand years between the invention of the
wheel (by, we assume, the Mesopotamians) and this brilliant implementation (by
some luggage maker in a drab industrial suburb)?
the Mayans and Zapotecs did not make the leap to the application.
They used vast quantities of human labor, corn maize, and lactic acid to move
gigantic slabs of stone in the flat spaces ideal for pushcarts and chariots
where they built their pyramids.Meanwhile, their small children were rolling
their toys on the stucco floors.
The same story holds for the steam engine: the Greeks had an
operating version of it, for amusement, of course: the aeolipyle, a turbine
that spins when heated, as described by Hero of Alexandria. But it took the
Industrial Revolution for us to discover this earlier discovery.
The story of the wheel also illustrates the point of this chapter:
both governments and universities have done very, very little for innovation
and discovery, precisely because, in addition to their blinding rationalism,
they look for the complicated, the lurid, the newsworthy, the narrated, the
scientistic, and the grandiose, rarely for the wheel on the suitcase.
Just as great geniuses invent their predecessors, practical
innovations create their theoretical ancestry.
There is something sneaky in the process of discovery and
implementation—something people usually call evolution. We talk big but
hardly have any imagination, except for a few visionaries who seem to recognize
the optionality of things.
implementation does not necessarily proceed from invention. It,
too, requires luck and circumstances. The history of medicine is littered with
the strange sequence of discovery of a cure followed, much later, by the
implementation
As per the Yiddish saying: “If the student is smart, the teacher
takes the credit.”
So we are blind to the possibility of the alternative process, or
the role of such a
process, a loop: Random Tinkering (antifragile) → Heuristics
(technology) → Practice and
Apprenticeship → Random Tinkering (antifragile) → Heuristics
(technology)
→ Practice and Apprenticeship …
In parallel to the above loop: Practice → Academic Theories →
Academic Theories → Academic Theories →Academic Theories … (with of course some
exceptions, some accidental leaks,
though these are indeed rare and overhyped and grossly
generalized).
The Soviet-Harvard illusion (lecturing birds on flying and
believing that the lecture is the cause of these wonderful skills) belongs to a
class of causal illusions called epiphenomena. What are these illusions? When
you spend time on the bridge of a ship or in the coxswain’s station with a
large compass in front, you can easily develop the impression that the compass
is directing the ship rather than merely reflecting its
direction.
It would seem a reasonable investment if one accepts the notion
that university
knowledge generates economic wealth. But this is a belief that
comes more from
superstition than empiricism
Traders trade → traders figure out techniques and products →
academic
economists find formulas and claim traders are using them → new
traders
believe academics → blowups (from theory-induced fragility)
There were two main sources of technical knowledge and innovation
in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: the hobbyist and the English
rector, both of whom were generally in barbell situations.
An extraordinary proportion of work came out of the rector, the
English parish priest with no worries, erudition, a large or at least
comfortable house, domestic help, a reliable supply of tea and scones with
clotted cream, and an abundance of free time. And, of course, optionality. The
enlightened amateur, that is. The Reverends Thomas Bayes (as in Bayesian
probability) and Thomas Malthus (Malthusian overpopulation) are the most
famous. But there are many more surprises, cataloged in Bill Bryson’s Home, in
which the author found ten times more vicars and clergymen leaving recorded
traces for posterity than scientists, physicists, economists, and even
inventors. In addition to the previous two giants, I randomly list
contributions by country clergymen: Rev. Edmund Cartwright invented the power
loom, contributing to the Industrial Revolution; Rev. Jack Russell bred the
terrier; Rev. William Buckland was the first authority on dinosaurs; Rev.
William Greenwell invented modern archaeology; Rev. Octavius Pickard-Cambridge
was the foremost authority on spiders; Rev. George Garrett invented the
submarine; Rev. Gilbert White was the most esteemed naturalist of his day; Rev.
M. J. Berkeley was the top expert on fungi; Rev. John Michell helped discover
Uranus; and many more. Note that, just as with our episode documented with
Haug, that organized science tends to skip the “not made here,” so the list of
visible contribution by hobbyists and doers is most certainly shorter than the
real one, as some academic might have appropriated the innovation by his
predecessor.
The Industrial Revolution, for a refresher, came from
“technologists building technology,” or what he calls “hobby science.” Take
again the steam engine, the one artifact that more than anything else embodies
the Industrial Revolution. As we saw, we had a blueprint of how to build it
from Hero of Alexandria. Yet the theory didn’t interest anyone for about two millennia.
So practice and rediscovery had to be the cause of the interest in Hero’s
blueprint, not the other way around.
Kealey presents a convincing—very convincing—argument that the
steam engine emerged from preexisting technology and was created by uneducated,
often isolated men who applied practical common sense and intuition to address
the mechanical problems that beset them, and whose solutions would yield
obvious economic reward.
