Author: Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Topics: Economics, Systems Design, Mental Models

All information is attributed to the author. Except in the case where we may have misunderstood a concept and summarized incorrectly. These notes are only for reference and we always suggest reading from the original source.

Contents

II. The Antifragile

III. The Antidote to the Black Swan

IV. This Book

Book I

Chapter 1: Between Damocles and Hydra

Chapter 2: Overcompensation and Overreaction Everywhere

Chapter 3: The Cat and the Washing Machine

Chapter 4: What Kills Me Makes Others Stronger

Book II

Chapter 5: The Souk and the Office Building

Chapter 6: Tell Them I Love (Some) Randomness

Chapter 7: Naïve Intervention

Chapter 8: Prediction as a Child of Modernity

Book III

Chapter 9: Fat Tony and the Fragilistas

Chapter 10: Seneca’s Upside and Downside

Chapter 11: Never Marry the Rockstar

Book IV

Chapter 12: Thales’ Sweet Grapes

Chapter 13: Lecturing Birds on How to Fly

Chapter 14: When Two Things Are Not the “Same Thing”

Chapter 15: History Written by the Losers

Chapter 16: A Lesson in Disorder

Chapter 17: Fat Tony Debates Socrates

Book V

Chapter 18: On the Difference Between a Large Stone and a Thousand Pebbles

Chapter 19: The Philosopher’s Stone and Its Inverse

Book VI

Intro

Chapter 20: Time and Fragility

Chapter 21: Medicine, Convexity, and Opacity

Chapter 22: To Live Long, but Not Too Long

Book VII

Chapter 23: Skin in the Game: Antifragility and Optionality at the Expense of Others

Chapter 24: Fitting Ethics to a Profession

Chapter 25: Conclusion

II. The Antifragile

Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shock and stays the same, the antifragile gets better. The antifragile loves randomness and uncertainty, which means a love of errors, a certain class of errors.

Seeing economic systems, nutrition, and ailments in the body as stressors rather than a lack of antifragility is the cause of destruction. We require stress to improve our bodies, societal structure, and psyche to thrive. We need to be prepared to succeed in volatility.

It is much easier to predict fragility than to predict an occurrence of an event that may harm something. Risk is not measurable. Anything that has more upside than downside from random events or certain shocks is antifragile. Our society has reduced randomness and volatility and all that has done has increased fragility.

Antifragility-at-the-cost-of-fragility-of-others occurs when somebody with no skin in the game gains from volatility and cause downside to those who can’t. Bureaucrats, bankers, academics with too much power, etc. hold no accountability but all the power.

III. The Antidote to the Black Swan

Black Swans are large scale unpredictable and irregular events of massive consequence – unpredicted by a certain observer, and such unpredictor is generally called the “turkey” when he is surprised and harmed. These events trick us into believing we could explain them in hindsight. This is because we like to make past events seem linear for convenience and to reduce fear. You get pseudo-order when you seek order; you only get a measure of order when you embrace randomness.

Complex systems are full of interdependencies – hard to detect – and nonlinear responses. Doubling the dose of something not being linear but rather as a curve.

Antifragility is not just the antidote to the Black Swan; understanding it makes us less intellectually fearful in accepting the role of these events as necessary for history, technology, knowledge, everything.

A fragilista is somebody who has a cozy life going to meetings, getting back pain, riding airplanes, suit and tie, reads newspapers, etc., who tends to mistake the unknown for the nonexistent. They fall for the Soviet-Harvard delusion, the (unscientific) overestimation of the reach of scientific knowledge. The fragilista (medical, economic, social planning) is one who makes you engage in policies and actions, all artificial, in which the benefits are small and visible, and the side effects potentially severe and invisible.

A complex system does not require complex intervention. Complications lead to multiplicative chains of unanticipated events. A certain brand of people seek sophistication to justify their profession these days.

IV. This Book

The Extended Disorder Family (or Cluster): (i) uncertainty, (ii) variability, (iii) imperfect, incomplete knowledge, (iv) chance, (v) chaos, (vi) volatility, (vii) disorder, (viii) entropy, (ix) time, (x) the unknown, (xi) randomness, (xii) turmoil, (xiii) stressor, (xiv) error, (xv) dispersion of outcomes, (xvi) unknowledge.

