Book Summary: Antifragile by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Antifragile Book Review

Antifragile is one of the most thought-provoking books of recent times and brutally challenges conventional wisdom, our biases, and our view of the world.

I promise you won’t look at academics, doctors, managers, Uber drivers and many others the same way. The book provides you with new lenses to view the world.

Open your eyes and see the world of volatility, disorder, uncertainty and randomness in a new light and use it to change yourself and the world around you.

MUST READ.

How to use the book in the author’s own words.

I will produce a small number of tricks, directives, and interdicts—how to live in a world we don’t understand, or, rather, how to not be afraid to work with things we patently don’t understand, and, more principally, in what manner we should work with these.

Antifragile Book Summary

Note: This summary is made up of my notes, thoughts and highlights of important passages while reading the book. I keep updating the summary when I revisit it, and occasionally may edit it to reduce summary length. Don’t be surprised if it has changed between visits. The author’s words are in normal font, while my interpretations are in italics.

Prologue

Wind extinguishes a candle and energizes fire.
You want to be the fire and wish for the wind.

Randomness, uncertainty, chaos: you want to use them, not hide from them.
The mission is how to domesticate, even dominate, even conquer, the unseen, the opaque, and the inexplicable.
Some things benefit from shocks; they thrive and grow when exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder, and stressors and love adventure, risk, and uncertainty.

Why Antifragility

Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better.
Antifragility determines the boundary between what is living and organic (or complex).
The antifragile loves randomness and uncertainty. It loves errors, a certain class of errors.
Antifragility allows us to deal with the unknown, to do things without understanding them—and do them well.
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.

Fragility can be measured; risk is not measurable.

It is far easier to figure out if something is fragile than to predict the occurrence of an event that may harm it.
The Black Swan problem is the impossibility of calculating the risks of consequential rare events and predicting their occurrence. The central point of the Black Swan problem is that the odds of rare events are simply not computable.
The rarer the event, the less tractable, and the less we know about how frequent its occurrence

Anything that has more upside than downside from random events (or certain shocks) is antifragile; the reverse is fragile.

Spending a month in bed leads to muscle atrophy, complex systems are weakened, even killed, when deprived of stressors. Diabetes and many similar modern ailments seem to be associated with a lack of randomness in feeding.
The largest fragilizer of society, and greatest generator of crises, absence of “skin in the game.”

The chief ethical rule is the following:
Thou shalt not have antifragility at the expense of the fragility of others.

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.

Mother Nature—thanks to its antifragility—is the best expert at rare events, and the best manager of Black Swans; in its billions of years it succeeded in getting here without much command-and-control instruction.
Mother Nature is not just “safe.” It is aggressive in destroying and replacing, in selecting and reshuffling.
We have been unconsciously exploiting antifragility in practical life and, consciously, rejecting it particularly in intellectual life.

Less is more and usually more effective.

Heuristics are simplified rules of thumb

Heuristics make things simple and easy to implement.
Their main advantage is that the user knows that they are not perfect, just expedient, and is therefore less fooled by their powers.
Fragility could be expressed as what does not like volatility.
Everything nonlinear in response is either fragile or antifragile to a certain source of randomness.
Anything fragile hates volatility.

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.

Modernity has replaced ethics with legalese.

If you see fraud and do not say fraud, you are a fraud.

Compromising is condoning.

A man is morally free when … he judges the world, and judges other men, with uncompromising sincerity.
George Santayana

BOOK I The Antifragile: An Introduction

Chapter 1 – Between Damocles and Hydra

Fragile, Robust and Antifragile

The fragile is anything that would be at best unharmed, For example, a ceramic cup or vase on a table.
The robust would be at best and at worst unharmed. For example, Phoenix, the bird with splendid colors. Whenever it is destroyed, it is reborn from it own ashes. It always returns to its initial state.
The antifragile (opposite of fragile) is therefore what is at worst unharmed.

Hydra, in Greek mythology, is a serpent-like creature that dwells in the lake of Lerna, near Argos, and has numerous heads. Each time one is cut off, two grow back. So harm is what it likes. Hydra represents antifragility.

The sword of Damocles represents the side effect of power and success: you cannot rise and rule without facing this continuous danger—someone out there will be actively working to topple you.

Perhaps being deprived of poison makes us fragile.
The road to robustification starts with a modicum of harm.

Humans somehow fail to recognize situations outside the contexts in which they usually learn about them.

Chapter 2 – Overcompensation and Overreaction Everywhere

Intellectuals tend to focus on negative responses from randomness (fragility) rather than the positive ones (antifragility).

How do you innovate?

First, try to get in trouble. I mean serious, but not terminal, trouble.
The excess energy released from overreaction to setbacks is what innovates!

Sophistication is born out of hunger.

The great Roman statesman Cato the Censor, looked at comfort, almost any form of comfort, as a road to waste.

Abundance is harder for us to handle than scarcity.

Undercompensation from the absence of a stressor, inverse hormesis, absence of challenge, degrades the best of the best.

Nature likes to overinsure itself. It is all about redundancy.

Layers of redundancy are the central risk management property of natural systems.
For example, we humans have two kidneys where one would suffice.
Redundancy is ambiguous because it seems like a waste if nothing unusual happens. Except that something unusual happens—usually.
The so-called worst-case event, when it happened, exceeded the worst case at the time.

If humans fight the last war, nature fights the next one.

The higher you build your barricades, the stronger we become.

Information is antifragile; it feeds more on attempts to harm it than it does on efforts to promote it.
Criticism, for a book, (or banning it), is a truthful, unfaked badge of attention, signaling that it is not boring. Almost no scandal would hurt an artist or writer.
Focus on altering your exposure, say, by putting yourself in a position impervious to reputational damage.
When you don’t have debt you don’t care about your reputation in economics circles—and somehow it is only when you don’t care about your reputation that you tend to have a good one.

Just as in matters of seduction, people lend the most to those who need them the least.

Chapter 3 – The Cat and the Washing Machine

Everything that has life in it is to some extent antifragile (but not the reverse).

Failures to self-repair come largely from maladjustment—either too few stressors or too little time for recovery between them.
Maladjustment is the mismatch between one’s design and the structure of the randomness of the environment.

Much of aging comes from a misunderstanding of the effect of comfort—a disease of civilization: make life longer and longer, while people are more and more sick.

Artificial aging comes from stifling internal antifragility.

Distinction between noncomplex and complex systems.

Artificial, man-made mechanical and engineering contraptions with simple responses are complicated, but not “complex,” as they don’t have interdependencies.
With complex systems, interdependencies are severe.
In the complex world, the notion of “cause” itself is suspect; it is either nearly impossible to detect or not really defined.
The crux of complex systems, those with interacting parts, is that they convey information to these component parts through stressors, or thanks to these stressors: your body gets information about the environment.
For the nonorganic, noncomplex, say, an object on the table, equilibrium (as traditionally defined) happens in a state of inertia. So for something organic, equilibrium (in that sense) only happens with death.