In some cases, because the source of the discovery is military, we
don’t know exactly what’s going on. Take for instance chemotherapy for cancer,
as discussed in Meyers’s book. An American ship carrying mustard gas off Bari
in Italy was bombed by the Germans 1942. It helped develop chemotherapy owing
to the effect of the gas on the condition of the soldiers who had liquid
cancers (eradication of white blood cells). But mustard gas was banned by the
Geneva Conventions, so the story was kept secret— Churchill purged all mention
from U.K. records, and in the United States, the information was stifled,
though not the research on the effect of nitrogen mustard.
Almost everything theoretical in management, from Taylorism to all
productivity stories, upon empirical testing, has been exposed as
pseudoscience—and like most economic theories, lives in a world parallel to the
evidence:
For an illustration of business drift, rational and opportunistic
business drift, take the following. Coca-Cola began as a pharmaceutical
product. Tiffany & Co., the fancy jewelry store company, started life as a
stationery store. The last two examples are close, perhaps, but consider next:
Raytheon, which made the first missile guidance system, was a refrigerator
maker (one of the founders was no other than Vannevar Bush, who conceived the
teleological linear model of science we saw earlier; go figure). Now, worse:
Nokia, who used to be the top mobile phone maker, began as a paper mill (at
some stage they were into rubber shoes). DuPont, now famous for Teflon nonstick
cooking pans, Corian countertops, and the durable fabric Kevlar, actually started
out as an explosives company. Avon, the cosmetics company, started out in
door-to-door book sales. And, the strangest of all, Oneida Silversmiths was a
community religious cult but for regulatory reasons they needed to use as cover
a joint stock company.
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
In the fragile case of negative asymmetries (turkey problems), the
sample track record will tend to underestimate the long-term average; it will
hide the defects and display the qualities.
Rules based on the chapter so far. (i) Look for optionality; in
fact, rank things according to optionality, (ii) preferably with open-ended,
not closed-ended, payoffs; (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 (an idea that is part of the modus operandi of the venture capitalist Marc
Andreessen); one gets immunity from the backfit narratives of the business plan
by investing in people. It is simply more robust to do so; (iv) Make sure you
are barbelled, whatever that means in your business.
The biologist and intellectual E. O. Wilson was once asked what
represented the most hindrance to the development of children; his answer was
the soccer mom. His argument is that they repress children’s natural biophilia,
their love of living things. But the problem is more general; soccer moms try
to eliminate the trial and error, the antifragility, from children’s lives,
move them away from the ecological and transform them into nerds working on
preexisting (soccer-mom-compatible) maps of realit
it is indeed with Socrates that the main questions that became
philosophy today were first raised, questions such as “what is existence?,”
“what are morals?,” “what is a proof?,”
“what is science?,” “what is this?” and “what is that?” Socrates
went even as far as questioning the poets and reported that they had no more
clue than the public about their own works
Nietzsche is also allergic to Socrates’ version of truth.
“What is not intelligible to me is not necessarily unintelligent” is
perhaps the most potent sentence in all of Nietzsche’s century—and we used a
version of it in the prologue, in the very definition of the fragilista who
mistakes what he does not understand for nonsense. This argument is precisely
what Nietzsche vituperated against: knowledge is the panacea; error is evil;
hence science is an optimistic enterprise.
Philosophers talk about truth and falsehood. People in life talk
about payoff, exposure, and consequences (risks and rewards), hence fragility
and antifragility. And sometimes philosophers and thinkers and those who study
conflate Truth with risks and rewards.
Book VI
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.
Finally, consider this modernized version in a saying from Steve
Jobs: “People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on.
But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other
good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I’m actually as proud of
the things we haven’t done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying no
to 1,000 things.”
Antifragility implies—contrary to initial instinct—that the old is
superior to the new, and much more than you think. No matter how something
looks to your intellectual machinery, or how well or poorly it narrates, time
will know more about its fragilities and break it when necessary.
“Time has sharp teeth that destroy everything,” declaimed the
sixth-century (B.C.)
poet Simonides of Ceos. Franco-Russian poetess Elsa Triolet said,
“time burns but leaves no ashes”. An interesting apparent paradox is that,
according to these principles, longer-term predictions are more reliable than
short-term one.
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. He tells
people what to do, or, rather, in my opinion, the more robust what not to do.
humans discovered how to make fat products (trans fat) and, as it
was the great era of scientism, they were convinced they could make it better
than nature. Today trans fat is widely banned as it turned out that it kills
people, as it is behind heart disease and cardiovascular problems.
For another murderous example of such sucker (and fragilizing)
rationalism, consider the story of Thalidomide. It was a drug meant to reduce
the nausea episodes of pregnant women. It led to birth defects. Another drug,
Diethylstilbestrol, silently harmed the fetus and led to delayed gynecological
cancer among daughters.
Statins. Statin drugs are meant to lower cholesterol in your
blood. But there is an asymmetry, and a severe one. One needs to treat fifty
high risk persons for five years to avoid a single cardiovascular event.