Book I

Chapter 1: Between Damocles and Hydra

Damocles represents fragility and ruling with the constant threat of danger (sword above his head held by a horse hair while eating at a banquet). The danger will be silent, inexorable, and discontinuous. The threat of the black swan looming during times of peace. The more complex a society gets the more vulnerable it is to collapse. You really want to be a phoenix or hydra.

Hormesis is a form of antifragility. A vegetable releasing toxic chemicals to keep predators away may stimulate the organism to become stronger at the right concentration. Low dose poisoning. It lost interest in the 1930s because it was mistakenly associated with homeopathy. Another example of spirituality laden alternative medicine giving possible unresearched interventions a bad name. Don’t scare the scientists away by hijacking it and attributing the effects to mysticism. The funding disappears and can only be researched out of jest or interest.

Experts sometimes become domain dependent. They understand a concept within their field but fail to recognize them in outside concepts.

Chapter 2: Overcompensation and Overreaction Everywhere

How do you innovate? First, get into trouble, not terminal, because sophistication sparks from necessity. Sophistication is born out of hunger. Roman statesman Cato the Censor looked at comfort as the road to waste. As a society, the richer we become, the harder it gets to live within our means. Abundance is harder for us to handle than scarcity.

The best racehorses lose when competing with slower ones and win with better rivals. This makes me think about the weightlifting principals of needing a weight above 80% RPE to fully use all your muscles and make the lift feel easier. Lifting too light leads to under-compensation. If you need something done, give it to the busiest or second busiest person in the office. If you are tired from a long flight, go to the gym instead of resting.

If speaking it is better to have the self control to speak quietly to make the audience be attentive than to yell and scream. Get them into intellectual overdrive.

The purpose of hormesis is for nature to over-insure itself in the case of future threat. It is all about redundancy. Current human systems plan based on previous events and often fail during black swan scenarios. Then they cry that it has never happened before to shift blame.

During times of revolution, the greater the resistance those in power put up, the more willing the people are to become martyrs. The inverse effect of punishments. Rebellions and political movements can become antifragile and it’s a sucker’s game to try to repress them with brute force rather than manipulate or find more astute ruses.

Love is one of the most antifragile things there is. It overreacts and overcompensates to stressors, damage, distance, family incompatibilities, etc. Information is too: it feeds more on attempts to harm it than it does with efforts to promote it. Many harm their reputation by trying to defend it. The Venetians knew how to spread information by disguising it as a secret. Fire feeds on obstacles (Aurelius).

Artists are able to get away with murder without affecting their sales, whereas somebody who is dependent on their reputation, who take themselves seriously cannot. If a company has to “reinstall confidence” you know they are fragile. Also, when you aren’t in debt you don’t care as much about your reputation in economic circles and somehow it is when you don’t care that you tend to have a good rep. Informational attacks can backfire quite easily.

Chapter 3: The Cat and the Washing Machine

Biological organisms can get stronger with stress but inanimate objects cannot (bar one instance of carbon nanotubes self-strengthening). We tend to associate age with muscle atrophy, bone weakness, and loss of mental function but these failures of self-repair come largely from maladjustment. Too few stressors or too little time for recovery. Much of aging comes from a misunderstanding of the effects of comfort.

A lot of man-made things get treated like they are biological. Like society, the economy, markets, and cultural behavior because they grow on their own to reach a sort of self-organization. It is complex so it can be considered almost biological. The lions were exterminated and goats ended up eating roots of trees and caused deforestation. If you shut a bank in New York it will create ripple effects to the whole world.

Complex systems, with interacting parts, convey information to the parts via stressors. Your body receives information about the environment not through your logical apparatus, your intelligence and ability to reason, compute, and calculate, but through stress, via hormones or other messengers. Errors and their consequences are information, such as pain as a risk management system.

Humans tend to build greater antifragility under acute stressors rather than chronic ones. Acute allows time for recovery so the frequency matters. Political tampering (from a fragilista) with a societal structure and building reliance on systems that require ongoing maintenance that don’t self-organize causes more fragility over time and never recovers.

For the nonorganic, noncomplex, equilibrium happens in a state of inertia. So, for the organic, equilibrium only happens with death. We require volatility and randomness.

Ancestral life had no homework, no boss, no civil servants, no academic grades, no application forms, no planned trips or parties, no boring conversations: all life was random stimuli and nothing, good or bad, ever felt like work.

