Antifragile

According to legend, Mithridates IV, king of Pontus in Asia Minor, while hiding after his father’s assassination, got himself some protection against poisoning by ingesting sub-lethal doses of toxic material in progressively larger quantities. He later incorporated the process into a complicated religious ritual. But this immunity got him in trouble a bit later as his attempt to take his own life by poisoning failed, “having fortified himself against the drugs of others.” So he had to ask for the services of an ally military commander to give him a blow with a sword. The method named Antidotum Mithridatium, celebrated by Celsus, the ancient world’s famous doctor, had to be rather fashionable in Rome, since about a century later it brought some complication to the emperor Nero’s attempts at matricide. Nero had been obsessed with the idea of killing his mother, Agrippina, who, to make things more colorful, was Caligula’s sister (and, even more colorful, was the alleged lover of the philosopher Seneca, more on whom later). But a mother tends to know her son rather well and predict his actions, particularly when he is her only child—and Agrippina knew something about poison, as she might have used the method to kill at least one of her husbands (I said things were quite colorful). So, suspecting that Nero had a contract on her, she got herself Mithridatized against the poisons that would have been available to her son’s underlings. Like Mithridates, Agrippina eventually died by more mechanical methods as her son (supposedly) had assassins slay her, thus providing us with the small but meaningful lesson that one cannot be robust against everything. And, two thousand years later, nobody has found a method for us to get “fortified” against swords. 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 s...

...ort 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. And we already have a hint that perhaps being deprived of poison makes us fragile and that the road to robustification starts with a modicum of harm. Now consider a case when the poisonous substance, in some dose, makes you better off overall, one step up from robustness. Hormesis, a word coined by pharmacologists, is when a small dose of a harmful substance is actually beneficial for the organism, acting as medicine. A little bit of an otherwise offending substance, not too much, acts to benefit the organism and make it better overall as it triggers some overreaction. This was not interpreted at the time in the sense of “gains from harm” so much as “harm is dose dependent” or “medicine is dose dependent.” The interest to scientists has been in the nonlinearity of the dose-response. Hormesis was well known by the ancients (and like the color blue was known but not expressed). But it was… (Location 868)

Typically, the natural—the biological—is both antifragile and fragile, depending on the source (and the range) of variation. A human body can benefit from stressors (to get stronger), but only to a point. For instance, your bones will get denser when episodic stress is applied to them, a mechanism formalized under the name Wolff’s Law after an 1892 article by a German surgeon. But a dish, a car, an inanimate object will not—these may be robust but cannot be intrinsically antifragile. (Location 1159)

One of the rare exceptions I’ve seen is in the report of a 2011 experiment by Brent Carey, a graduate student, in which he shows that composite material of carbon nanotubes arranged in a certain manner produces a self-strengthening response previously unseen in synthetic materials, “similar to the localized self-strengthening that occurs in biological structures.” This crosses the boundary between the living and the inanimate, as it can lead to the development of adaptable load-bearing material. (Location 1163)

Our antifragilities have conditions. 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. For instance, having an intense emotional shock from seeing a snake coming out of my keyboard or a vampire entering my room, followed by a period of soothing safety (with chamomile tea and baroque music) long enough for me to regain control of my emotions, would be beneficial for my health, provided of course that I manage to overcome the snake or vampire after an arduous, hopefully heroic fight and have a picture taken next to the dead predator. Such a stressor would be certainly better than the mild but continuous stress of a boss, mortgage, tax problems, guilt over procrastinating with one’s tax return, exam pressures, chores, emails to answer, forms to complete, daily commutes—things that make you feel trapped in life. In other words, the pressures brought about by civilization. In fact, neurobiologists show that the former type of stressor is necessary, the second harmful, for one’s health. For an idea of how harmful a low-level stressor without recovery can be, consider the so-called Chinese water torture: a drop continuously hitting the same spot on your head, never letting you recover. (Location 1227)

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. … (Location 1283)

There is a titillating feeling associated with randomness. We like the moderate (and highly domesticated) world of games, from spectator sports to having our breathing suspended between crap shoots during the next visit to Las Vegas. I myself, while writing these lines, try to avoid the tyranny of a precise and explicit plan, drawing from an opaque source inside me that gives me surprises. (Location 1318)

Also consider how easy it is to skip a meal when the randomness in the environment causes us to do so, because of lack of food—as compared to the “discipline” of sticking to some eighteen-day diet plan. (Location 1329)

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Henry Petroski presents a very elegant point. Had the Titanic not had that famous accident, as fatal as it was, we would have kept building larger and larger ocean liners and the next disaster would have been even more tragic. (Location 1459)

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The natural was built from nonsystemic mistake to nonsystemic mistake: my errors lifting stones, when I am well calibrated, translate into small injuries that guide me the next time, as I try to avoid pain—after all, that’s the purpose of pain. (Location 1476)

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Leopards, who move like a true symphony of nature, are not instructed by personal trainers on the “proper form” to lift a deer up a tree. Human advice might work with artificial sports, like, say, tennis, bowling, or gun shooting, not with natural movements. (Location 1477)

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Further, my characterization of a loser is someone who, after making a mistake, doesn’t introspect, doesn’t exploit it, feels embarrassed and defensive rather than enriched with a new piece of information, and tries to explain why he made the mistake rather than moving on. These types often consider themselves the “victims” of some large plot, a bad boss, or bad weather. (Location 1494)

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Finally, a thought. He who has never sinned is less reliable than he who has only sinned once. And someone who has made plenty of errors—though never the same error more than once—is more reliable than someone who has never made any. (Location 1497)

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Their respective industries improve from failure to failure. Natural and naturelike systems want some overconfidence on the part of individual economic agents, i.e., the overestimation of their chances of success and underestimation of the risks of failure in their businesses, provided their failure does not impact others. In other words, they want local, but not global, overconfidence. (Location 1517)