Errors and their consequences are information.

Complex systems are all about information.

There are many more conveyors of information around us than meet the eye.
Causal opacity: it is hard to see the arrow from cause to consequence, making much of conventional methods of analysis and standard logic inapplicable.
Loss of bone density and degradation of the health of the bones also causes aging, diabetes, and, for males, loss of fertility and sexual function.
We just cannot isolate any causal relationship in a complex system.
Adam Smith understood the opacity of complex systems as well as the interdependencies, since he developed the notion of the “invisible hand.”

Our antifragilities have conditions. The frequency of stressors matters a bit.

Humans tend to do better with acute than with chronic stressors.
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—make you feel trapped in life.

Frano Barović reading this chapter wrote to me:
“Machines: use it and lose it; organisms: use it or lose it.”

Touristification is the systematic removal of uncertainty and randomness from things, trying to make matters highly predictable in their smallest details. All that for the sake of comfort, convenience, and efficiency.

If you are not a washing machine or a cuckoo clock—in other words, if you are alive—something deep in your soul likes a certain measure of randomness and disorder.

The worse touristification is the life we moderns lead in captivity, during our leisure hours: Friday night opera, scheduled parties, scheduled laughs. Golden jail.

What the author is bored writing bores the reader.

Much of modern life is preventable chronic stress injury.

Chapter 4 – What Kills Me Makes Others Stronger

Antifragility of some comes necessarily at the expense of the fragility of others.

Some parts on the inside of a system may be required to be fragile in order to make the system antifragile as a result.
In a system, the sacrifices of some units—fragile units, that is, or people—are often necessary for the well-being of other units or the whole.
The fragility of every startup is necessary for the economy to be antifragile.
The organism itself might be fragile, but the information encoded in the genes reproducing it will be antifragile.
While individual organisms are relatively fragile, the gene pool takes advantage of shocks to enhance its fitness.

Nature does not find its members very helpful after their reproductive abilities are depleted.

Nature prefers to let the game continue at the informational level, the genetic code. Organisms need to die for nature to be antifragile—nature is opportunistic, ruthless, and selfish.
Post-event adaptation, no matter how fast, would always be a bit late.
If nature ran the economy, it would not continuously bail out its living members to make them live forever.

Black Swan Management 101:
Nature (and nature-like systems) likes diversity between organisms rather than diversity within an immortal organism..

Evolution benefits from randomness by two different routes:

Randomness in the mutations – By letting the organisms go one lifespan at a time, with modifications between successive generations, nature does not need to predict future conditions beyond the extremely vague idea of which direction things should be heading.
Randomness in the environment – Even when there is extinction of an entire species after some extreme event, no big deal, it is part of the game. This is still evolution at work, as those species that survive are fittest.

Both act in a similar way to cause changes in the traits of the surviving next generations.

Evolution likes randomness only up to some limit. Evolution occurs when harm makes the individual organism perish and the benefits are transferred to others, the surviving ones, and future generations.

Evolution is not about a species, but at the service of the whole of nature.

Hormesis corresponds to situations by which the individual organism benefits from direct harm to itself.

Predictability

When you are fragile, you depend on things following the exact planned course, with as little deviation as possible.
The fragile needs to be very predictive in its approach, and, conversely, predictive systems cause fragility.

Every trial, attempt, experiment provides you with information about what does not work,

You start zooming in on a solution—so every attempt becomes more valuable, more like an expense than an error.
It is often the mistakes of others that benefit the rest of us—and, sadly, not them.
Every plane crash brings us closer to safety, improves the system, and makes the next flight safer at the cost of crash victims.
Stressors are information, in the right context.

Both your failures and your successes will give you information.

But, and this is one of the good things in life, sometimes you only know about someone’s character after you harm them with an error for which you are solely responsible
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

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.

For the economy to be antifragile and undergo what is called evolution, every single individual business must necessarily be fragile, exposed to breaking—evolution needs organisms (or their genes) to die when supplanted by others, in order to achieve improvement, or to avoid reproduction when they are not as fit as someone else.

There is a problem in which the property of the sum (the aggregate) varies from that of each one of the parts—in fact, it wants harm to the parts.

Sacrifice for the sake of the group is behind the notion of heroism.

Heroism and the respect it commands is a form of compensation by society for those who take risks for others.
Someone who did not find something is providing others with knowledge, the best knowledge, that of absence (what does not work)—yet he gets little or no credit for it.

As a humanist, I stand against the antifragility of systems at the expense of individuals, for if you follow the reasoning, this makes us humans individually irrelevant.

BOOK II Modernity and the Denial of Antifragility

Depriving political (and other) systems of volatility harms them, causing eventually greater volatility of the cascading type.

We are fragilizing social and economic systems by denying them stressors and randomness.

Chapter 5 – The Souk and the Office Building

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.

Thanks to variability, artisanal careers (Uber driver, mom and pop stores) harbor a bit of antifragility: small variations make them adapt and change continuously by learning from the environment and being, sort of, continuously under pressure to be fit.
Natural randomness presents itself more like the Uber driver’s income: smaller role for very large shocks, but daily variability.
Employees’ risks are hidden. Man-made smoothing of randomness produces the of an employees’ income: smooth, steady, but fragile.

For a self-employed person, a small (nonterminal) mistake is information, valuable information, one that directs him in his adaptive approach.

Nature loves small errors (without which genetic variations are impossible), humans don’t.
When you rely on human judgment you are at the mercy of a mental bias that disfavors antifragility.

Avoidance of small mistakes makes the large ones more severe.

The more variability you observe in a system, the less Black Swan– prone it is.

Stalin could not have existed in a municipality.

If you multiply by ten the number of persons in a given entity, you do not preserve the properties: there is a transformation.
Conversations switch from the mundane—but effective—to abstract numbers, more interesting, more academic perhaps, but less effective.
On the small, local scale, his body and biological response would direct him to avoid causing harm to others.
On a large scale, others are abstract items; given the lack of social contact with the people concerned, the civil servant’s brain leads rather than his emotions.
We humans scorn what is not concrete.

[Focus ]
on techne (crafts and know how), not episteme (book knowledge, know what).

Mother of all harmful mistakes: Mistaking absence of evidence (of harm) for evidence of absence.

Mediocristan has a lot of variations, not a single one of which is extreme; Extremistan has few variations, but those that take place are extreme.
In Extremistan, one is prone to be fooled by the properties of the past and get the story exactly backwards.
“Not being a turkey” starts with figuring out the difference between true and manufactured stability.

A little bit of agitation gives resources to souls and what makes the species prosper isn’t peace, but freedom.

It is hard to explain to naive data-driven people that risk is in the future, not in the past.