Chapter 4: What Kills Me Makes Others Stronger

Antifragility gets more intricate in the presence of layers and hierarchies. A natural organism is not a single, final unit; it is composed of subunits and itself may be a subunit of some larger collective. They may compete with each other to create antifragility on a whole. For example, restaurants compete for survival and make greater food to attract more customers. Competition creates quality. So, parts on the inside can be fragile.

Evolution is a form of hormesis for a collective rather than the individual. The person may die but the others that are smart enough to avoid the danger or overcome it – or the rest of the group that watches can learn without suffering the same fate. If you ignore the memetic side, evolution is based on genetic code transference. Evolution 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 to increase its fitness. Nature doesn’t find its members very helpful after their reproductive abilities are depleted, except if the organism is a part of big groups. Nature is opportunistic, ruthless, and selfish. However, it can only handle a certain amount of chaos. If you wipe out all the life on the planet, the fittest will not survive.

When you are fragile, you depend on things following the exact planned course, with as little deviation as possible – for deviations cause more harm than help. This is why it needs predictability. If you are using trial and error to navigate unknown space you can gather more and more information with each investigation, reducing expense and creating more value with each endeavor.

The collective grows from the mistakes of the units. Every plane crash leads to greater safety. Economic systems however, are manmade, and include global systems too, which makes them fragile. So, this means we keep making errors because small errors across the world compound without present a true cause. Not that it would make a difference since there are so many variables at play.

To create a form of evolution for the economy and our political structure we require all parts to be equally fragile. That way as a whole we can improve and replace broken or less fit parts. By creating a system that allows failures the weak will actually benefit more than giving bailouts and creating safety nets for those who refuse to secede.

The Nietzche “what doesn’t kill me makes me stronger” gets misinterpreted as hormesis. Although, it could be interpreted as what did not kill me did not make me stronger, but spared me because I am stronger than others; but it killed others and the average population is now stronger because the weak are gone.

The great benefit of the Enlightenment is it has brought the individual to the fore, with his rights, his freedoms, his independence, his “pursuit of happiness”, and privacy. This freed us from the domination of society (sort of), the tribe, and the family.

Heroism is now the act of fulfilling the original contract we all used to have with the tribe. We all respect the act but now it stands out as the rest of us are individualistic. Entrepreneurship can be seen as heroism due to the risk undertaken for the sake of the survival of the economy. Ruined entrepreneurs should probably be treated like failed soldiers.

Book II

Chapter 5: The Souk and the Office Building

Manmade smoothing of randomness produces smooth and steady incomes that are also fragile. Being a taxi driver provides information that allows the driver to change to suit the volatility. Whereas a banker may be fired during a recession suddenly and have no sign of change beforehand. The banker may be unemployable in his 50s when the driver can work as long as he wants. Nature loves small errors, whereas humans do not. So, we create biases that are against antifragility.

Switzerland is the most antifragile country (Direct Democracy). It operates with a bottom-up styled government with regional entities called cantons, near-sovereign mini-states united in a confederation. A bottom-up dictatorship that resists romanticism of utopias. They are small enough to allow this level of volatility assessment at local levels. Biology plays a role in decision making because the policy maker has to confront those it affects and they have skin in the game. A politician removed from the social contact and in control of grand scale decisions will look at the numbers and make mistakes. Which they will also deny responsibility. Large is doomed to break.

The problem with bureaucracies is that we put civil servants in a position to make decisions based on abstract and theoretical matters, with the illusion that they will be making them in a rational, accountable way.

Having access to volatility at the bottom is much more antifragile than a top down stability model that erupts in chaos occasionally. A rare event in a top-down model is inconsequential when you average a year’s records. Freedom of choice and policies for citizens creates an antifragile and burgeoning society. People can overcome their differences if they have control. Groups focus on the difference of others when life becomes stressful because different people in a small tribe have different rules that create instability. So, in reality it would probably be the other groups causing the issues. Not anymore though, when the problems stem from top-down smoothness.

Nation-states rely on centralized bureaucracy, whereas empires, such as Romans and Ottoman dynasties, have relied on local elites, allowing city-states to prosper and conserve effective autonomy. Leading to commercial focus rather than military. Large states get tempted by warfare. Mediocrity can not handle more than one enemy. Individual states compete rather than disturb the whole system. Randomness is distributed rather than concentrated.