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saw that the restaurant business is wonderfully efficient precisely because restaurants, being vulnerable, go bankrupt every minute, and entrepreneurs ignore such a possibility, as they think that they will beat the odds. In other words, some class of rash, even suicidal, risk taking is healthy for the economy—under the condition that not all people take the same risks and that these risks remain small and localized. (Location 1520)

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Nietzsche’s famous expression “what does not kill me makes me stronger” can be easily misinterpreted as meaning Mithridatization or hormesis. It may be one of these two phenomena, very possible, but it could as well mean “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.” (Location 1531)

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This is the central illusion in life: that randomness is risky, that it is a bad thing—and that eliminating randomness is done by eliminating randomness. (Location 1634)

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The idea of injecting random noise into a system to improve its functioning has been applied across fields. By a mechanism called stochastic resonance, adding random noise to the background makes you hear the sounds (say, music) with more accuracy. (Location 1931)

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My definition of modernity is humans’ large-scale domination of the environment, the systematic smoothing of the world’s jaggedness, and the stifling of volatility and stressors. Modernity corresponds to the systematic extraction of humans from their randomness-laden ecology—physical and social, even epistemological. (Location 2026)

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the separation of “work” and “leisure” (though the two would look identical to someone from a wiser era), (Location 2038)

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In the case of tonsillectomies, the harm to the children undergoing unnecessary treatment is coupled with the trumpeted gain for some others. The name for such net loss, the (usually hidden or delayed) damage from treatment in excess of the benefits, is iatrogenics, literally, “caused by the healer,” iatros being a healer in Greek. We (Location 2072)

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But when you medicate a child for an imagined or invented psychiatric disease, say, ADHD or depression, instead of letting him out of the cage, the long-term harm is largely unaccounted for. (Location 2099)

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Incidentally, those who do too much somewhere do too little elsewhere—and editing provides a quite fitting example. Over my writing career I’ve noticed that those who overedit tend to miss the real typos (and vice versa). I once pulled an op-ed from The Washington Post owing to the abundance of completely unnecessary edits, as if every word had been replaced by a synonym from the thesaurus. I gave the article to the Financial Times instead. The editor there made one single correction: 1989 became 1990. The Washington Post had tried so hard that they missed the only relevant mistake. As we will see, interventionism depletes mental and economic resources; it is rarely available when it is needed the most. (Beware what you wish for: small government might in the end be more effective at whatever it needs to do. Reduction in size and scope may make it even more intrusive than large government.) (Location 2184)

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As we saw with the overzealous editor, over-intervention comes with under-intervention. Indeed, as in medicine, we tend to over-intervene in areas with minimal benefits (and large risks) while under-intervening in areas in which intervention is necessary, like emergencies. So the message here is in favor of staunch intervention in some areas, such as ecology or to limit the economic distortions and moral hazard caused by large corporations. (Location 2201)

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Some libertarians use the example of Drachten, a town in the Netherlands, in which a dream experiment was conducted. All street signs were removed. The deregulation led to an increase in safety, confirming the antifragility of attention at work, how it is whetted by a sense of danger and responsibility. (Location 2214)

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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.” (Location 2251)

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Alas, men of leisure become slaves to inner feelings of dissatisfaction and interests over which they have little control. The freer Nero’s time, the more compelled he felt to compensate for lost time in filling gaps in his natural interests, things that he wanted to know a bit deeper. And, as he discovered, the worst thing one can do to feel one knows things a bit deeper is to try to go into them a bit deeper. The sea gets deeper as you go further into it, according to a Venetian proverb. (Location 2575)

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Curiosity is antifragile, like an addiction, and is magnified by attempts to satisfy it—books have a secret mission and ability to multiply, as everyone who has wall-to-wall bookshelves knows well. Nero lived, at the time of writing, among fifteen thousand books, with the stress of how to discard the empty boxes and wrapping material after the arrival of his daily shipment from the bookstore. One subject Nero read for pleasure, rather than the strange duty-to-read-to-become-more-learned, was medical texts, for which he had a natural curiosity. The curiosity came from having had two brushes with death, the first from a cancer and the second from a helicopter crash that alerted him to both the fragility of technology and the self-healing powers of the human body. So he spent a bit of his time (Location 2578)

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To put it bluntly, Nero’s family’s wealth had peaked in 1804, so he did not have the social insecurity of other adventurers, and money to him could not possibly be a social statement—only erudition for now, and perhaps wisdom in old age. (Location 2605)

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Excess wealth, if you don’t need it, is a heavy burden. Nothing was more hideous in his eyes than excessive refinement—in clothes, food, lifestyle, manners—and wealth was nonlinear. Beyond some level it forces people into endless complications of their lives, creating worries about whether the housekeeper in one of the country houses is scamming them while doing a poor job and similar headaches that multiply with money. (Location 2607)

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But to follow ethics to their natural conclusion, Nero should have felt just as proud—and satisfied—had the envelope contained statements of losses. A man is honorable in proportion to the personal risks he takes for his opinion—in other words, the amount of downside he is exposed to. To sum him up, Nero believed in erudition, aesthetics, and risk taking—little else. (Location 2630)

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Success brings an asymmetry: you now have a lot more to lose than to gain. You are hence fragile. (Location 2721)

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Let us return to the story of Damocles’ sword. There is no good news in store, just plenty of bad news in the pipeline. 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. (Location 2721)

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To show how eminently modern this is, I will next reveal how I’ve applied this brand of Stoicism to wrest back psychological control of the randomness of life. I have always hated employment and the associated dependence on someone else’s arbitrary opinion, particularly when much of what’s done inside large corporations violates my sense of ethics. (Location 2738)

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My idea of the modern Stoic sage is someone who transforms fear into prudence, pain into information, mistakes into initiation, and desire into undertaking. (Location 2751)