Chapter 6 – Tell Them I Love (Some) Randomness

Variations also act as purges.

Small forest fires periodically cleanse the system of the most flammable material. Absence of fire lets highly flammable material accumulate.
When a currency never varies, a slight, very slight move makes people believe that the world is ending. Injecting some confusion stabilizes the system.
A volatile market doesn’t let people go such a long time without a “cleanup” of risks, thereby preventing such market collapses.
It has been hard to explain to real people that stressors and uncertainty have their role in life
The ancients evolved hidden and sophisticated ways and tricks to exploit randomness. The ancients perfected the method of random draw in more or less difficult situations—and integrated it into divinations. You went with what the gods told you to do, so you would not have to second-guess yourself later.

One of life’s packages: no stability without volatility.

The problem with artificially suppressed volatility is not just that the system tends to become extremely fragile; it is that, at the same time, it exhibits no visible risks. Also remember that volatility is information.
Modernity corresponds to the systematic extraction of humans from their randomness-laden ecology—physical and social, even epistemological.
We had free-range humans and free-range children before the advent of the golden period of the soccer mom.

There is a dependence on narratives, an intellectualization of actions and ventures.

Remember that you need a name for the color blue when you build a narrative, but not in action—the thinker lacking a word for “blue” is handicapped; not the doer.

The emergence of the nation-state falls squarely into this progression—the transfer of agency to mere humans.

Modernity starts with the state monopoly on violence, and ends with the state’s monopoly on fiscal irresponsibility.

Chapter 7 – Naive Intervention

Anything in which there is naive interventionism, nay, even just intervention, will have iatrogenics (violocation of the principle that first do no harm).

Interventionism depletes mental and economic resources; it is rarely available when it is needed the most.
Over-intervention comes with under-intervention.
Motorists need the stressors and tension coming from the feeling of danger to feed their attention and risk controls, rather than some external regulator.
What should we control? As a rule, intervening to limit size (of companies, airports, or sources of pollution), concentration, and speed are beneficial in reducing Black Swan risks.

It’s much easier to sell “Look what I did for you” than “Look what I avoided for you.”
Of course a bonus system based on “performance” exacerbates the problem.
The true hero in the Black Swan world is someone who prevents a calamity and, naturally, because the calamity did not take place, does not get recognition—or a bonus—for it.

What scientists call phenomenology is the observation of an empirical regularity without a visible theory for it.

Procrastination as our natural defense.

Some psychologists and behavioral economists seem to think that procrastination is a disease to be remedied and cured.
Few understand that procrastination is our natural defense, letting things take care of themselves and exercise their antifragility.
Procrastination protects you from error as it gives nature a chance to do its job.

Humans may have an instinct to procrastinate only when no life is in danger.
I do not procrastinate after a severe injury.
I do so with unnatural duties and procedures.

Since procrastination is a message from our natural willpower via low motivation, the cure is changing the environment, or one’s profession, by selecting one in which one does not have to fight one’s impulses.
Someone who procrastinates is not irrational; it is his environment that is irrational. And the psychologist or economist calling him irrational is the one who is beyond irrational.

Time is the best test of fragility

Noise is a generalization beyond the actual sound to describe random information that is totally useless for any purpose, and that you need to clean up to make sense of what you are listening to.

Personal or intellectual inability to distinguish noise from signal is behind overintervention.
If you want to accelerate someone’s death, give him a personal doctor.
In business and economic decision making, reliance on data causes severe side effects

A very rarely discussed property of data:
it is toxic in large quantities—even in moderate quantities.

The more frequently you look at data, the more noise you are disproportionately likely to get (rather than the valuable part, called the signal).
Anyone who listens to news (except when very, very significant events take place) is one step below sucker. Newspapers should be of two-line length on some days, two hundred pages on others—in proportion with the intensity of the signal.

In a natural environment, a stressor is information.

Too much information would thus be too much stress, exceeding the threshold of antifragility.
Significant signals have a way to reach you.
In an ancestral environment, the anecdote, the “interesting,” is information; today, no longer.

Chapter 8 – Prediction as a Child of Modernity

Our track record in figuring out significant rare events in politics and economics is not close to zero; it is zero.

Fragility-Robustness-Antifragility could be a replacement for predictive methods.

The Central Triad - Fragile, Robust, Antifragile — **The Central Triad – Fragile, Robust, Antifragile**
(Source: Antifragile by Nassim Nicholas Taleb)

Providing someone with a random numerical forecast increases his risk taking, even if the person knows the projections are random.

The robust and antifragile don’t have to have as accurate a comprehension of the world as the fragile—and they do not need forecasting.

Entire mission reduces to the central principle of what to do to minimize harm (and maximize gain) from forecasting errors, that is, to have things that don’t fall apart, or even benefit, when we make a mistake.

We should first make things more robust to defects and forecast errors, or even exploit these errors.
Social, economic, and cultural life lie in the Black Swan domain, physical life much less so.
There is, in the Black Swan zone, a limit to knowledge that can never be reached, no matter how sophisticated statistical and risk management science ever gets.

BOOK III A Nonpredictive View of the World

Chapter 9 – Fat Tony and the Fragilistas

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.
Curiosity is antifragile, like an addiction, and is magnified by attempts to satisfy it. For example, books.
A system built on illusions of understanding probability is bound to collapse.

Excess wealth, if you don’t need it, is a heavy burden.

Wealth is nonlinear. Beyond some level it forces people into endless complications of their lives, creating worries..

There are two schools of thought.

To Nero one should first warn people that they are suckers
Tony was against the very notion of warning. “You will be ridiculed,” he said; “words are for sissies.”

The need to focus on actions and avoid words:
the health-eroding dependence on external recognition.

A man is honorable in proportion to the personal risks he takes for his opinion.

You can’t predict in general, but you can predict that those who rely on predictions are taking more risks, will have some trouble, perhaps even go bust.
Someone who predicts will be fragile to prediction errors.
Numerical prediction leads people to take more risks.

Chapter 10 – Seneca’s Upside and Downside

Seneca is a prominent member of the philosophical school of Stoicism, which advanced a certain indifference to fate.

Because Seneca was into practical decision making, he has been described—by academics—as not theoretical or philosophical enough.

Wisdom in decision making is vastly more important—not just practically, but philosophically—than knowledge.

To become a successful philosopher king, it is much better to start as a king than as a philosopher.
Key phrase reverberating in Seneca’s oeuvre is nihil perditi, “I lost nothing,” after an adverse event.

“He is in debt, whether he borrowed from another person or from fortune.”
Seneca

Stoicism, seen this way, becomes pure robustness—for the attainment of a state of immunity from one’s external circumstances, good or bad, and an absence of fragility to decisions made by fate, is robustness. Seneca’s version of that Stoicism is antifragility from fate.

Success brings an asymmetry:
You now have a lot more to lose than to gain.
You are hence fragile.

