Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder

Doxastic Commitment, or “Soul in the Game”: 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. (View Highlight)

Heuristics: Simple, practical, easy-to-apply rules of thumb that make life easy. These are necessary (we do not have the mental power to absorb all information and tend to be confused by details) but they can get us in trouble as we do not know we are using them when forming judgments. (View Highlight)

Opaque Heuristic: Routine performed by societies that does not seem to make sense yet has been done for a long time and sticks for unknown reasons. (View Highlight)

Dionysian: Opaque heuristic seemingly irrational, named after Dionysos (or Bacchus for Romans), the god of wine and revelling. Is contrasted to the Apollonian, which represents order. (View Highlight)

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. When he is right, he collects large benefits; when he is wrong, others pay the price. Typically this problem leads to fragility, as it is easy to hide risks. It also affects politicians and academics. A major source of fragility. (View Highlight)

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; the remedy is to remove the incentive in favor of delayed risk. (View Highlight)

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. How theoreticians impute wrong weights to what one should know in a certain business or, more generally, how many things we call “relevant knowledge” aren’t so much so. (View Highlight)

Skin in the Game / Captain and Ship Rule: Every captain goes down with every ship. This removes the agency problem and the lack of doxastic commitment. (View Highlight)

Empedocles’ Tile: A dog sleeps on the same tile because of a natural, biological, explainable or nonexplainable match, confirmed by long series of recurrent frequentation. We may never know the reason, but the match is there. Example: why we read books. (View Highlight)

Cherry-picking: Selecting from the data what serves to prove one’s point and ignoring disconfirming elements. (View Highlight)

Ethical Problems as Transfers of Asymmetry (fragility): Someone steals antifragility and optionality from others, getting the upside and sticking others with the downside. “Others’ skin in the game.” (View Highlight)

The Robert Rubin violation: Stolen optionality. Getting upside from a strategy without downside for oneself, leaving the harm to society. Rubin got $120 million in compensation from Citibank; taxpayers are retrospectively paying for his errors. (View Highlight)

The Alan Blinder problem: (1) Using privileges of office retrospectively at the expense of citizens. (2) Violating moral rules while complying perfectly with the law; confusion of ethical and legal. (3) The regulator’s incentive to make complicated regulations in order to subsequently sell his “expertise” to the private sector. (View Highlight)

The Joseph Stiglitz problem: Lack of penalty from bad recommendation causing harm to others. Mental cherry-picking, leading to contributing to the cause of a crisis while being convinced of the opposite—and thinking he predicted it. Applies to people with opinions without skin in the game. (View Highlight)

Rational Optionality: Not being locked into a given program, so one can change his mind as he goes along based on discovery or new information. Also applies to rational flâneur. (View Highlight)

Ethical Inversion: Fitting one’s ethics to actions (or profession) rather than the reverse. (View Highlight)

Narrative Fallacy: Our need to fit a story, or pattern, to a series of connected or disconnected facts. The statistical application is data mining. (View Highlight)

Narrative Discipline: Discipline that consists of fitting a convincing and good-sounding story to the past. Opposed to experimental discipline. A great way to fool people is to use statistics as part of the narrative, by ferreting out “good stories” from the data thanks to cherry picking; in medicine, epidemiological studies tend to be marred with the narrative fallacy, less so controlled experiments. Controlled experiments are more rigorous, less subjected to cherry-picking. (View Highlight)

Non-narrative action: Does not depend on a narrative for the action to be right—the narrative is just there to motivate, entertain, or prompt action. See flâneur. (View Highlight)

Robust Narrative: When the narrative does not produce opposite conclusions or recommendations for action under change of assumption or environment. The narrative is otherwise fragile. Similarly, a robust model or mathematical tool does not lead to different policies when you change some parts of the model. (View Highlight)

Subtractive Knowledge: You know what is wrong with more certainty than you know anything else. An application of via negativa. (View Highlight)

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. (View Highlight)

Subtractive Prophecy: Predicting the future by removing what is fragile from it rather than naively adding to it. An application of via negativa. (View Highlight)

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). So a book that has been a hundred years in print is likely to stay in print another hundred years. (View Highlight)

Neomania: A love of change for its own sake, a form of philistinism that does not comply with the Lindy effect and understands fragility. Forecasts the future by adding, not subtracting. (View Highlight)

Opacity: You do not see the barrel when someone is playing Russian roulette. More generally, some things remain opaque to us, leading to illusions of understanding. (View Highlight)

Mediocristan: A process dominated by the mediocre, with few extreme successes or failures (say, income for a dentist). No single observation can meaningfully affect the aggregate. Also called “thin-tailed,” or member of the Gaussian family of distributions. (View Highlight)

Extremistan: A process where the total can be conceivably impacted by a single observation (say, income for a writer). Also called “fat-tailed.” Includes the fractal, or power-law, family of distributions. (View Highlight)