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One finds similar ideas in ancestral lore: it is explained in a Yiddish proverb that says “Provide for the worst; the best can take care of itself.” This may sound like a platitude, but it is not: just observe how people tend to provide for the best and hope that the worst will take care of itself. We have ample evidence that people are averse to small losses, but not so much toward very large Black Swan risks (which they underestimate), since they tend to insure for small probable losses, but not large infrequent ones. Exactly backwards. (Location 2864)

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There is a shockingly small number of academics among French authors. American writers, on the other hand, tend to become 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 indeed, severe bastardization of the soul. (Location 2873)

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Every line you write under someone else’s standards, like prostitution, kills a corresponding segment deep inside. (Location 2875)

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The barbell businessman-scholar situation was ideal; after three or four in the afternoon, when I left the office, my day job ceased to exist until the next day and I was completely free to pursue what I found most valuable and interesting. (Location 2884)

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When I tried to become an academic I felt like a prisoner, forced to follow others’ less rigorous, self-promotional programs. (Location 2886)

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Indeed, Georges Simenon, one of the most prolific writers of the twentieth century, only wrote sixty days a year, with three hundred days spent “doing nothing.” He published more than two hundred novels. (Location 2895)

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More barbells. Do crazy things (break furniture once in a while), like the Greeks during the later stages of a drinking symposium, and stay “rational” in larger decisions. Trashy gossip magazines and classics or sophisticated works; never middlebrow stuff. (Location 2914)

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Talk to either undergraduate students, cab drivers, and gardeners or the highest caliber scholars; never to middling-but-career-conscious academics. If you dislike someone, leave him alone or eliminate him; don’t attack him verbally.* (Location 2915)

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What he collected was large, perhaps not enough to make him massively wealthy, but enough to make the point—to others but also, I suspect, to himself—that he talked the talk and was truly above, not below, wealth. This kind of sum I’ve called in my vernacular “f*** you money”—a sum large enough to get most, if not all, of the advantages of wealth (the most important one being independence and the ability to only occupy your mind with matters that interest you) but not its side effects, such as having to attend a black-tie charity event and being forced to listen to a polite exposition of the details of a marble-rich house renovation. The worst side effect of wealth is the social associations it forces on its victims, as people with big houses tend to end up socializing with other people with big houses. Beyond a certain level of opulence and independence, gents tend to be less and less personable and their conversation less and less interesting. (Location 2987)

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Beyond books, consider this simple heuristic: your work and ideas, whether in politics, the arts, or other domains, are antifragile if, instead of having one hundred percent of the people finding your mission acceptable or mildly commendable, you are better off having a high percentage of people disliking you and your message (even intensely), combined with a low percentage of extremely loyal and enthusiastic supporters. Options like dispersion of outcomes and don’t care about the average too much. (Location 3070)

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No one at present dares to state the obvious: growth in society may not come from raising the average the Asian way, but from increasing the number of people in the “tails,” that small, very small number of risk takers crazy enough to have ideas of their own, those endowed with that very rare ability called imagination, that rarer quality called courage, and who make things happen. (Location 3088)

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This story of the suitcase came to tease me when I realized, looking at a porcelain coffee cup, that there existed a simple definition of fragility, hence a straightforward and practical testing heuristic: the simpler and more obvious the discovery, the less equipped we are to figure it out by complicated methods. The key is that the significant can only be revealed through practice. How many of these simple, trivially simple heuristics are currently looking and laughing at us? 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. Simplicity, I realized, does not lead to laurels. (Location 3239)

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So, in the corpus, knowledge is presented as derived in the following manner: basic research yields scientific knowledge, which in turn generates technologies, which in turn lead to practical applications, which in turn lead to economic growth and other seemingly interesting matters. The payoff from the “investment” in basic research will be partly directed to more investments in basic research, and the citizens will prosper and enjoy the benefits of such knowledge-derived wealth with Volvo cars, ski vacations, Mediterranean diets, and long summer hikes in beautifully maintained public parks. This is called the Baconian linear model, after the philosopher of science Francis Bacon; I am adapting its representation by the scientist Terence Kealey (who, crucially, as a biochemist, is a practicing scientist, not a historian of science) as follows: (Location 3321)

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Academia → Applied Science and Technology → Practice (Location 3328)

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While this model may be valid in some very narrow (but highly advertised instances), such as building the atomic bomb, the exact reverse seems to be true in most of the domains I’ve examined. (Location 3329)

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Or, at least, this model is not guaranteed to be true and, what is shocking, we have no rigorous evidence that it is true. It may be that academia helps science and technology, which in turn help practice, but in unintended, nonteleological ways, as we will see later (in other words, it is directed research that may well be an illusion). Let us (Location 3330)

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return to the metaphor of the birds. Think of the following event: A collection of hieratic persons (from Harvard or some such place) lecture birds on how to fly. Imagine bald males in their sixties, dressed in black robes, officiating in a form of English that is full of jargon, with equations here and there for good measure. The bird flies. Wonderful confirmation! They rush to the department of ornithology to write books, articles, and reports stating that the bird has obeyed them, an impeccable causal inference. The Harvard Department of Ornithology is now indispensable for bird flying. It will get government research funds for its contribution. (Location 3333)

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“If the student is smart, the teacher takes the credit.” (Location 3349)

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Benoît Mandelbrot (Location 3407)

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And the evidence is so easy to check, just lying out there in front of us. It can be obtained by looking at countries that are both wealthy and have some level of education and considering which condition preceded the other. Take the following potent and less-is-more-style argument by the rogue economist Ha-Joon Chang. In 1960 Taiwan had a much lower literacy rate than the Philippines and half the income per person; today Taiwan has ten times the income. At the same time, Korea had a much lower literacy rate than Argentina (which had one of the highest in the world) and about one-fifth the income per person; today it has three times as much. Further, over the same period, sub-Saharan Africa saw markedly increasing literacy rates, accompanied with a decrease in their standard of living. We can multiply the examples (Pritchet’s study is quite thorough), but I wonder why people don’t realize the simple truism, that is, the fooled by randomness effect: (Location 3467)