Chapter 6: Tell Them I Love (Some) Randomness

The idea of injecting random sound into a system to improve its functioning is called stochastic resonance, adding random noise to the background makes you hear the sounds (say, music) with more accuracy. In an annealing analogy, heat causes atoms to become unstuck from their initial positions and wander randomly through states of higher energy; the cooling gives them more chances of finding new, better configurations.

Alessandro Pluchino and his colleagues showed how adding a certain number of randomly selected politicians to the process can improve the functioning of the parliamentary system. In the US it is the same two parties not changing rather than the two party system itself.

Today we depend on the press for essential human things as gossip and anecdotes about the private lives of people in very remote places. In the past we were not aware of antifragility because we constructed beliefs that served the purpose of managing and surviving uncertainty.

Chapter 7: Naïve Intervention

Iatrogenics is damage in treatment in excess of the benefits. This is frequently shown in the case of medicating children for made up diseases like ADHD or depression. The long-term harm is largely unaccounted for. Iatrogenics is compounded by the “agency problem,” which emerges when one party (agent) has personal interests that are divorced from those of the one using his services (principle). It is also present when a stock broker or medical doctor whose checking account is their ultimate interest rather than your financial or medical health. Or politicians working on their career.

The socioeconomic life and the human body have been affected greatly by low degrees of competence with a high rate of intervention and a disrespect for spontaneous operation and healing – let alone growth and improvement.

What should we control? Limit size of companies, airports, or sources of pollution, and the concentration and speed. Driving speed limits reduce harm but regulating street signs leads to complacency. Alertness is weakened when one relinquishes control to the system.

The Democratic side in the US favors hyper-intervention, unconditional regulation, and large government, while the Republicans love large corporations, unconditional deregulation, and militarism. They both encourage citizen debt.

We need a systematic protocol to determine when to intervene or leave systems alone. We may need to intervene to control the harm from damage to the environment and potential future damage. These are risk management tools. Unfortunately, history doesn’t celebrate people who choose inaction. Avoiding loss isn’t sexy or exciting.

Some leaders have used procrastination as a strategy to deal with aggressors who get frustrated or bored. Delaying revolutions. Sometimes things need to run their course before irreversible policies are undertaken. Procrastination is often the natural way of resisting intervention. We tend to avoid intervening when our life is in no danger. Someone who procrastinates is not irrational; it is the environment that is. It is a way of filtering short-term information.

The personal or intellectual ability to distinguish noise from signal is behind over-intervention. Reliance on data causes severe side-effects. There is a higher signal to noise ratio with more data. If you constantly check stocks and the news your noise signal goes up to 99.5%. The absence of news is significant but the media needs something. Noise is iatrogenic. If you are overanxious, oversensitive, and neurotic you will get distracted and confused by other messages and hence miss the signal. We forget to check the map of the world against reality. So, we are living in an increasingly fragile world, while thinking it is more understandable.

Most explanations that are offered for episodes of turmoil follow the catalysts-as-causes confusion. It is its systems and its fragility, not events, that must be studied. Physicists call it “percolation theory”, in which the properties of the randomness are studied, rather than a single element.

Chapter 8: Prediction as a Child of Modernity

Forecasting is not neutral. It can be iatrogenic to risk-takers. No different to giving snake oil to somebody with cancer. Our world is full of people who make random predictions and nothing is done about them either. Rather than try to predict potential problems we would be better off building antifragile systems. This would entail making the world greed-proof, so nobody can benefit from the harm of others, and hopefully make society benefit from those same deficits in humanity.

Mediocristan randomness, low exposure to extreme events (First Quadrant)

Mediocristan randomness, high exposure to extreme events (Second Quadrant)

Extremistan randomness, low exposure to extreme events (Third Quadrant)

Extremistan randomness, high exposure to extreme events (Fourth Quadrant).

The first three quadrants are ones in which knowledge or lack of it bring inconsequential errors. “Robustification” is the modification of exposures to make a switch from the fourth to the third quadrant.

Book III

Chapter 9: Fat Tony and the Fragilistas

“The sea gets deeper as you go further into it,” according to a Venetian proverb. Curiosity is antifragile and is magnified by attempts to satisfy it.

