Learnings from Book Antifragile

Whenever we read a book we try to co-relate it with our experiences and beliefs. We enjoy reading it and quote extensively in many occasions. One such author whom I have quoted many times and enjoyed reading his work is Nassim Nicholas  Taleb.

I was fortunate enough to read his three books i.e. Fooled by Randomness, Black Swan and the latest Antifragile. I have always recommended my friends / acquaintances to read Fooled by Randomness / Black Swan.

Now in that list I will add Antifragile also. What I like is the author strongly agreeing to the role of randomness. Somehow, randomness is something I have spoken many times with friends. They have rejected it out rightly.

There are few who actually manage to poke holes in theories and foremost in them is the Taleb. It will be difficult for others (especially corporate climbers, theorist) to enjoy this book. The extent of subject linking and depth of knowledge of Taleb is unchallenged.

As compared to Fooled by Randomness and Black Swan this book has extensively touched upon the importance of what has been survived since ancient times. In short the importance of traditions which has been ignored by many has been held high by Taleb.

The journey from start to end was highly energizing and satisfactory for me. With no single doubt I will be recommending this book for reading.

I have listed below the sections which I liked the most from Antifragile as my learning or my belongings for my onward journey. The bold part below is for my understanding from the various statements appeared in Antifragile. Below the bold, statement is reproduced from the book as is for my / readers understanding.

Robustness

Given the unattainability of perfect robustness, we need a mechanism by which the system regenerates itself continuously by using, rather than suffering from, random events, unpredictable shocks, stressors, and volatility.

Risk Management

Risk management as practiced is the study of an event taking place in the future, and only some economists and other lunatics can claim—against experience—to “measure” the future incidence of these rare events, with suckers listening to them—against experience and the track record of such claims.

Basic difference of Fragile, Antifragile and Robust

Recall that the fragile wants tranquility, the antifragile grows from disorder, and the robust doesn’t care too much.

Opposite of fragile

 Logically, the exact opposite of a “fragile” parcel would be a package on which one has written “please mishandle” or “please handle carelessly.” Its contents would not just be unbreakable, but would benefit from shocks and a wide array of trauma. The fragile is the package that would be at best unharmed, the robust would be at best and at worst unharmed. And the opposite of fragile is therefore what is at worst unharmed.

Abundance is harder for us to handle than scarcity.

Most humans manage to squander their freetime, as free time makes them dysfunctional, lazy, and unmotivated—the busier they get, the more active they are at other tasks.

Nature

Every random event will bring its own antidote in the form of ecological variation. It is as if nature changed itself at every step and modified its strategy every instant.

Remember

Someone paid a price for the system to improve.

Respecting entrepreneur

Most of you will fail, disrespected, impoverished, but we are grateful for the risks you are taking and the sacrifices you are making for the sake of the economic growth of the planet and pulling others out of poverty. You are at the source of our antifragility. Our nation thanks you.

Difference between Employee and Self Employed

One has the illusion of stability, but is fragile; the other one the illusion of variability, but is robust and even Antifragile.

On Planning: anything locked into planning tends to fail precisely because of these attributes

it is quite a myth that planning helps corporations: in fact we saw that the world is too random and unpredictable to base a policy on visibility of the future. What survives comes from the interplay of some fitness and environmental conditions.

About Risk analysis

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

Importance of randomness

When some systems are stuck in a dangerous impasse, randomness and only randomness can unlock them and set them free. You can see here that absence of randomness equals guaranteed death.

Good example of centralization

Indeed, the U.K. health service was operating under the principle that a pin falling somewhere in some remote hospital should be heard in Whitehall (the street in London where the government buildings are centralized).

Rewards for Non action

I’ve looked in history for heroes who became heroes for what they did not do, but it is hard to observe nonaction; I could not easily find any. The doctor who refrains from operating on a back (a very expensive surgery), instead giving it a chance to heal itself, will not be rewarded and judged as favorably as the doctor who makes the surgery look indispensable, then brings relief to the patient while exposing him to operating risks, while accruing great financial rewards to himself.

