| Mental Model | Quote | Application | Use Cases | | --------------------------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | ----------------------------------- | | Antifragility | "Things that gain from disorder, volatility, and stressors" | Understanding systems that improve with stress or volatility | #risk-management #innovation | | Mithridatization | "A bit of a harmful substance, or stressor, in the right dose or with the right intensity, stimulates the organism and makes it better, stronger, healthier, and prepared for a stronger dose the next exposure." | Building resilience through controlled exposure to stressors | #health #personal-development | | Post-traumatic growth | "The opposite of post-traumatic stress syndrome, where people harmed by past events surpass themselves" | Understanding potential positive outcomes from adversity | #psychology #resilience | | Naive Interventionism | "The preference, even obligation, to 'do something' over doing nothing" | Recognizing when inaction might be more beneficial than action | #decision-making #policy | | Via Negativa | "In theology and philosophy, the focus on what something is not, an indirect definition. In action, it is a recipe for what to avoid, what not to do—subtraction, not addition, say, in medicine." | Simplifying decision-making and problem-solving by elimination | #strategy #philosophy | | Lindy Effect | "A technology, or anything nonperishable, increases in life expectancy with every day of its life—unlike perishable items (such as humans, cats, dogs, and tomatoes)" | Predicting the longevity of ideas, technologies, or practices | #forecasting #innovation | | Barbell Strategy | "A dual strategy, a combination of two extremes, one safe and one speculative, deemed more robust than a 'monomodal' strategy" | Managing risk and opportunity in various domains | #investment #career-planning | | Skin in the Game | "Every captain goes down with every ship. This removes the agency problem and the lack of doxastic commitment." | Aligning incentives and reducing agency problems | #ethics #governance | | Optionality | "Not being locked into a given program, so one can change his mind as he goes along based on discovery or new information" | Creating flexibility and resilience in decision-making | #strategy #risk-management | | Iatrogenics | "Harm done by the healer, as when the doctor's interventions do more harm than good" | Recognizing potential negative consequences of well-intentioned actions | #medicine #policy | | Convexity | "Nonlinearities can be concave or convex, or a mix of both. The term convexity effects is an extension and generalization of the fundamental asymmetry." | Identifying and leveraging situations with favorable risk-reward profiles | #finance #decision-making | | Ergodicity | Not directly quoted in the text | Understanding the difference between ensemble probabilities and time probabilities | #probability #risk-assessment | | Black Swan | "Rare, high-impact, and retrospectively predictable events" | Preparing for and potentially benefiting from extreme, unpredictable events | #risk-management #forecasting | | Hormesis | "A bit of a harmful substance, or stressor, in the right dose or with the right intensity, stimulates the organism and makes it better, stronger, healthier, and prepared for a stronger dose the next exposure" | Understanding how small stressors can lead to positive adaptations | #biology #health | | Antifragile Tinkering | "A certain class of trial and error, with small errors being 'the right' kind of mistakes" | Encouraging innovation and learning through controlled experimentation | #innovation #learning | | Lecturing-Birds-How-to-Fly Effect | "Inverting the arrow of knowledge to read academia → practice, or education → wealth, to make it look as though technology owes more to institutional science than it actually does" | Recognizing the limitations of theoretical knowledge in practical applications | #education #innovation | | Green Lumber Fallacy | "Mistaking the source of important or even necessary knowledge—the greenness of lumber—for another, less visible from the outside, less tractable one" | Understanding that practical success doesn't always require theoretical knowledge | #business #expertise | | Fundamental Asymmetry | "When someone has more upside than downside in a certain situation, he is antifragile and tends to gain from (a) volatility, (b) randomness, (c) errors, (d) uncertainty, (e) stressors, (f) time. And the reverse." | Identifying situations with asymmetric risk-reward profiles | #risk-management #decision-making | | Nonpredictive Approach | "Building stuff in a manner immune to perturbations—hence robust to changes in future outcomes" | Developing strategies that don't rely on accurate predictions | #strategy #innovation | | Burden of evidence | "The burden of evidence falls on those who disrupt the natural, or