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.