Procrastination

Procrastination turned out to be a way to let events take their course and give the activists the chance to change their minds before committing to irreversible policies. 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.”

Time and Fragility

Time is the best test of fragility—it encompasses high doses of disorder—and nature is the only system that has been stamped “robust” by time. But some philosophasters fail to understand the primacy of risk and survival over philosophizing, and those should eventually exit the gene pool—true philosophers would agree with my statement.

Cause of Greed

 But lack of vigilance is not the cause of the death of a mafia don; the cause of death is making enemies, and the cure is making friends.

Simplicity

 People with too much smoke and complicated tricks and methods in their brains start missing elementary, very elementary 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.

Theory and Practice

 As Yogi Berra said, “In theory there is no difference between theory and practice; in practice there is.”

On Blow ups

 Traders trade → traders figure out techniques and products → academic economists find formulas and claim traders are using them → new traders believe academics → blowups (from theory-induced fragility)

Men brought up by Street (disorderliness)

Some can be more intelligent than others in a structured environment—in fact school has a selection bias as it favors those quicker in such an environment, and like anything competitive, at the expense of performance outside it. Although I was not yet familiar with gyms, my idea of knowledge was as follows. People who build their strength using these modern expensive gym machines can lift extremely large weights, show great numbers and develop impressive-looking muscles, but fail to lift a stone; they get completely hammered in a street fight by someone trained in more disorderly settings.

Their strength is extremely domain-specific and their domain doesn’t exist outside of ludic—extremely organized—constructs. In fact their strength, as with overspecialized athletes, is the result of a deformity. I thought it was the same with people who were selected for trying to get high grades in a small number of subjects rather than follow their curiosity: try taking them slightly away from what they studied and watch their decomposition, loss of confidence, and denial. (Just like corporate executives are selected for their ability to put up with the boredom of meetings, many of these people were selected for their ability to concentrate on boring material.) I’ve debated many economists who claim to specialize in risk and probability: when one takes them slightly outside their narrow focus, but within the discipline of probability, they fall apart, with the disconsolate face of a gym rat in front of a gangster hit man.

About via negative

 For the Arab scholar and religious leader Ali Bin Abi-Taleb (no relation), keeping one’s distance from an ignorant person is equivalent to keeping company with a wise man.

Finally, consider this modernized version in a saying from Steve Jobs

“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.”

About life Longevity

So the longer a technology lives, the longer it can be expected to live. This, simply, as a rule, tells you why things that have been around for a long time are not “aging” like persons, but “aging” in reverse. Every year that passes without extinction doubles the additional life expectancy. This is an indicator of some robustness. The robustness of an item is proportional to its life!

On Scaling up

Recall the discussion of municipal properties—they don’t translate into something larger because problems become more abstract as they scale up, and the abstract is not something human nature can manage properly. The same principle needs to apply to urban life: neighborhoods are villages, and need to remain villages.

Missing the picture

Now we can see the pattern: 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. And of course, the potential costs are much worse than the cumulative gains.

Nature’s way

 Just as there is a dichotomy in law: innocent until proven guilty as opposed to guilty until proven innocent, 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.

Basic truths

 Let us remember that we are not designed to be receiving foods from the delivery person. In nature, we had to expend some energy to eat. Lions hunt to eat, they don’t eat their meal then hunt for pleasure. Giving people food before they expend energy would certainly confuse their signaling process. And we have ample evidence that intermittently (and only intermittently) depriving organisms of food has been shown to engender beneficial effects on many functions.

Beautiful statement

 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. And when you take risks, insults by half-men (small men, those who don’t risk anything) are similar to barks by nonhuman animals: you can’t feel insulted by a dog.

Skin in the Game

Hammurabi’s code—now about 3,800 years old—identifies the need to reestablish 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.