those who propose via positiva policies" | Evaluating proposed changes or interventions | #policy #decision-making | | Doxastic Commitment | "You must only believe predictions and opinions by those who committed themselves to a certain belief, and had something to lose, in a way to pay a cost in being wrong" | Assessing the credibility of opinions and predictions | #critical-thinking #decision-making | | Subtractive Knowledge | "You know what is wrong with more certainty than you know anything else" | Focusing on eliminating known negatives rather than adding positives | #learning #decision-making | | Neomania | "A love of change for its own sake, a form of philistinism that does not comply with the Lindy effect and understands fragility" | Recognizing and avoiding unnecessary or harmful changes | #innovation #decision-making | | Procrustean bed | "Procrustes got people to fit perfectly into his bed by cutting or stretching their limbs. Corresponds to situations in which simplifications are not simplifications." | Recognizing oversimplification and forced conformity | #critical-thinking #decision-making | | Fragilista | "Someone who causes fragility because he thinks he understands what's going on. Also usually lacks sense of humor." | Identifying and avoiding harmful oversimplification | #risk-management #decision-making | | Touristification | "The attempt to suck randomness out of life" | Recognizing and avoiding excessive control or planning | #lifestyle #decision-making | | Rational flâneur | "Someone who, unlike a tourist, makes a decision opportunistically at every step to revise his schedule (or his destination) so he can imbibe things based on new information obtained" | Embracing flexibility and opportunism in decision-making | #lifestyle #strategy | | Tantalized Class | "An economic condition of making more than minimum wage and wishing for more wealth" | Understanding economic and social motivations | #economics #sociology | | Thalesian versus Aristotelian | "The Thalesian focuses on exposure, payoff from decision; the Aristotelian focuses on logic, the True-False distinction" | Balancing practical outcomes with logical reasoning | #philosophy #decision-making | | Ludic Fallacy | "Mistaking the well-posed problems of mathematics and laboratory experiments for the ecologically complex real world" | Recognizing the limitations of simplified models | #critical-thinking #risk-management | | Turkey and Inverse Turkey | "The turkey is fed by the butcher for a thousand days, and every day the turkey pronounces with increased statistical confidence that the butcher 'will never hurt it'—until Thanksgiving" | Understanding the dangers of extrapolating from past data | #risk-management #forecasting | | Agency Problem | "Situation in which the manager of a business is not the true owner, so he follows a strategy that cosmetically seems to be sound, but in a hidden way benefits him and makes him antifragile at the expense (fragility) of the true owners or society" | Aligning incentives in organizational structures | #management #governance | | Hammurabi Risk Management | "The idea that a builder has more knowledge than the inspector and can hide risks in the foundations where they can be most invisible" | Designing systems to align incentives and reduce hidden risks | #risk-management #governance | | Ethical Inversion | "Fitting one's ethics to actions (or profession) rather than the reverse" | Recognizing and avoiding post-hoc ethical justifications | #ethics #critical-thinking | | Narrative Fallacy | "Our need to fit a story, or pattern, to a series of connected or disconnected facts" | Avoiding oversimplification and false patterns in data interpretation | #critical-thinking #data-analysis | | Robust Narrative | "When the narrative does not produce opposite conclusions or recommendations for action under change of assumption or environment" | Developing resilient strategies and explanations | #strategy #communication | | Subtractive Prophecy | "Predicting the future by removing what is fragile from it rather than naively adding to it" | Forecasting by eliminating unlikely scenarios | #forecasting #risk-management | | Mediocristan | "A process dominated by the mediocre, with few extreme successes or failures" | Understanding systems with low variability and predictable outcomes | #statistics #risk-management | | Extremistan | "A process where the total can be conceivably impacted by a single observation" | Understanding systems with high variability and unpredictable outcomes | #statistics #risk-management | | Philosopher's Stone | "The exact measure of benefits derived from nonlinearity or optionality" | Quantifying the benefits of flexibility and nonlinear systems | #finance #decision-making | [[Nassim Nicholas Taleb - Antifragile Things That Gain From Disorder]] #risk-management #innovation #psychology #decision-making #strategy #cheatsheet