A system based on verbal warnings will by dominated by non-risk taking babblers. They won’t give you or your ideas respect unless you take their money. A man is honorable in proportion to the personal risks he takes for his opinion. Don’t forget to give excess to others who you know personally deserve it, rather than falling into the charity trap.

Chapter 10: Seneca’s Upside and Downside

To become a successful philosopher king, it is much better to start as a king than as a philosopher. About a person who lived in luxury: “He is in debt, whether he borrowed from another person or from fortune.” Being a stoic makes you too robust to lose and not greedy enough to enjoy the upside. It was not supposed to be about gains or benefits but to have a sense of control over one’s fate and the reduction of psychological fragility.

Success brings asymmetry: you now have more to lose than to gain and are hence, fragile. Possessions make us worry about the downside, thus acting as a punishment as we depend upon them. Dependence on circumstance, rather, the emotions that arise from circumstance – induces a form of slavery.

If an additional quantity of wealth would not benefit you, but you would feel great harm in losing the same amount, there is great asymmetry.

To protect against the fear of loss you can start the day imagining having already had the worst happen and everything afterwards is a bonus. An intelligent life is all about emotional positioning to eliminate the sting of harm. The domestication of emotions rather than the elimination. Fear into prudence, pain into information, mistakes into initiation, and desire into undertaking. Invest in good action. Things can be taken away from us, but not good deeds and acts of virtue.

Stoics who report to prefer poverty to wealth might be fitting a narrative to their situation. Although, you can do moral bookkeeping. If you give something to somebody you treat it as an expenditure. If it is given back it is a gain.

Chapter 11: Never Marry the Rockstar

The first step to achieving antifragility is to decrease one’s downside. Lowering exposure to negative Black Swans and letting natural antifragility work by itself. What matters is the route taken, order of events, not just the destination – what scientists call a path-dependent property. Take many small risks to avoid the consequence of large ones being thrust upon you. Hang around people at opposite ends to you. Don’t bother with the middle men.

Allow children to play with fire for a little bit but keep them away from high danger. Invest energy into protection from consequential harm.

“Provide for the worst; the best can take care of itself.”

American writers tend to be members of the media or academics, which makes them prisoners of a system and corrupts their writing, and in the case of research academics, makes them live under continuous anxiety, pressures, and severe bastardization of the soul.

Book IV

Chapter 12: Thales’ Sweet Grapes

You will never get to know yourself – your preferences- until you face options and choices. You need to know whether you do not like the pursuit of money and wealth because you genuinely do not like it, or because you are rationalizing your inability to be successful at it with the argument that wealth is not a good thing.

If you create options you don’t need to know where you are going. Just pursue what you desire with a stoic mindset and by building antifragility.

Authors, artists, and philosophers are better off having a small number of fanatics than a large number who appreciate their work. The people who dislike don’t matter because you can’t unbuy a book.

If you have optionality, you don’t have much need for intelligence, knowledge, insight, skills, etc. You don’t have to be right that often. All you need is the wisdom to not do unintelligent things to hurt yourself and to recognize favorable outcomes when they occur.

Option = asymmetry + rationality

Rationality means keeping what is good and ditching the bad, knowing to take the profits. The antifragile has the choice to select what is best-options. Long gamma means benefits from volatility and variability.

Chapter 13: Lecturing Birds on How to Fly

Someone in academia must have annoyed him.

Chapter 14: When Two Things Are Not the “Same Thing”

More frustration with education at school not translating into useable skills. Better to learn from people by networking and doing. He says rich countries gain very little by funding universities. The economy doesn’t really benefit. Learning at school is to shape you into a good citizen and tolerable dinner guest. The more interesting the person, the more cultured they are, the more they will be trapped into thinking that they are effective at what they do in real business. The halo effect. Entrepreneurs are doers. They don’t think about anything but the task at hand. Bureaucrats are often measured by their “halo”.

Economics is like a fable. It is there to stimulate ideas, inspire practice perhaps, but not direct or determine practice.

Chapter 15: History Written by the Losers

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)

History is written by the losers with time on their hands and a protected academic position. It is better to create theory from practice rather than the other way around.

Dan Ariely once observed, we cannot reverse engineer the taste of food from looking at the nutritional label.