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mistaking the merely associative for the causal, that is, if rich countries are educated, immediately inferring that education makes a country rich, without even checking. Epiphenomenon here again. (The error in reasoning is a bit from wishful thinking, because education is considered “good”; I wonder why people don’t make the epiphenomenal association between the wealth of a country and something “bad,” say, decadence, and infer that decadence, or some other disease of wealth like a high suicide rate, also generates wealth.) I am not saying that for an individual, education is useless: it builds helpful credentials for one’s own career—but such effect washes out at the country level. Education stabilizes the income of families across generations. A merchant makes money, then his children go to the Sorbonne, they become doctors and magistrates. The family retains wealth because the diplomas allow members to remain in the middle class long after the ancestral wealth is depleted. But these effects don’t count for countries. (Location 3474)

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Aside from the non-narrative view of things, another lesson. People with too much smoke and complicated tricks and methods in their brains start missing elementary, very elementary (Location 3580)

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things. Persons in the real world can’t afford to miss these things; otherwise they crash the plane. Unlike researchers, they were selected for survival, not complications. So I saw the less is more in action: the more studies, the less obvious elementary but fundamental things become; activity, on the other hand, strips things to their simplest possible model. (Location 3581)

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Something hit me then. Nobody worries that a child ignorant of the various theorems of aerodynamics and incapable of solving an equation of motion would be unable to ride a bicycle. So why didn’t he transfer the point from one domain to another? (Location 3712)

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No, we don’t put theories into practice. We create theories out of practice. That was our story, and it is easy to infer from it—and from similar stories—that the confusion is generalized. The theory is the child of the cure, not the opposite—ex cura theoria nascitur. (Location 3748)

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When you ask children how many intervals there are between fifteen poles, those who don’t know arithmetic figure out that there are fourteen of them. Those who studied arithmetic get confused and often make the mistake that there are fifteen. (Location 4107)

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So I went to the bookstore and ordered (there was no Web at the time) almost every book with “probability” or “stochastic” in its title. I read nothing else for a couple of years, no course material, no newspaper, no literature, nothing. I read them in bed, jumping from one book to the next when stuck with something I did not get immediately or felt ever so slightly bored. And I kept ordering those books. I was hungry to go deeper into the problem of small probabilities. It was effortless. That was my best investment—risk turned out to be the topic I know the best. Five years later I was set for life and now I am making a research career out of various aspects of small probability events. Had I studied the subject by prepackaged means, I would be now brainwashed into thinking that uncertainty was something to be found in a casino, that kind of thing. There is such a thing as nonnerdy applied mathematics: (Location 4209)

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You can see that what Fat Tony is hitting here is the very core of philosophy: 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?” The question we saw in Euthyphro pervades the various dialogues written by Plato. What Socrates is seeking relentlessly are definitions of the essential nature of the thing concerned rather than descriptions of the properties by means of which we can recognize them. (Location 4308)

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Perhaps—thus he [Socrates] should have asked himself—what is not intelligible to me is not necessarily unintelligent? Perhaps there is a realm of wisdom from which the logician is exiled? (Location 4329)

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“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. (Location 4331)

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After the crisis of the late 2000s, I went through an episode of hell owing to contact with the press. I was suddenly deintellectualized, corrupted, extracted from my habitat, propelled into being a public commodity. I had not realized that it is hard for members of the media and the public to accept that the job of a scholar is to ignore insignificant current affairs, to write books, not emails, and not to give lectures dancing on a stage; that he has other things to do, like read in bed in the morning, write at a desk in front of a window, take long walks (slowly), drink espressos (mornings), chamomile tea (afternoons), Lebanese wine (evenings), and Muscat wines (after dinner), take more long walks (slowly), argue with friends and family members (but never in the morning), and read (again) in bed before sleeping, not keep rewriting one’s book and ideas for the benefit of strangers and members of the local chapter of Networking International who haven’t read it. (Location 4493)

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Black Swan effects are necessarily increasing, as a result of complexity, interdependence between parts, globalization, and the beastly thing called “efficiency” that makes people now sail too close to the wind. Add to that consultants and business schools. One problem somewhere can halt the entire project—so the projects tend to get as weak as the weakest link in their chain (an acute negative convexity effect). The world is getting less and less predictable, and we rely more and more on technologies that have errors and interactions that are harder to estimate, let alone predict. (Location 4789)

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Ancestral humans did it differently. Jennifer Dunne, a complexity researcher who studies hunter-gatherers, examined evidence about the behavior of the Aleuts, a North American native tribe, for which we have ample data, covering five millennia. They exhibit a remarkable lack of concentration in their predatorial behavior, with a strategy of prey switching. They were not as sticky and rigid as us in their habits. Whenever they got low on a resource, they switched to another one, as if to preserve the ecosystem. So they understood convexity effects—or, rather, their habits did. (Location 4838)

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effect can be across domains, from medicine to business. I have used all my life a wonderfully simple heuristic: charlatans are recognizable in that they will give you positive advice, and only positive advice, exploiting our gullibility and sucker-proneness for recipes that hit you in a flash as just obvious, then evaporate later as you forget them. Just look at the “how to” books with, in their title, “Ten Steps for—” (fill in: enrichment, weight loss, making friends, innovation, getting elected, building muscles, finding a husband, running an orphanage, etc.). Yet in practice it is the negative that’s used by the pros, those selected by evolution: chess grandmasters usually win by not losing; people become rich by not going bust (particularly when others do); religions are mostly about interdicts; the learning of life is about what to avoid. You reduce most of your personal risks of accident thanks to a small number of measures. (Location 5048)