Possessions make us worry about downside, thus acting as a punishment as we depend on them.
Dependence on circumstances—rather, the emotions that arise from circumstances—induces a form of slavery.
Seneca’s practical method to counter such fragility was to go through mental exercises to write off possessions, so when losses occurred he would not feel the sting—a way to wrest one’s freedom from circumstances.
Stoicism is about the domestication, not necessarily the elimination, of emotions.

An intelligent life is all about such emotional positioning to eliminate the sting of harm, which as we saw is done by mentally writing off belongings so one does not feel any pain from losses.

My idea of the modern Stoic sage is someone who:

Transforms fear into prudence,
Pain into information,
Mistakes into initiation, and
Desire into undertaking.

Seneca also provides us a catalogue of social deeds: invest in good actions. Things can be taken away from us—not good deeds and acts of virtue.

Seneca was all deeds, and we cannot ignore the fact that he kept the wealth.
It is central that he showed his preference of wealth without harm and for wealth instead of poverty.

“The bookkeeping of benefits is simple: it is all expenditure; if any one returns it, that is clear gain (my emphasis); if he does not return it, it is not lost, I gave it for the sake of giving.”

If I have “nothing to lose” then it is all gain and I am antifragile.

Fragility implies more to lose than to gain, equals more downside than upside, equals (unfavorable) asymmetry.
Antifragility implies more to gain than to lose, equals more upside than downside, equals (favorable) asymmetry.

Chapter 11 – Never Marry the Rock Star

Fragility has a ratchetlike property, the irreversibility of damage.

What matters is the route taken, the order of events, not just the destination—what scientists call a path-dependent property.
There should be a strong logical precedence of survival over success.
If something is fragile, its risk of breaking makes anything you do to improve it or make it “efficient” inconsequential unless you first reduce that risk of breaking.

Barbell Strategies – combination aggressiveness plus paranoia

Biological systems are replete with barbell strategies.
Clip your downside, protect yourself from extreme harm, and let the upside, the positive Black Swans, take care of itself.
Overcompensation, to work, requires some harm and stressors as tools of discovery.

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

Many of the “doers” turned “thinkers” like Montaigne have done a serial barbell: pure action, then pure reflection.
Literature is the most uncompromising, most speculative, most demanding, and riskiest of all careers.
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.
Speculative bets: “Make sure that the probability of the unacceptable (i.e., the risk of ruin) is nil.”

Just as Stoicism is the domestication, not the elimination, of emotions,
so is the barbell a domestication, not the elimination, of uncertainty.

BOOK IV Optionality, Technology, and the Intelligence of Antifragility

An agent does not move except out of intention for an end.

The flâneur is not a prisoner of a plan. The opportunism of the flâneur is great in life and business—but not in personal life and matters that involve others.

People don’t know what they want until you provide them with it.

An option is what makes you antifragile and allows you to benefit from the positive side of uncertainty, without a corresponding serious harm from the negative side.

Chapter 12 – Thales’ Sweet Grapes

Those who can, do, and others philosophize.

It is an option, “the right but not the obligation” for the buyer and, of course, “the obligation but not the right” for the other party, called the seller.

The option is an agent of antifragility.
We don’t pay for the options given to us by nature and technological innovation. Most interesting options are free, or at the worst, cheap.
You need less information, that is, less knowledge, about the resort with broader options.
Options are vectors of antifragility.
One property of the option: it does not care about the average outcome, only the favorable ones.

Financial independence, when used intelligently, can make you robust; it gives you options and allows you to make the right choices.

Freedom is the ultimate option.

The essayist Michel de Montaigne sees the Thales episode as a story of immunity to sour grapes. (Read the book for the story :).

The decision maker focuses on the payoff, the consequence of the actions (hence includes asymmetries and nonlinear effects). The Aristotelian focuses on being right and wrong—in other words, raw logic.

If you “have optionality,” you don’t have much need for what is commonly called intelligence, knowledge, insight, skills.

The option is a substitute for knowledge.

This property allowing us to be stupid, or, alternatively, allowing us to get more results than the knowledge may warrant, I will call the “philosopher’s stone” for now, or “convexity bias,” the result of a mathematical property called Jensen’s inequality.
Evolution can produce astonishingly sophisticated objects without intelligence, simply thanks to a combination of optionality and some type of a selection filter, plus some randomness.
Nature is all about the exploitation of optionality; it illustrates how optionality is a substitute for intelligence.

Option = asymmetry + rationality.

Options benefit from variability, but also from situations in which errors carry small costs.

“Long gamma” means “benefits from volatility and variability.”
Risk taking ain’t gambling, and optionality ain’t lottery tickets.
Romans got their political system by tinkering, not by “reason.”

Chapter 13 – Lecturing Birds on How to Fly

We humans lack imagination, to the point of not even knowing what tomorrow’s important things look like.

Just as great geniuses invent their predecessors, practical innovations create their theoretical ancestry.
Implementation does not necessarily proceed from invention. It, too, requires luck and circumstances.
The simplest “technologies,” or perhaps not even technologies but tools, such as the wheel, are the ones that seem to run the world.
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.

In many pursuits, every trial, every failure provides additional information, each more valuable than the previous one—if you know what does not work.

The first type is not exactly “knowledge”; its ambiguous character prevents us from associating it with the strict definitions of knowledge. It is a way of doing things that we cannot really express in clear and direct language.
The second type is more like what we call “knowledge”; it is what you acquire in school, can get grades for, can codify, what is explainable, academizable.

Most texts define it as the application of scientific knowledge to practical projects—leading us to believe in a flow of knowledge going chiefly, even exclusively, from lofty “science” (organized around a priestly group of persons with titles before their names) to lowly practice (exercised by uninitiated people without the intellectual attainments to gain membership into the priestly group). Academia → Applied Science and Technology → Practice.

We are blind to the possibility of the alternative process, or the role of such a process, a loop: Random Tinkering (antifragile) → Heuristics (technology) → Practice and Apprenticeship → Random Tinkering (antifragile) → Heuristics (technology) → Practice and Apprenticeship.
In parallel to the above loop, Practice → Academic Theories → Academic Theories → Academic Theories → Academic Theories … (with of course some exceptions, some accidental leaks, though these are indeed rare and overhyped and grossly generalized).

The important difference between theory and practice lies precisely in the detection of the sequence of events and retaining the sequence in memory.

Someone standing today looking at events without having lived them would be inclined to develop illusions of causality, mostly from being mixed-up by the sequence of events.
We are suckers for the sophisticated.

Someone with optionality—the right to pick and choose his story—is only reporting on what suits his purpose.

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

[There is a] quote by Seneca and Ovid to the effect that sophistication is born of need, and success of difficulties.

Poverty makes experiences.
Publilius Syrus:

It is unrigorous to equate skills at doing with skills at talking.