I see the point he is trying to get across by showing how dangerous and useless science has been in the past but it already has problems with funding. Leading to broke students with no life experience following the money and learning nothing of tangible value. Unless he has a silver lining here, there needs to be a way to use science in a more functional manner and to fix the poor begging scientist system. By encouraging people who have no scientific background that science is useless we’ll probably encourage ignorance and the Dunning-Kruger effect will accelerate.

The more drugs introduced into the market the more unforeseeable interactions we will have.

Collaboration has explosive upside, what is mathematically called a super additive function, i.e., one plus one equals more than two, and one plus one equals much, much more than three.

Strategic planning in economics is nothing more than superstitious babble.

The chapter rules thus far:

(i) Look for optionality; rank things according to optionality

(ii) Open ended, not closed 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

(iv) Make sure you are barbelled in your business.

Charlatan was held to be a synonym for empiric. The word empiric designated someone who relied on experiment and experience to ascertain what was correct. In other words, trial and error and tinkering. That was held to be inferior – professionally, socially, and intellectually. However, empirics enjoyed public support and could not be uprooted. You don’t see their works but they left their mark in medicine. There was a huge peak in iatrogenics after the academization and institutionalization. Organized quacks – they could rationalize their charlatanism. Then again nonacademic medical professionals are mostly quacks but that doesn’t mean because organized ones have quacks that all non-organized are. The take-away from this chapter is that science isn’t the problem, it’s the scientists that ruin it.

Chapter 16: A Lesson in Disorder

The soccer mom represses the child’s biophilia, or love of living things. They also reduce the child’s trial and error, the antifragility, moving them into trusting the map of reality instead. Making them untrained to handle ambiguity. He believes it is best to learn from books and experience with a haphazard approach. If we have the right type of rigor, we need randomness, mess, adventure, uncertainty, self-discovery, near traumatic episodes. Sports try to put randomness in a box.

Those trained to perform within a class setting get used to that kind of contained environment. They struggle to cope with randomness. Just like a bodybuilder having to fight an MMA fighter. Their specialty becomes a deficit.

As a barbell autodidact you need to study enough to get by without over or undershooting so you can use the information in a practical setting.

Chapter 17: Fat Tony Debates Socrates

It is indeed Nietzsche who was first to coin the term with reference to Dionysus, whom he called “creatively destructive” and “destructively creative.” Nietzsche indeed figured out—in his own way—antifragility. Socrates was all questions and no answers. He took joy in shattering people’s illusions by confusing them and debating language as a form of philosophy.

We base most of our decisions on fragility rather than on truth and probability. It is costs and pay offs that matter rather than confidence intervals. If you were 95% confident a plane was safe, you wouldn’t get on. Education is an institution that has grown without external stressors, making it fragile.

Book V

Chapter 18: On the Difference Between a Large Stone and a Thousand Pebbles

For the fragile, shocks bring greater harm as their intensity increases (up to a certain level). Take minimal damage over long periods rather than massive damage in a single go. Fragile people are hurt the most from excessive shock events (black swans, non linearity). For the antifragile, shocks bring more benefits as their intensity increases (up to a point).

Non linearity comes concave and convex. Convex assumes more gain than pain and vice versa.

Emerging properties: The non-linearity result of adding units, as the sum becomes increasingly difficult from the parts. A city is not a large village. Nor is a corporation a larger small business.

In times of stress it is not wise to be “large”. Economics say that at larger sizes things should be more efficient but the reality is they are affected worse. Animals, such as elephants, are hit pretty hard when resources are scarce.

It is better to spread the risk out over smaller areas than the invest heavily in one thing. Bottlenecks are the mother of all squeezes.

Chapter 19: The Philosopher’s Stone and Its Inverse

Detecting the acceleration of harm is the best way to detect fragility, uncertainty, and risk management. An example is when traffic increases and the time it takes to get somewhere increases nonlinearly. Things degrade if there is unevenness in distribution.

Book VI

Intro

If we cannot express what something is exactly, we can say what it is not – the indirect rather than the direct expression. The “apophatic” focuses on what cannot be said directly in words, from the Greek apophasis (saying no, or mentioning without mentioning). Via Negativa. Explaining what something is, not rather than, is through a process of elimination – like when somebody tries to describe god. Proclus would say that statues are carved by subtraction. In our case, we want to remove anything that is fragile. Interventionalists will focus on positive action and are often celebrated by our primitive minds and lead to naïve government intervention that end in disaster. Acts of omission (not doing something) don’t look part of one’s mission and get ignored. Charlatans are recognized by their positive advice with no downside, exploiting our gullibility.