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Convincing—and confident—disciplines, say, physics, tend to use little statistical backup, while political science and economics, which have never produced anything of note, are full of elaborate statistics and statistical “evidence” (Location 5135)

If someone attacks a book or idea using more than one argument, you know it is not real: nobody says “he is a criminal, he killed many people, and he also has bad table manners and bad breath and is a very poor driver.” (Location 5148)

have often followed what I call Bergson’s razor: “A philosopher should be known for one single idea, not more” (Location 5150)

So, a heuristic: if someone has a long bio, I skip him—at a conference a friend invited me to have lunch with an over-achieving hotshot whose résumé “can cover more than two or three lives”; I skipped to sit at a table with the trainees and stage engineers.* Likewise when I am told that someone has three hundred academic papers and twenty-two honorary doctorates, but no other single compelling contribution or main idea behind it, I avoid him like the bubonic plague. (Location 5153)

In this chapter we use the notion of fragility as a central driver of prediction. Recall the foundational asymmetry: the antifragile benefits from volatility and disorder, the fragile is harmed. Well, time is the same as disorder. FROM (Location 5165)

Why? Odds are that your imagination will be adding things to the present world. I am sorry, but I will show in this chapter that this approach is exactly backward: the way to do it rigorously, according to the notions of fragility and antifragility, is to take away from the future, reduce from it, simply, things that do not belong to the coming times. Via negativa. What is fragile will eventually break; and, luckily, we can easily tell what is fragile. Positive Black Swans are more unpredictable than negative ones. (Location 5178)

“Time has sharp teeth that destroy everything,” declaimed the sixth-century (B.C.) poet Simonides of Ceos, perhaps starting a tradition in Western literature about the inexorable effect of time. (Location 5182)

A word on the blindness to this over-technologizing. After I left finance, I started attending some of the fashionable conferences attended by pre-rich and post-rich technology people and the new category of technology intellectuals. I was initially exhilarated to see them wearing no ties, as, living among tie-wearing abhorrent bankers, I had developed the illusion that anyone who doesn’t wear a tie was not an empty suit. But these conferences, while colorful and slick with computerized images and fancy animations, felt depressing. I knew I did not belong. It was not just their additive approach to the future (failure to subtract the fragile rather than add to destiny). It was not entirely their blindness by uncompromising neomania. It took a while for me to realize the reason: a profound lack of elegance. Technothinkers tend to have an “engineering mind”—to put it less politely, they have autistic tendencies. While they don’t usually wear ties, these types tend, of course, to exhibit all the textbook characteristics of nerdiness—mostly lack of charm, interest in objects instead of persons, causing them to neglect their looks. They love precision at the expense of applicability. And they typically share an absence of literary culture. (Location 5240)

This absence of literary culture is actually a marker of future blindness because it is usually accompanied by a denigration of history, a byproduct of unconditional neomania. Outside of the niche and isolated genre of science fiction, literature is about the past. We do not learn physics or biology from medieval textbooks, but we still read Homer, Plato, or the very modern Shakespeare. We cannot talk about sculpture without knowledge of the works of Phidias, Michelangelo, or the great Canova. These are in the past, not in the future. Just by setting foot into a museum, the aesthetically minded person is connecting with the elders. Whether overtly or not, he will tend to acquire and respect historical knowledge, even if it is to reject it. And the past—properly handled, as we will see in the next section—is a much better teacher about the properties of the future than the present. To understand the future, you do not need technoautistic jargon, obsession with “killer apps,” these sort of things. You just need the following: some respect for the past, some curiosity about the historical record, a hunger for the wisdom of the elders, and a grasp of the notion of “heuristics,” these often unwritten rules of thumb that are so determining of survival. In other words, you will be forced to give weight to things that have been around, things that have survived. (Location 5249)

Technology is at its best when it is invisible. I am convinced that technology is of greatest benefit when it displaces the deleterious, unnatural, alienating, and, most of… (Location 5260)

Many of the modern applications that have managed to survive today came to disrupt the deleterious effect of the philistinism of modernity, particularly the twentieth century: the large multinational bureaucratic corporation with “empty suits” at the top; the isolated family (nuclear) in a one-way relationship with the television set, even more isolated thanks to car-designed suburban society; the dominance of the state, particularly the militaristic nation-state, with border controls; the destructive dictatorship on thought and culture by the established media; the tight control on publication and dissemination of economic ideas by the charlatanic economics establishment; large corporations that tend to control their markets now threatened by the Internet; pseudorigor that has been busted by the Web; and many others. You no longer have to “press 1 for English” or wait in line for a rude operator to make bookings for your honeymoon in Cyprus. In many respects, as unnatural as it is, the Internet removed some of the even more unnatural… (Location 5261)

Even now, we are using technology to reverse technology. Recall my walk to the restaurant wearing shoes not too dissimilar to those worn by the ancient, preclassical person found in the Alps. The shoe industry, after spending decades “engineering” the perfect walking and running shoe, with all manner of “support” mechanisms and material for cushioning, is now selling us shoes that replicate being barefoot—they want to be so unobtrusive that their only claimed function is to protect our feet from the elements, not to dictate how we walk as the more modernistic mission was. In a way they are selling us the calloused feet of a hunter-gatherer that we can put on, use, and then remove upon… (Location 5270)

before modernity. So it may be a natural property of technology to only want to be displaced by itself. (Location 5284)

But consider the difference between the artisanal—the other category—and the industrial. What is artisanal has the love of the maker infused in it, and tends to satisfy—we don’t have this nagging impression of incompleteness we encounter with electronics. (Location 5418)

I also enjoy writing facing trees, and, if possible, wild untamed gardens with ferns. But white walls with sharp corners and Euclidian angles and crisp shapes strain me. And once they are built, there is no way to get rid of them. Almost everything built since World War II has an unnatural smoothness to it. (Location 5442)