My experience of good practitioners is that they can be totally incomprehensible—they do not have to put much energy into turning their insights and internal coherence into elegant style and narratives.
People who do things in the field are not subjected to a set exam; they are selected in the most non-narrative manner—nice arguments don’t make much difference.

Evolution does not rely on narratives, humans do.

There is something (here, perception, ideas, theories) and a function of something (here, a price or reality, or something real).

The conflation problem is to mistake one for the other, forgetting that there is a “function” and that such function has different properties.
Prometheus means “fore-thinker” while Epimetheus means “after-thinker,” equivalent to someone who falls for the retrospective distortion of fitting theories to past events in an ex post narrative.

Optionality is Promethean, narratives are Epimethean.

You make forays into the future by opportunism and optionality.

In theory there is no difference between theory and practice; in practice there is.
Yogi Berra

Just as evolution operates on individuals, so does it act on these tacit, unexplainable rules of thumb transmitted through generations.

An idea does not survive because it is better than the competition, but rather because the person who holds it has survived!
Accordingly, wisdom you learn from your grandmother should be vastly superior (empirically, hence scientifically) to what you get from a class in business school (and, of course, considerably cheaper).

Chapter 15 – History Written by the Losers

Practitioners don’t write; they do.

Birds fly and those who lecture them are the ones who write their story.
So it is easy to see that history is truly written by losers with time on their hands and a protected academic position.

No, we don’t put theories into practice. We create theories out of practice.

Things that are implemented tend to want to be born from practice, not theory.

There is a body of know-how that was transmitted from master to apprentice, and transmitted only in such a manner—with degrees necessary as a selection process or to make the profession more respectable, or to help here and there, but not systematically.
The role of … formal knowledge will be over-appreciated precisely because it is highly visible.
As Dan Ariely once observed, we cannot reverse engineer the taste of food from looking at the nutritional label.
Cooking schools are entirely apprenticeship based.
Medicine today remains an apprenticeship model with some theoretical science in the background, but made to look entirely like science.
Computer technology relies on science in most of its aspects; at no point did academic science serve in setting its direction, rather it served as a slave to chance discoveries in an opaque environment, with almost no one but college dropouts and overgrown high school students along the way.

Knowledge formation, even when theoretical, takes time, some boredom, and the freedom that comes from having another occupation.

Self-directed scholarship has an aesthetic dimension.

The Industrial Revolution, for a refresher, came from “technologists building technology,” or what he calls “hobby science.”
The increase in our theoretical understanding—the “epistemic base,” to use Mokyr’s term—came with a decrease in the number of new drugs.

Historically, skepticism has been mostly skepticism of expert knowledge rather than skepticism about abstract entities like God.

For the antifragile, good news tends to be absent from past data, and for the fragile it is the bad news that doesn’t show easily.

In the antifragile case (of positive asymmetries, positive Black Swan businesses), such as trial and error, the sample track record will tend to underestimate the long-term average; it will hide the qualities, not the defects.
In the fragile case of negative asymmetries (turkey problems), the sample track record will tend to underestimate the long-term average; it will hide the defects and display the qualities.

Chapter 16 – A Lesson In Disorder

Provided we have the right type of rigor, we need randomness, mess, adventures, uncertainty, self-discovery, near-traumatic episodes, all these things that make life worth living.

Trial and error is freedom.

Much of what other people know isn’t worth knowing.

Chapter 17 – Fat Tony Debates Socrates

The most severe mistake made in life is to mistake the unintelligible for the unintelligent.

Socrates’ technique was to make his interlocutor, who started with a thesis, agree to a series of statements, then proceed to show him how the statements he agreed to are inconsistent with the original thesis, thus establishing that he has no clue as to what he was talking about.

Fat Tony’s power in life is that he never lets the other person frame the question. He taught Nero that an answer is planted in every question; never respond with a straight answer to a question that makes no sense to you.

“My dear Socrates … you know why they are putting you to death? It is because you make people feel stupid for blindly following habits, instincts, and traditions. You may be occasionally right. But you may confuse them about things they’ve been doing just fine without getting in trouble. You are destroying people’s illusions about themselves. You are taking the joy of ignorance out of the things we don’t understand. And you have no answer; you have no answer to offer them.”
Fat Tony’s reasons why Socrates was put to death.

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.

“What is not intelligible to me is not necessarily unintelligent.”

Things are too complicated to be expressed in words; by doing so, you kill humans.

The distinction in life isn’t True or False, but rather sucker or nonsucker.

Exposure is more important than knowledge; decision effects supersede logic.

The need to focus on the payoff from your actions instead of studying the structure of the world (or understanding the “True” and the “False”) has been largely missed in intellectual history.

The payoff, what happens to you (the benefits or harm from it), is always the most important thing, not the event itself.
Philosophers talk about truth and falsehood. People in life talk about payoff, exposure, and consequences (risks and rewards), hence fragility and antifragility.
And sometimes philosophers and thinkers and those who study conflate Truth with risks and rewards.
You decide principally based on fragility, not probability. Or to rephrase,

You decide principally based on fragility, not so much on True/False.

If I tell you that some result is true with 95 percent confidence level, you would be quite satisfied. But what if I told you that the plane was safe with 95 percent confidence level? Even 99 percent confidence level would not do, as a 1 percent probability of a crash would be quite a bit alarming.

The probability (hence True/False) does not work in the real world; it is the payoff that matters.
A Black Swan event and how it affects you—its impact on your finances, emotions, the destruction it will cause—are not the same “ting.”

The vastly more effective “modify your exposure” and learn to get out of trouble, something religions and traditional heuristics have been better at enforcing than naive and cosmetic science.

Doing is wiser than you are prone to believe—and more rational.

In a way it is no different from racketeering: one needs a decent university “name” to get ahead in life; but we know that collectively society doesn’t appear to advance with organized education.

Education is an institution that has been growing without external stressors; eventually the thing will collapse.

Book V The Nonlinear and the Nonlinear

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

Fragility was simply vulnerability to the volatility of the things that affect it.

The difference between a thousand pebbles and a large stone of equivalent weight is a potent illustration of how fragility stems from nonlinear effects.

For the fragile, shocks bring higher harm as their intensity increases (up to a certain level).
For the antifragile, shocks bring more benefits (equivalently, less harm) as their intensity increases (up to a point).

The effect of variability in food sources and the nonlinearity in the physiological response is central to biological systems. The very idea of exercise is to gain from antifragility to workout stressors.

Squeezes are exacerbated by size.

When one is large, one becomes vulnerable to some errors, particularly horrendous squeezes.
The squeezes become nonlinearly costlier as size increases.
Bottlenecks are the mothers of all squeezes.
When you add uncertainty to projects, they tend to cost more and take longer to complete.

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.

Wealth means more, and because of nonlinear scaling, more is different.