The greatest thinkers contribute to knowledge by removing what is wrong – subtractive epistemology. It is much easier to detect what is wrong than what is right. Negative knowledge is more robust to error than positive knowledge. Disconfirmation is more rigorous than confirmation. Karl Popper often gets mistaken as the origin for falsification. French scholars had it first and philosophers often critique his analysis as too clear cut. Each situation is different so you can’t disprove much with certainty.

In effective political systems, a good mechanism is one that removes the bad guy. They can cause more harm than all of the collective good actions. Bentham’s idea is “the art of the legislator is limited to the prevention of everything that might prevent the development of their [members of the assembly] liberty and their intelligence.”

Steve Jobs said “People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on… It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are… Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things.”

Goldstein and Gigerenzer coined the notion of “fast and frugal” heuristics that make good decisions despite limited time, knowledge, and computing power. Less is more.

The 80/20 idea by Vilfredo Pareto. Winner take all effect. A small number of people own the majority of assets, websites and traffic, customers and business, etc. A small number of employees generate the most problems. Just work on removing the pebble from your shoe.

Physics doesn’t use much statistical backup because it produces results, whereas political science and economics always use stats. If you have more than one reason to do something, don’t do it. It means you require convincing to do the thing and have probably searched for reason. Obvious decisions (robust to error) require no more than a single reason. Bergson’s razor – “A philosopher should be known for one single idea, not more.” If somebody has a massive bio or a bunch of papers and degrees behind them and they haven’t contributed a single major idea they should be avoided.

Chapter 20: Time and Fragility

Much progress comes from the young because of their relative freedom from the system and courage to take action that older people lose as they become trapped by life. But it is the young ideas that are fragile and unseasoned.

An issue with information is it hides failures. We never see the bad novels, failed experiments, or things defeated by evolution. We also notice change more than statics. If you tell someone you lost $10,000 they will be more alerted than if you said your net worth is now worth $1,000,000. Variation requires less memory storage than carrying totals.

Technology tends to display minor variations over time that provide an initial elation when purchased and then a quick dissatisfaction. Whereas artisanal objects build attachment through their imperfections and connection to the creator. By buying barefoot shoes and houses that are nature inspired (floor to ceiling windows) we can get a little closer to our roots without abandoning technology.

Academic experts are to science as prostitutes are to love. If you want truth you need to go for textbooks or those who have not become slaves to the ideology they love. Groundbreaking research is usually garbage and sensationalized.

Chapter 21: Medicine, Convexity, and Opacity

In medicine, if the intervention is to save your life or prevent harm the effects have positive asymmetry and convex. If the aim is comfort you are more likely to suffer from fragility. This is similar to politics.

The second rule of iatrogenics: it is not linear. We should not take risks with near-healthy people; but we take take bigger risks with those in danger. When somebody is just outside the range for something, the chances of having their health improved with intervention is very slim and vice versa for at risk people. Pharma plays on the interventionism of doctors. The legal system favors intervention. It makes more sense for a Dr. to prescribe things like statins than not to since they may be sued for malpractice if they don’t. Even though statins only lower cholesterol. An attribution problem occurs when the person imputes his positive results to his own skills and his failures to luck. The same applies to stockbrokers and managers of companies. No Dr. derives pleasure from the health of his friends, nor the soldier from the peace of his city. Medicine has a hard time grasping normal variability in subjects.

Chapter 22: To Live Long, but Not Too Long

Life expectancy has increased largely due to sanitation, penicillin, a drop in crime, life saving surgery, and some medical practitioners operating in life-threatening situations. To counter for our “progress”, primitive societies were largely free of CV disease, cancer, dental cavities, and other modern ailments. Also, advances in lung cancer treatment would be offset by smoking and pollution. We are fooled into believing that because the average life expectancy was 30 that people only lived that long. The bulk of deaths were from death and childhood. Men mostly died of physical trauma so legal enforcement may have helped more than science.