In his book How Buildings Learn, Stewart Brand shows in pictures how buildings change through time, as if they needed to metamorphose into unrecognizable shapes—strangely buildings, when erected, do not account for the optionality of future alterations. (Location 5471)

The skepticism about architectural modernism that I am proposing is not unconditional. While most of it brings unnatural stress, some elements are a certain improvement. For instance, floor-to-ceiling windows in a rural environment expose us to nature—here again technology making itself (literally) invisible. (Location 5473)

(much like the belief—well tested—by traders that companies that get hyped up for their potential and called “best” on the cover of magazines or in books such as Good to Great are about to underperform and one can derive an abnormal profit by shorting their stock). (Location 5527)

“do you have evidence that this is harmful?” (the same type of response as “is there evidence that polluting is harmful?”). As usual, the solution is simple, an extension of via negativa and Fat Tony’s don’t-be-a-sucker rule: the non-natural needs to prove its benefits, not the natural—according to the statistical principle outlined earlier that nature is to be considered much less of a sucker than humans. (Location 5644)

the emergency room, the doctor and staff insisted that I should “ice” my nose, meaning apply an ice-cold patch to it. In the middle of the pain, it hit me that the swelling that Mother Nature gave me was most certainly not directly caused by the trauma. It was my own body’s response to the injury. It seemed to me that it was an insult to Mother Nature to override her programmed reactions unless we had a good reason to do so, backed by proper empirical testing to show that we humans can do better; the burden of evidence falls on us humans. So I mumbled to the emergency room doctor whether he had any statistical evidence of benefits from applying ice to my nose or if it resulted from a naive version of an interventionism. His response was: “You have a nose the size of Cleveland and you are now interested in … numbers?” I recall developing from his blurry remarks the thought that he had no answer. Effectively, he had no answer, because as soon as I got to a computer, I was able to confirm that there is no compelling empirical evidence in favor of the reduction of swelling. At least, not outside of the very rare cases in which the swelling would threaten the patient, which was clearly not the case. It was pure sucker-rationalism in the mind of doctors, following what made sense to boundedly intelligent humans, coupled with interventionism, this need to do something, this defect of thinking that we knew better, and denigration of the unobserved. This (Location 5657)

let me express my rule as follows: what Mother Nature does is rigorous until proven otherwise; what humans and science do is flawed until proven otherwise. (Location 5846)

As usual, the ancients. As Ennius wrote, “The good is mostly in the absence of bad”; Nimium boni est, cui nihil est mali. Likewise, happiness is best dealt with as a negative concept; the same nonlinearity applies. Modern happiness researchers (who usually look quite unhappy), often psychologists turned economists (or vice versa), do not use nonlinearities and convexity effects when they lecture us about happiness as if we knew what it was and whether that’s what we should be after. Instead, they should be lecturing us about unhappiness (I speculate that just as those who lecture on happiness look unhappy, those who lecture on unhappiness would look happy); the “pursuit of happiness” is not equivalent to the “avoidance of unhappiness.” Each of us certainly knows not only what makes us unhappy (for instance, copy editors, commuting, bad odors, pain, the sight of a certain magazine in a waiting room, etc.), but what to do about it. Let (Location 6035)

Hammurabi’s code—now about 3,800 years old—identifies the need to reestablish a symmetry of fragility, spelled out as follows: If a builder builds a house and the house collapses and causes the death of the owner of the house—the builder shall be put to death. If it causes the death of the son of the owner of the house, a son of that builder shall be put to death. If it causes the death of a slave of the owner of the house—he shall give to the owner of the house a slave of equal value. (Location 6330)

The psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer has a simple heuristic. Never ask the doctor what you should do. Ask him what he would do if he were in your place. You would be surprised at the difference. (Location 6489)

The frequency, i.e., how often someone is right is largely irrelevant in the real world, but alas, one needs to be a practitioner, not a talker, to figure it out. On paper, the frequency of being right matters, but only on paper—typically, fragile payoffs have little (sometimes no) upside, and antifragile payoffs have little downside. This means that one makes pennies to lose dollars in the fragile case; makes dollars to lose pennies in the antifragile one. So the antifragile can lose for a long time with impunity, so long as he happens to be right once; for the fragile, a single loss can be terminal. Accordingly (Location 6494)

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. (Location 6505)

Let me give an example of a type of false belief that is helpful for survival. In your opinion, which is more dangerous, to mistake a bear for a stone, or mistake a stone for a bear? It is hard for humans to make the first mistake; our intuitions make us overreact at the smallest probability of harm and fall for a certain class of false patterns—those who overreact upon seeing what may look like a bear have had a survival advantage, those who made the opposite mistake left the gene pool. Our mission is to make talk less cheap. (Location 6526)

Ask a polyglot who knows Arabic who he considers the best poet—in any language—and odds are that he would answer Almutanabbi, (Location 6556)

Well, the poem cost him his life. For Almutanabbi had—characteristically—vilified a desert tribe in one of his poems and they were out to get him. They reached him as he was traveling. As he was outnumbered, he started to do the rational thing and run away, nothing shameful, except that one of his companions started reciting “the horse, the night …” back at him. He turned around and confronted the tribe to his certain death. Thus Almutanabbi remains, a thousand years later, the poet who died simply to avoid the dishonor of running away, and when we recite his verses we know they are genuine. (Location 6563)

My childhood role model was the French adventurer and writer André Malraux. (Location 6567)

I believe that forcing researchers to eat their own cooking whenever possible solves a serious problem in science. Take this simple heuristic—does the scientific researcher whose ideas are applicable to the real world apply his ideas to his daily life? If so, take him seriously. Otherwise, ignore him. (Location 6586)