Chapter 19 – The Philosopher’s Stone and Its Inverse

Do not cross a river if it is on average four feet deep.

The function of something becomes different from the something under nonlinearities.

The more nonlinear, the more the function of something divorces itself from the something.
The more volatile the something—the more uncertainty—the more the function divorces itself from the something.

If the function is convex (antifragile), then the average of the function of something is going to be higher than the function of the average of something. This hidden “convexity bias” comes from a mathematical property called Jensen’s inequality.

You can be dumb and antifragile and still do very well.

The more uncertainty, the more role for optionality to kick in, and the more you will outperform. This property is very central to life.

BOOK VI Via Negativa

Almost anything around us of significance is hard to grasp linguistically—and in fact the more powerful, the more incomplete our linguistic grasp.

Acts of commission are respected and glorified by our primitive minds and lead to, say, naive government interventions that end in disaster.

In life, antifragility is reached by not being a sucker.

Keeping one’s distance from an ignorant person is equivalent to keeping company with a wise man.

Negative knowledge (what is wrong, what does not work) is more robust to error than positive knowledge (what is right, what works). So knowledge grows by subtraction much more than by addition

People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I’m actually as proud of the things we haven’t done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things.
Steve Jobs

Just worry about Black Swan exposures, and life is easy.

If you have more than one reason to do something (choose a doctor or veterinarian, hire a gardener or an employee, marry a person, go on a trip), just don’t do it. It does not mean that one reason is better than two, just that by invoking more than one reason you are trying to convince yourself to do something.

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”

Chapter 20 – Time and Fragility

Time burns but leaves no ashes..
Elsa Triolet

The most fragile is the predictive.

Outside of the niche and isolated genre of science fiction, literature is about the past.

Technology is at its best when it is invisible. It may be a natural property of technology to only want to be displaced by itself.

The perishable is typically an object, the nonperishable has an informational nature to it.

For the perishable, every additional day in its life translates into a shorter additional life expectancy.
For the nonperishable, every additional day may imply a longer life expectancy.
The robustness of an item is proportional to its life!

It is precisely the young who propose ideas that are fragile, not because they are young, but because most unseasoned ideas are fragile.

The future is in the past.

He who does not have a past has no future.
Arabic Proverb

With so many technologically driven and modernistic items—skis, cars, computers, computer programs—it seems that we notice differences between versions rather than commonalities.

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.

Fractals induce a certain wealth of detail based on a small number of rules of repetition of nested patterns.

Wealth of details, ironically, leads to inner peace.

There is always some opacity that time, and only time, can dissipate.

Amateurs in any discipline are the best, if you can connect with them.

Career professionals are to knowledge what prostitutes are to love.

Original role of the prophet: to warn, not necessarily to predict, and to predict calamities if people don’t listen.

There are secrets to our world that only practice can reveal, and no opinion or analysis will ever capture in full.

If something that makes no sense to you (say, religion—if you are an atheist—or some age-old habit or practice called irrational); if that something has been around for a very, very long time, then, irrational or not, you can expect it to stick around much longer, and outlive those who call for its demise.

Chapter 21 – Medicine, Convexity, and Opacity

Only resort to medical techniques when the health payoff is very large (say, saving a life) and visibly exceeds its potential harm, such as incontrovertibly needed surgery or lifesaving medicine (penicillin).

In a complex domain, only time—a long time—is evidence.

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.

What we call diseases of civilization result from the attempt by humans to make life comfortable for ourselves against our own interest, since the comfortable is what fragilizes.

Iatrogenics, being a cost-benefit situation, usually results from the treacherous condition in which the benefits are small, and visible—and the costs very large, delayed, and hidden.

We should not take risks with near-healthy people; but we should take a lot, a lot more risks with those deemed in danger.

While: in a “mature” market there is no free lunch anymore, and what appears as a free lunch has a hidden risk.

Pharma plays on the interventionism of doctors.

If the patient is close to death, all speculative treatments should be encouraged—no holds barred.
Conversely, if the patient is near healthy, then Mother Nature should be the doctor.

If you are antifragile (i.e., convex) to a given substance, then you are better off having it randomly distributed, rather than provided steadily.

What made medicine mislead people for so long is that its successes were prominently displayed, and its mistakes literally buried.

Few wonder why, after hundreds of million of years of having our skins exposed to sun rays, we suddenly need so much protection from them—is it that our exposure is more harmful than before … or rather, that makers of sun protection products need to make some profits?

The experiments used by drug companies seem to play on nonlinearities and

Bundle the very ill and the less ill
Assume that the metric “cholesterol” equates 100 percent with health.

Statins can potentially harm people who are not very sick, for whom the benefits are either minimal or totally nonexistent.

Statins fail in their application the first principle of iatrogenics (unseen harm).
They certainly do lower cholesterol, but as a human your objective function is not to lower a certain metric to get a grade to pass a school-like test, but get in better health.

Hygiene (beyond a certain point, hygiene may make you fragile by denying hormesis—our own antifragility). We ingest probiotics because we don’t eat enough “dirt” anymore.

Insulin injections for Type II diabetics, based on the assumption that the harm from diabetes comes from blood sugar, not insulin resistance (or something else associated with it).

Complex systems have feedback loops, so what you “burn” depends on what you consume, and how you consume it.

Evolution proceeds by undirected, convex bricolage or tinkering, inherently robust, i.e., with the achievement of potential stochastic gains thanks to continuous, repetitive, small, localized mistakes.

Our record of understanding risks in complex systems (biology, economics, climate) has been pitiful, marred with retrospective distortions (we only understand the risks after the damage takes place, yet we keep making the mistake).
Simply, humans should not be given explosive toys (like atomic bombs, financial derivatives, or tools to create life).

What Mother Nature does is rigorous until proven otherwise; what humans and science do is flawed until proven otherwise.

We sacrifice ourselves in favor of our genes, trading our fragility for their survival.

We age, but they stay young and get fitter and fitter outside us.

Things break on a small scale all the time, in order to avoid large-scale generalized catastrophes. Phenomenology is more potent than theories—and should lead to more rigorous policy making.

A consulting firm, [is] a profession grounded in building narratives and naive rationalization.

We are built to be dupes for theories. But theories come and go; experience stays.

What physicists call the phenomenology of the process is the empirical manifestation, without looking at how it glues to existing general theories.

The doctor and medical essayist James Le Fanu showed how our understanding of the biological processes was coupled with a decline of pharmaceutical discoveries.

An attribution problem arises when the person imputes his positive results to his own skills and his failures to luck.

Montaigne also detected the agency problem, or why the last thing a doctor needs is for you to be healthy: “No doctor derives pleasure from the health of his friends, wrote the ancient Greek satirist, no soldier from the peace of his city, etc.”
Frequent visits to the doctor, particularly outside the cases of a life-threatening ailment or an uncomfortable condition—just like frequent access to information—can be harmful.
David Freedman showed (very convincingly) with a coauthor that the link everyone is obsessing about between salt and blood pressure has no statistical basis. It may exist for some hypertensive people, but it is more likely the exception than the rule.