Statins can potentially harm people who are not very sick, for whom the
benefits are either minimal or totally nonexistent
Antibiotics. Every time you take an antibiotic, you help, to some
degree, the mutation of germs into antibiotic-resistant strains. Add to that
the toying with your immune system. You transfer the antifragility from your
body to the germ. The solution, of course, is to do it only when the benefits are
large. Hygiene, or excessive hygiene, has the same effect, particularly when
people clean their hands with chemicals after every social exposure.
Here are some verified and potential examples of iatrogenics (in
terms of larger downside outside of very ill patients, whether such downside
has been verified or not)4: Vioxx, the anti-inflammatory medicine with delayed
heart problems as side effects. Antidepressants (used beyond the necessary
cases). Bariatric surgery (in place of starvation of overweight diabetic
patients). Cortisone. Disinfectants, cleaning products potentially giving rise
to autoimmune diseases. Hormone replacement therapy. Hysterectomies. Cesarean
births beyond the strictly necessary. Ear tubes in babies as an immediate
response to ear infection. Lobotomies. Iron supplementation. Whitening of rice
and wheat—it was considered progress. The sunscreen creams suspected to cause
harm. Hygiene (beyond a certain point, hygiene may make you fragile by denying
hormesis—our own antifragility). We ingest probiotics because we don’t eat
enough “dirt” anymore. Lysol and other disinfectants killing so many “germs”
that kids’
developing immune systems are robbed of necessary workout (or
robbed of the “good” friendly germs and parasites). Dental hygiene: I wonder if
brushing our teeth with toothpaste full of chemical substances is not mostly to
generate profits for the toothpaste industry—the brush is natural, the
toothpaste might just be to counter the abnormal products we consume, such as
starches, sugars and high fructose corn syrup. Speaking of which, high fructose
corn syrup was the result of neomania, financed by a Nixon administration in
love with technology and victim of some urge to subsidize corn farmers. Insulin
injections for Type II diabetics, based on the assumption that the harm from
diabetes comes from blood sugar, not insulin resistance (or something else associated
with it). Soy milk. Cow milk for people of Mediterranean and Asian descent.
Heroin, the most dangerously addictive substance one can imagine, was developed
as a morphine substitute for cough suppressants that did not have morphine’s
addictive side effects.
Perhaps what we mostly need to remove is a few meals at random, or
at least avoid steadiness in food consumption. The error of missing
nonlinearities is found in two places, in the mixture and in the frequency of
food intake.
the Greek Orthodox church has, depending on the severity of the
local culture, almost two hundred days of fasting per year; and these are
harrowing fasts
Book VII
We are witnessing a fundamental change. Consider older
societies—those societies that have survived. The main difference between us
and them is the disappearance of a sense of heroism; a shift away from a
certain respect—and power—to those who take downside risks for 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. What we have currently is the opposite: power
seems to go to those, like bankers, corporate
executives (nonentrepreneurs), and politicians, who steal a free
option from society. In other words, what is called sacrifice. And the word
“sacrifice” is related to sacred, the domain of the holy that is separate from
that of the profane.
Heroism has evolved through civilization from the martial arena to
that of ideas. Initially, in preclassical times, the Homeric hero was someone
principally endowed with physical courage—since everything was physical. In
later classical times, for such people as the great Lacedaemonian king
Agiselaus, a truly happy life was one crowned by the privilege of death in
battle, little else, perhaps even nothing else. Finally, a new form of courage
was born, that of the Socratic Plato, which is the very definition of the
modern man: the courage to stand up for an idea, and enjoy death in a state of
thrill, simply because the privilege of dying for truth, or standing up for
one’s values, had become the highest form of honor.
If you take risks and face your fate with dignity, there is
nothing you can do that makes you small; if you don’t take risks, there is
nothing you can do that makes you grand, nothing. And when you take risks,
insults by half-men (small men, those who don’t risk anything) are similar to
barks by nonhuman animals: you can’t feel insulted by a dog.
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. It is like a free option—to
them; we pay for it.
I want predictors to have visible scars on their body from
prediction errors, not distribute these errors to society.
Never ask anyone for their opinion, forecast, or recommendation.
Just ask them what they have—or don’t have—in their portfolio.
Look at it again, the way we looked at entrepreneurs. They are
usually wrong and make “mistakes”—plenty of mistakes. They are convex. So what
counts is the payoff from success.
Romans forcing engineers to spend time under the bridge they built
(skin in the game)
Never listen to a leftist who does not give away his fortune or
does not live the exact lifestyle he wants others to follow. What the French
call “the caviar left,” la gauche caviar, or what Anglo-Saxons call champagne socialists,
are people who advocate socialism, sometimes even communism, or some political
system with sumptuary
limitations, while overtly leading a lavish lifestyle, often
financed by inheritance—not realizing the contradiction that they want others
to avoid just such a lifestyle.
Shaiy’s extraction was: Everything gains or loses from volatility.
Fragility is what loses from volatility and uncertainty. The glass on the table
is short volatility