Treating a cancer that will not kill you can cause more harm than the cancer itself. Chemo is toxic. Mammograms end up causing more tampering and finding deviations from the norm leading to them being “cured”. The harmful effects of smoking are roughly equivalent to the combined good ones of every medical intervention developed since the war. Getting rid of smoking provides more benefit than being able to cure people of every possible type of cancer.

This brings the point of the chapter back to the forefront: Removal of stressors has a greater effect to the overall life of a human and the same can be said in science. No sunscreen, no sunglasses if you have brown eyes, no air conditioning, no orange juice, no smooth surfaces, no soft drinks, no complicated pills, no loud music, no elevator, no juicer, etc.

True wealth lies in worriless sleeping, clear conscience, reciprocal gratitude, absence of envy, good appetite, muscle strength, physical energy, frequent laughs, no meals alone, no gym class, some physical labor (or hobby), good bowel movements, no meeting rooms, and periodic surprises. The Mediterranean diet is proposed to be ideal since their population lives for ages. What isn’t taken into account is their Greek church has 200 days of fasting per year. Some fasting is just fasting of meat, sugar, and olive oil. Randomize protein intake.

Book VII

Chapter 23: Skin in the Game: Antifragility and Optionality at the Expense of Others

In traditional societies, a person is only as respectable and as worthy as the downside he is willing to face for the sake of others. The most courageous occupy the highest rank in their society.

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. If you do, insults from the other are similar to barks from nonhuman animals.

Hammurabi’s code: if a builder builds a house and it collapses and kills someone he should be put to death, the same for if it falls on a child – his child, slave – his slave, etc. It is less about punishing retrospectively and more about establishing responsibility. People voting for war need to have at least one descendent exposed to combat.

The second heuristic is we need to build redundancy, a margin of safety, avoiding optimization, mitigating asymmetries in our sensitivities to risk. No risk without hope for return. If you have an opinion you need exposure.

The asymmetry 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. They become personally antifragile. The more volatility, the higher the illusion of intelligence.

Never ask the doctor what you should do. Ask him what he would do if he were in your position.

A problem with Popper’s falsification is that a harmless wrong idea can persist undetected (Thalesian effect).

First layer, the mild violation: companies are shamelessly self-promotional, like the man on the British Air flight, and it only harms them.

Second layer, the more serious violation: companies trying to represent themselves in the most favorable light possible, hiding the defects of their products—still harmless, as we tend to expect it and rely on the opinion of users.

Third layer, the even more serious violation: companies trying to misrepresent the product they sell by playing with our cognitive biases, our unconscious associations, and that’s sneaky

Chapter 24: Fitting Ethics to a Profession

Shame is the penalty for the violation of ethics – making things more symmetric. Banishment and exile, or worse, ostracism were severe penalties. A simple solution for political corruption would be that anyone who goes into public service should not be allowed to subsequently earn more from any commercial activity than the income of the highest paid civil servant.

Alan Blinder Problem:

• First, the more complicated the regulation, the more prone to arbitrages by insiders. This is another argument in favor of heuristics. Twenty-three hundred pages of regulation—something I can replace with Hammurabi’s rule—will be a gold mine for former regulators. The incentive of a regulator is to have complex regulation. Again, the insiders are the enemies of the less-is-more rule.
• Second, the difference between the letter and the spirit of regulation is harder to detect in a complex system. The point is technical, but complex environments with nonlinearities are easier to game than linear ones with a small number of variables. The same applies to the gap between the legal and the ethical.
• Third, in African countries, government officials get explicit bribes. In the United States they have the implicit, never mentioned, promise to go work for a bank at a later date with a sinecure offering, say $5 million a year, if they are seen favorably by the industry. And the “regulations” of such activities are easily skirted.

The researcher’s free option is in his ability to pick whatever statistics can confirm his belief—or show a good result—and ditch the rest. He has the option to stop once he has the right result. But beyond that, he can find statistical relationships—the spurious rises to the surface. There is a certain property of data: in large data sets, large deviations are vastly more attributable to noise (or variance) than to information (or signal).

There are techniques to control the cherry-picking (one of which is known as the Bonferroni adjustment), but even then they don’t catch the culprits—much as regulation doesn’t stop insiders from gaming the system. This explains why in the twelve years or so since we’ve decoded the human genome, not much of significance has been found.

Chapter 25: Conclusion

Everything gains or loses from volatility. Fragility is what loses from volatility and uncertainty.