What I am against is naive rationalized, pseudo-learned discourse, with green lumber problems—one that focuses solely on the known and ignores the unknown.

Chapter 22 – To Live Long, but Not Too Long

It is a serious error to infer that if we live longer because of medicine, that all medical treatments make us live longer.

Perhaps legal enforcement contributed more than doctors to the increase in length of life—so the gains in life expectancy are more societal than from the result of scientific advance.

Treating the tumor that will not kill you shortens your life—chemotherapy is toxic.

An error of logic called affirming the consequent. If all of those dying prematurely from cancer had a malignant tumor, that does not mean that all malignant tumors lead to death from cancer.

Ennius wrote, “The good is mostly in the absence of bad”.

The “pursuit of happiness” is not equivalent to the “avoidance of unhappiness.”

Sometimes scantiness of nourishment restores the system.
Plotinus

The regimen of the Salerno School of Medicine: joyful mood, rest, and scant nourishment.

From a scientific perspective, it seems that the only way we may manage to extend people’s lives is through caloric restriction—which seems to cure many ailments in humans and extend lives in laboratory animals.

If all the medications were dumped in the sea, it would be better for mankind but worse for the fishes.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

As to liquid, my rule is drink no liquid that is not at least a thousand years old—so its fitness has been tested. I drink just wine, water, and coffee.

From such examples, I derived the rule that what is called “healthy” is generally unhealthy, just as “social” networks are antisocial, and the “knowledge”-based economy is typically ignorant.

In my own experience, a considerable jump in my personal health has been achieved by removing offensive irritants: the morning newspapers (the mere mention of the names of the fragilista journalists Thomas Friedman or Paul Krugman can lead to explosive bouts of unrequited anger on my part), the boss, the daily commute, air-conditioning (though not heating), television, emails from documentary filmmakers, economic forecasts, news about the stock market, gym “strength training” machines, and many more.

To understand the outright denial of antifragility in the way we seek wealth, consider that construction laborers seem happier with a ham and cheese baguette than businessmen with a Michelin three-star meal. Food tastes so much better after exertion.

Few have considered that money has its own iatrogenics, and that separating some people from their fortune would simplify their lives and bring great benefits in the form of healthy stressors. So being poorer might not be completely devoid of benefits if one does it right.

If true wealth consists 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, then it is largely subtractive (elimination of iatrogenics).

In a large set of circumstances (marginal disease), anything that takes you away from the doctor and allows you to do nothing (hence gives nature a chance to do its work) will be beneficial.

It seems to me that human nature does, deep down, know when to resort to the solace of religion, and when to switch to science.

Among other things the role of religion is to tame the iatrogenics of abundance—fasting makes you lose your sense of entitlement.

The error of missing nonlinearities is found in two places, in the mixture and in the frequency of food intake.

Specialization is the response to a very stable habitat free of abrupt changes, redundancy of pathways the response to a more variegated one.
Take the following principles derived from the random structure of the environment: when we are herbivores, we eat steadily; but when we are predators we eat more randomly. Hence our proteins need to be consumed randomly for statistical reasons.
So if you agree that we need “balanced” nutrition of a certain combination, it is wrong to immediately assume that we need such balance at every meal rather than serially so.
I am convinced (an inevitable result of nonlinearity) that we are antifragile to randomness in food delivery and composition—at least over a certain range, or number of days.

Deprivation is a stressor—and we know what stressors do when allowed adequate recovery.

Scientists are in the process of discovering the effects of episodic deprivation of some, or all, foods. Somehow, evidence shows, we get sharper and fitter in response to the stress of the constraint.
We are not designed to be receiving foods from the delivery person. In nature, we had to expend some energy to eat.
Religions with ritual fasts have more answers than assumed by those who look at them too literally.

While the gene is antifragile, since it is information, the carrier of the gene is fragile, and needs to be so for the gene to get stronger.

Nietzsche had the Latin pun aut liberi, aut libri—either children or books, both information that carries through the centuries.
The antifragility of a system comes from the mortality of its components.

I am here to die a heroic death for the sake of the collective, to produce offspring (and prepare them for life and provide for them), or eventually, books—my information, that is, my genes, the antifragile in me, should be the ones seeking immortality, not me.

Book VII The Ethics of Fragility and Antifragility

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

The main difference between us and them [ancients] is the disappearance of a sense of heroism; a shift away from a certain respect—and power—to those who take downside risks for others.

In traditional societies, a person is only as respectable and as worthy as the downside he (or, more, a lot more, than expected, she) is willing to face for the sake of others.
Publilius Syrus, prudence was deemed the courage of the general.

If success is random, a conscious act of heroism is nonrandom.

A half-man (or, rather, half-person) is not someone who does not have an opinion, just someone who does not take risks for it.
If you take risks and face your fate with dignity, there is nothing you can do that makes you small; if you don’t take risks, there is nothing you can do that makes you grand, nothing.

First, never get on a plane if the pilot is not on board. Second, make sure there is also a copilot. The first heuristic addresses the asymmetry in rewards.

To me, every opinion maker needs to have “skin in the game” in the event of harm caused by reliance on his information or opinion.

Predicting—any prediction—without skin in the game can be as dangerous for others.
Commentators need to have a status below ordinary citizens. Regular citizens, at least, face the downside of their statements.
The “knowledge world” causes separation of knowing and doing (within the same person) and leads to the fragility of society.
In the old days, privilege came with obligations—except for the small class of intellectuals who served a patron or, in some cases, the state. You want to be a feudal lord—you will be first to die.

Natural and ancestral systems work by penalties: no perpetual free option given to anyone.

Words are dangerous: postdictors, who explain things after the fact—because they are in the business of talking—always look smarter than predictors.

The past is fluid, marred with selection biases and constantly revised memories.

The asymmetry (antifragility of postdictors): postdictors can cherry-pick and produce instances in which their opinions played out and discard mispredictions into the bowels of history. It is like a free option—to them; we pay for it.
When you look at the actual history of someone’s activities, instead of what thoughts he will deliver after the facts, things become crystal clear.
I want predictors to have visible scars on their body from prediction errors, not distribute these errors to society.

An academic is not designed to remember his opinions because he doesn’t have anything at risk from them.
Never ask anyone for their opinion, forecast, or recommendation. Just ask them what they have—or don’t have—in their portfolio.

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.

Suckers try to win arguments, nonsuckers try to win.

For Mother Nature, opinions and predictions don’t count.

It is not ideas that survive, but people who have the right ones, or societies that have the correct heuristics, or the ones, right or wrong, that lead them to do the good thing. A wrong idea that is harmless can survive.