They are no entrepreneurs—just actors, slick actors (business schools are more like acting schools). Someone intelligent—or free—would likely implode under such a regimen. So Niall immediately detected her weak point and went straight for the jugular: her slogan was that she contributed to employment by having six hundred thousand persons on her staff. He immediately exposed her propaganda with the counterargument—actually developed by Marx and Engels—that large bureaucratic corporations seized control of the state just by being “big employers,” and can then extract benefits at the expense of small businesses. So a company that employs six hundred thousand persons is allowed to wreck the health of citizens with impunity, and to benefit from the implied protection of bailouts (just like American car companies), whereas artisans like hairdressers and cobblers do not get such immunity. (Location 6701)

Another attribute of the artisanal. There is no product that I particularly like that I have discovered through advertising and marketing: cheeses, wine, meats, eggs, tomatoes, basil leaves, apples, restaurants, barbers, art, books, hotels, shoes, shirts, eyeglasses, pants (my father and I have used three generations of Armenian tailors in Beirut), olives, olive oil, etc. The same applies to cities, museums, art, novels, music, painting, sculpture (I had at some point an obsession with ancient artifacts and Roman heads). These may have been “marketed” in some sense, by making people aware of their existence, but this isn’t how I came to use them—word of mouth is a potent naturalistic filter. Actually, the only filter. (Location 6717)

Marketing is bad manners—and I rely on my naturalistic and ecological instincts. Say you run into a person during a boat cruise. What would you do if he started boasting of his accomplishments, telling you how great, rich, tall, impressive, skilled, famous, muscular, well educated, efficient, and good in bed he is, plus other attributes? You would certainly run away (or put him in contact with another talkative bore to get rid of both of them). It is clearly much better if others (preferably someone other than his mother) are the ones saying good things about him, and it would be nice if he acted with some personal humility. (Location 6732)

A corporation does not have natural ethics; it just obeys the balance sheet. (Location 6751)

Tony: “Nero, you sucker. Don’t be fooled by money. These are just numbers. Being self-owned is a state of mind.” (Location 6801)

It is a fact that one can rapidly, after a phase of indoctrination, become enslaved to a profession, to the point of having one’s opinions on any subject become self-serving, (Location 6822)

hence unreliable for the collective. This is the bone the Greeks had to pick with professionals. (Location 6823)

Barbell Strategy: A dual strategy, a combination of two extremes, one safe and one speculative, deemed more robust than a “monomodal” strategy; often a necessary condition for antifragility. For instance, in biological systems, the equivalent of marrying an accountant and having an occasional fling with a rock star; for a writer, getting a stable sinecure and writing without the pressures of the market during spare time. Even trial and error are a form of barbell. (Location 7088)

By grasping the mechanisms of antifragility we can build a systematic and broad guide to nonpredictive decision making under uncertainty in business, politics, medicine, and life in general—anywhere the unknown preponderates, any situation in which there is randomness, unpredictability, opacity, or incomplete understanding of things. 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 (outside of casinos or the minds of people who call themselves “risk experts”). This provides a solution to what I’ve called the Black Swan problem—the impossibility of calculating the risks of consequential rare events and predicting their occurrence. Sensitivity to harm from volatility is tractable, more so than forecasting the event that would cause the harm. So we propose to stand our current approaches to prediction, prognostication, and risk management on their heads. 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. (Location 450)

To accord with the practitioner’s ethos, the rule in this book is as follows: I eat my own cooking. I have only written, in every line I have composed in my professional life, about things I have done, and the risks I have recommended that others take or avoid were risks I have been taking or avoiding myself. I will be the first to be hurt if I am wrong. When I warned about the fragility of the banking system in The Black Swan, I was betting on its collapse (particularly when my message went unheeded); otherwise I felt it would not have been ethical to write about it. That personal stricture applies to every domain, including medicine, technical innovation, and simple matters in life. It does not mean that one’s personal experiences constitute a sufficient sample to derive a conclusion about an idea; it is just that one’s personal experience gives the stamp of authenticity and sincerity of opinion. (Location 630)

Consider that as I am writing these lines, we are living in a debt crisis. The world as a whole has never been richer, and it has never been more heavily in debt, living off borrowed money. The record shows that, for society, the richer we become, the harder it gets to live within our means. Abundance is harder for us to handle than scarcity. (Location 962)

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. (Location 973)

music, and similar degenerative effects. But these failures to self-repair come largely from maladjustment—either too few stressors or too little time for recovery between them—and maladjustment for this author is the mismatch between one’s design and the structure of the randomness of the environment (what I call more technically its “distributional or statistical (Location 1175)

Such a stressor would be certainly better than the mild but continuous stress of a boss, mortgage, tax problems, guilt over procrastinating with one’s tax return, exam pressures, chores, emails to answer, forms to complete, daily commutes—things that make you feel trapped in life. In other words, the pressures brought about by civilization. (Location 1232)

Not only are we averse to stressors, and don’t understand them, but we are committing crimes against life, the living, science, and wisdom, for the sake of eliminating volatility and variation. 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. Indeed, when you go through mood swings, you now have to justify why you are not on some medication. 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. I get mellow and lose physical energy when it rains, become more meditative, and tend to write more and more slowly then, with the raindrops hitting the window, what Verlaine called autumnal “sobs” (sanglots). Some days I enter poetic melancholic states, what the Portuguese call saudade or the Turks hüzün (from the Arabic word for sadness). Other days I am more aggressive, have more energy—and will write less, walk more, do other things, argue with researchers, answer emails, draw graphs on blackboards. Should I be turned into a vegetable or a happy imbecile? 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. … If large pharmaceutical companies were able to eliminate the seasons, they would probably do so—for a profit, of course. (Location 1274)

Further, this randomness is necessary for true life. Consider that all the wealth of the world can’t buy a liquid more pleasurable than water after intense thirst. Few objects bring more thrill than a recovered wallet (or laptop) lost on a train. (Location 1323)