Nonlinearities, Convexity Effects (smiles and frowns): Nonlinearities can be concave or convex, or a mix of both. The term convexity effects is an extension and generalization of the fundamental asymmetry. The technical name for fragility is negative convexity effects and for antifragility is positive convexity effects. Convex is good (a smiley), concave is bad (a frowny). (View Highlight)

Philosopher’s Stone, also called Convexity Bias (very technical): The exact measure of benefits derived from nonlinearity or optionality (or, even more technically, the difference between x and a convex function of x). For instance, such bias can quantify the health benefits of variable intensity of pulmonary ventilation over steady pressure, or compute the gains from infrequent feeding. The Procrustean bed from the neglect of nonlinearity (to “simplify”) lies in assuming such convexity bias does not exist. (View Highlight)

Let us call Mithridatization the result of an exposure to a small dose of a substance that, over time, makes one immune to additional, larger quantities of it. It is the sort of approach used in vaccination and allergy medicine. It is not quite antifragility, still at the more modest level of robustness, but we are on our way. (View Highlight)

He informed me—in response to the idea of antifragility—of a phenomenon called post-traumatic growth, the opposite of post-traumatic stress syndrome, by which people harmed by past events surpass themselves. (View Highlight)

the more energy you put into trying to control your ideas and what you think about, the more your ideas end up controlling you. (View Highlight)

to estimate the quality of research, take the caliber of the highest detractor, or the caliber of the lowest detractor whom the author answers in print—whichever is lower. (View Highlight)

Further, the story of the bones and the associated misunderstanding of interconnectedness illustrates how lack of stress (here, bones under a weight-bearing load) can cause aging, and how depriving stress-hungry antifragile systems of stressors brings a great deal of fragility which we will transport to political systems in Book II. Lenny’s exercise method, the one I watched and tried to imitate in the last chapter, seemed to be as much about stressing and strengthening the bones as it was about strengthening the muscles—he didn’t know much about the mechanism but had discovered, heuristically, that weight bearing did something to his system. (View Highlight)

The frequency of stressors matters a bit. Humans tend to do better with acute than with chronic stressors, particularly when the former are followed by ample time for recovery, which allows the stressors to do their jobs as messengers. (View Highlight)

Which brings us to the existential aspect of randomness. If you are not a washing machine or a cuckoo clock—in other words, if you are alive—something deep in your soul likes a certain measure of randomness and disorder. (View Highlight)

If I could predict what my day would exactly look like, I would feel a little bit dead. (View Highlight)

Hormesis is a metaphor; antifragility is a phenomenon.

We saw how nature wants herself, the aggregate, to survive—not every species—just as, in turn, every single species wants its individuals to be fragile (particularly after reproduction), for evolutionary selection to take place. We saw how such transfer of fragility from individuals to species is necessary for its overall survival: species are potentially antifragile, given that DNA is information, but members of the species are perishable, hence ready to sacrifice and in reality designed to do so for the benefit of the collective. (View Highlight)

His income is extremely variable. Some days are “good,” and he earns several hundred pounds; some are worse, when he does not even cover his costs; but, year after year, he averages about the same as his brother. To date, he has only had a single day in his twenty-five-year career without a fare. Because of the variability of his income, he keeps moaning that he does not have the job security of his brother—but in fact this is an illusion, for he has a bit more.

I write only if I feel like it and only on a subject I feel like writing about—and the reader is no fool. So I use procrastination as a message from my inner self and my deep evolutionary past to resist interventionism in my writing. Yet some psychologists and behavioral economists seem to think that procrastination is a disease to be remedied and cured.1 (View Highlight)

For antifragility is the combination aggressiveness plus paranoia—clip your downside, protect yourself from extreme harm, and let the upside, the positive Black Swans, take care of itself. (View Highlight)

It is an option, “the right but not the obligation” for the buyer and, of course, “the obligation but not the right” for the other party, called the seller. Thales had the right—but not the obligation—to use the olive presses in case there would be a surge in demand; the other party had the obligation, not the right. Thales paid a small price for that privilege, with a limited loss and large possible outcome. That was the very first option on record.

The formula in Chapter 10 was: antifragility equals more to gain than to lose equals more upside than downside equals asymmetry (unfavorable) equals likes volatility. And if you make more when you are right than you are hurt when you are wrong, then you will benefit, in the long run, from volatility (and the reverse). (View Highlight)

Financial independence, when used intelligently, can make you robust; it gives you options and allows you to make the right choices. Freedom is the ultimate option. (View Highlight)

Cicero’s Tusculan Discussions that (View Highlight)

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.” (View Highlight)

The lecturing-birds-how-to-fly effect is an example of epiphenomenal belief: we see a high degree of academic research in countries that are wealthy and developed, leading us to think uncritically that research is the generator of wealth. (View Highlight)

Cherry-picking has optionality: the one telling the story (and publishing it) has the advantage of being able to show the confirmatory examples and completely ignore the rest—and the more volatility and dispersion, the rosier the best story will be (and the darker the worst story). Someone with optionality—the right to pick and choose his story—is only reporting on what suits his purpose. You take the upside of your story and hide the downside, so only the sensational seems to count. (View Highlight)