Our mission is to make talk less cheap.

Never put your enemy’s back to the wall.

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.
Never listen to a leftist who does not give away his fortune or does not live the exact lifestyle he wants others to follow.

Prophecy is a pledge of belief, little else. A prophet is not someone who first had an idea; he is the one to first believe in it—and take it to its conclusion.

Corporate managers have incentives without disincentives.

The asymmetry is visibly present: volatility benefits managers since they only get one side of the payoffs.
Society pays for the losses of the bankers, but gets no bonuses from them. If you don’t see this transfer of antifragility as theft, you certainly have a problem.
Bankers used to be subjected to Hammurabi’s rule. The tradition in Catalonia was to behead bankers in front of their own banks.
Have you noticed that while corporations sell you junk drinks, artisans sell you cheese and wine? And there is a transfer of antifragility from the small in favor of the large—until the large goes bust.
My experience of company executives, as evidenced by their appetite for spending thousands of hours in dull meetings or reading bad memos, is that they cannot possibly be remarkably bright. They are no entrepreneurs—just actors, slick actors.
Small companies and artisans tend to sell us healthy products, ones that seem naturally and spontaneously needed.
Anything that requires marketing appears to carry such side effects. You certainly need an advertising apparatus to convince people that Coke brings them “happiness”—and it works.
Corporations, when they sell you what they call cheese, have an incentive to provide you with the cheapest-to-produce piece of rubber containing the appropriate ingredients that can still be called cheese.
Business books: publishers and authors want to grab your attention and put in your hands the most perishable journalistic item available that still can be called a book.

Anything one needs to market heavily is necessarily either an inferior product or an evil one.
Marketing is bad manners.
Marketing beyond conveying information is insecurity.

Societies function thanks to random acts of generosity between people, even sometimes strangers.

If you ever have to choose between a mobster’s promise and a civil servant’s, go with the mobster. Any time.
Institutions do not have a sense of honor, individuals do.
Never trust the words of a man who is not free.

Only a sense of honor can lead to commerce.

Chapter 24 Fitting Ethics to a Profession

Ethics (and Beliefs) → Profession or Profession → Ethics (and Beliefs).

“But, Neeroh Toolip, there are still slaves around,” Fat Tony blurted out. “They often distinguish themselves by wearing this intricate device called a necktie.”
Nero: “Signore Ingeniere Tony, some of these tie-wearers are very rich, even richer than you.”
Tony: “Nero, you sucker. Don’t be fooled by money. These are just numbers. Being self-owned is a state of mind.”

There is a phenomenon called the treadmill effect, similar to what we saw with neomania: you need to make more and more to stay in the same place.

Mafia dons don’t socialize with other mafia dons but with their constituents.
You cannot possibly trust someone on a treadmill.
Should we go into people’s inner and private thoughts and motivations, we would see that their wishes and hopes are almost invariably at someone else’s expense.

The definition of the free man, according to Aristotle, is one who is free with his opinions—as a side effect of being free with his time.

He is free who owns his own opinion.
Only he who has courage is free with his opinion.

It never meant not working; it just meant not deriving your personal and emotional identity from your work, and viewing work as something optional, more like a hobby.

Sissies are born, not made. They stay sissies no matter how much independence you give them, no matter how rich they get.

Banishment and exile, or, worse, ostracism were severe penalties—people did not move around voluntarily and considered uprooting a horrible calamity.

In larger organisms like the mega holy nation-state, with a smaller role for face-to-face encounters, and social roots, shame ceases to fulfill its duty of disciplinarian.

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.

In the modern world, there seems to be an inverse agency problem for those who do the right thing: you pay for your service to the public with smear campaigns and harassment.
The incentive of a regulator is to have complex regulation.
The difference between the letter and the spirit of regulation is harder to detect in a complex system.

A fraudulent opinion. It is simply one with vested interests generalized to the public good.

When general statements about the collective welfare are made, instead, absence of investment is what is required. Via negativa.

The mechanism of ethical optionality by which people fit their beliefs to actions rather than fit their actions to their beliefs.

Evidence against one’s interest. One should give more weight to witnesses and opinions when they present the opposite of a conflict of interest.

As to economics, fuhgetaboudit. You can hardly trust many statistically oriented sciences—especially when the researcher is under pressure to publish for his career.

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.
In large data sets, large deviations are vastly more attributable to noise (or variance) than to information (or signal).
Falsity grows faster than information; it is nonlinear (convex) with respect to data.
The fooled-by-data effect is accelerating. There is a nasty phenomenon called “Big Data” in which researchers have brought cherry-picking to an industrial level.

Noise is convex and information is concave. Increasingly, data can only truly deliver via negativa–style knowledge—it can be effectively used to debunk, not confirm.

The professional researcher competes to “find” relationships.

Science must not be a competition; it must not have rankings.
Knowledge must not have an agency problem.
Mistakes made collectively, not individually, are the hallmark of organized knowledge—and the best argument against it.
Is my duty as a professor to get students a job at the expense of society, or to fulfill my civic obligations? Well, if the former is the case, then economics and business schools have a severe ethical problem.
Professors are not penalized when they teach you something that blows up the financial system, which perpetuates the fraud. Departments need to teach something so students get jobs, even if they are teaching snake oil—this.
Science is precisely about arguments standing on their own legs, and something proven to be wrong empirically or mathematically is plain wrong.
The very use of “other people” to back up one’s claims is indicative that the person—or the entire collective that composes the “other”—is a wimp.

Chapter 25 Conclusion

Everything in religious law comes down to the refinements, applications, and interpretations of the Golden Rule, “Don’t do unto others what you don’t want them to do to you.”

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

Time is volatility.

Education, in the sense of the formation of character, personality, and acquisition of true knowledge, likes disorder; label-driven education and educators abhor disorder.

Innovation is precisely something that gains from uncertainty: and some people sit around waiting for uncertainty and using it as raw material, just like our ancestral hunters.

We can separate people and the quality of their experiences based on exposure to disorder and appetite for it.

Everything likes or hates volatility up to a point. Everything.

We can detect what likes volatility thanks to convexity or acceleration and higher orders, since convexity is the response by a thing that likes disorder.

Ethics is largely about stolen convexities and optionality.

We can control a function of x, f(x), even if x remains vastly beyond our understanding. We can keep changing f(x) until we are comfortable with it by a mechanism called convex transformation, the fancier name for the barbell.

Distributed randomness (as opposed to the concentrated type) is a necessity, not an option: everything big is short volatility. So is everything fast. Big and fast are abominations.

Modern times don’t like volatility.

Living things are long volatility. The best way to verify that you are alive is by checking if you like variations.

Remember that:

food would not have a taste if it weren’t for hunger
results are meaningless without effort,
joy without sadness,
convictions without uncertainty, and
an ethical life isn’t so when stripped of personal risks.

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