There exist the kind of people for whom life is some kind of project. After talking to them, you stop feeling good for a few hours; life starts tasting like food cooked without salt. I, a thrill-seeking human, have a b**t detector that seems to match my boredom detector, as if we were equipped with a naturalistic filter, dullness-aversion. Ancestral life had no homework, no boss, no civil servants, no academic grades, no conversation with the dean, no consultant with an MBA, no table of procedure, no application form, no trip to New Jersey, no grammatical stickler, no conversation with someone boring you: all life was random stimuli and nothing, good or bad, ever felt like work. Dangerous, yes, but boring, never. (Location 1330)

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. Swiss flight 111, TWA flight 800, and Air France flight 447 allowed the improvement of the system. But these systems learn because they are antifragile and set up to exploit small errors; the same cannot be said of economic crashes, since the economic system is not antifragile the way it is presently built. Why? There are hundreds of thousands of plane flights every year, and a crash in one plane does not involve others, so errors remain confined and highly epistemic—whereas globalized economic systems operate as one: errors spread and compound. (Location 1465)

And of course you learn from the errors of others. You may never know what type of person someone is unless they are given opportunities to violate moral or ethical codes. I remember a classmate, a girl in high school who seemed nice and honest and part of my childhood group of anti-materialistic utopists. I learned that against my expectations (and her innocent looks) she didn’t turn out to be Mother Teresa or Rosa Luxemburg, as she dumped her first (rich) husband for another, richer person, whom she dumped upon his first financial difficulties for yet another richer and more powerful (and generous) lover. In a nonvolatile environment I (and most probably she, too) would have mistaken her for a utopist and a saint. Some members of society—those who did not marry her—got valuable information while others, her victims, paid the price. (Location 1489)

There is something like a switch in us that kills the individual in favor of the collective when people engage in communal dances, mass riots, or war. Your mood is now that of the herd. You are part of what Elias Canetti calls the rhythmic and throbbing crowd. You can also feel a different variety of crowd experience during your next street riot, when fear of authorities vanishes completely under group fever. (Location 1548)

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. Then comes that day when it is really not a very good idea to be a turkey. So with the butcher surprising it, the turkey will have a revision of belief—right when its confidence in the statement that the butcher loves turkeys is maximal and “it is very quiet” and soothingly predictable in the life of the turkey. (Location 1790)

that is grounded in the social sciences. 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. (Location 1797)

One of life’s packages: no stability without volatility. (Location 2025)

Modernity corresponds to the systematic extraction of humans from their randomness-laden ecology—physical and social, even epistemological. Modernity is not just the postmedieval, postagrarian, and postfeudal historical period as defined in sociology textbooks. It is rather the spirit of an age marked by rationalization (naive rationalism), the idea that society is understandable, hence must be designed, by humans. With it was born statistical theory, hence the beastly bell curve. So was linear science. So was the notion of “efficiency”—or optimization. (Location 2027)

We are moving into a phase of modernity marked by the lobbyist, the very, very limited liability corporation, the MBA, sucker problems, secularization (or rather reinvention of new sacred values like flags to replace altars), the tax man, fear of the boss, spending the weekend in interesting places and the workweek in a putatively less interesting one, the separation of “work” and “leisure” (though the two would look identical to someone from a wiser era), (Location 2036)

And of course one can rigorously do science without it. What scientists call phenomenology is the observation of an empirical regularity without a visible theory for it. In the Triad, I put theories in the fragile category, phenomenology in the robust one. Theories are superfragile; they come and go, then come and go, then come and go again; phenomenologies stay, and I can’t believe people don’t realize that phenomenology is “robust” and usable, and theories, while overhyped, are unreliable for decision making—outside physics. (Location 2147)

ethical problem arises when someone is put in charge. Greenspan’s actions were harmful, but even if he knew that, it would have taken a bit of heroic courage to justify inaction in a democracy where the incentive is to always promise a better outcome than the other guy, regardless of the actual, delayed cost. (Location 2178)

Ingenuous interventionism is very pervasive across professions. Just as with the tonsillectomy, if you supply a typical copy editor with a text, he will propose a certain number of edits, say about five changes per page. Now accept his “corrections” and give this text to another copy editor who tends to have the same average rate of intervention (editors vary in interventionism), and you will see that he will suggest an equivalent number of edits, sometimes reversing changes made by the previous editor. Find a third editor, same. (Location 2180)

This may be the only possible way to murder someone while staying squarely within the law. We can see from the tonsillectomy story that access to data increases intervention, causing us to behave like the neurotic fellow. Rory Sutherland signaled to me that someone with a personal doctor on staff should be particularly vulnerable to naive interventionism, hence iatrogenics; doctors need to justify their salaries and prove to themselves that they have a modicum of work ethic, something that “doing nothing” doesn’t satisfy. Indeed, Michael Jackson’s personal doctor has been sued for something equivalent to overintervention-to-stifle-antifragility (but it will take the law courts a while to become directly familiar with the concept). Did you ever wonder why heads of state and very rich people with access to all this medical care die just as easily as regular persons? Well, it looks like this is because of overmedication and excessive medical care. (Location 2308)

Most explanations that are offered for episodes of turmoil follow the catalysts-as-causes 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. (Location 2426)

So the proximate reason for their getting together before that crisis was, as Fat Tony would say, “doing lunch.” If you live in an active city, say, New York, and have a friendly personality, you will have no trouble finding good dinner partners, people who can hold a conversation of some interest in an almost relaxed way. Lunch, however, is a severe difficulty, particularly during phases of high employment. It is easy to find lunch partners among resident office inmates but trust me, you don’t want to get near them. They will have liquefied stress hormones dripping from their pores, they will exhibit anxiety if they discuss anything that may divert them from what they think is in the course of their “work,” and when in the process of picking their brain you hit on a less uninteresting mine, they will cut you short with a “I have to run” or “I have a two-fifteen.” (Location 2540)