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Antifragility Quotes
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Highlights
intellectual society rewards “difficult” derivations, compared to practice in which there is no penalty for simplicity.
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Even political systems follow a form of rational tinkering, when people are rational hence take the better option: the Romans got their political system by tinkering, not by “reason.” Polybius in his Histories compares the Greek legislator Lycurgus, who constructed his political system while “untaught by adversity,” to the more experiential Romans, who, a few centuries later, “have not reached it by any process of reasoning [emphasis mine], but by the discipline of many struggles and troubles, and always choosing the best by the light of the experience gained in disaster.”
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If you “have optionality,” you don’t have much need for what is commonly called intelligence, knowledge, insight, skills, and these complicated things that take place in our brain cells. For you don’t have to be right that often. All you need is the wisdom to not do unintelligent things to hurt yourself (some acts of omission) and recognize favorable outcomes when they occur. (The key is that your assessment doesn’t need to be made beforehand, only after the outcome.)
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antifragility equals more to gain than to lose equals more upside than downside equals asymmetry (unfavorable) equals likes volatility. And if you make more when you are right than you are hurt when you are wrong, then you will benefit, in the long run, from volatility (and the reverse)
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The rational flâneur is someone who, unlike a tourist, makes a decision at every step to revise his schedule, so he can imbibe things based on new information
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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.
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erudition, aesthetics, and risk taking
18 days ago LikeShare 0
the cat and the washing machine
20 days ago LikeShare 0
the illusion of local causal chains—that is, confusing catalysts for causes and assuming that one can know which catalyst will produce which effect.
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The Origin of Financial Crises
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George Cooper 2 months ago Avatar for nik gaffney
The story of the nation-state is that of the concentration and magnification of human errors. Modernity starts with the state monopoly on violence, and ends with the state’s monopoly on fiscal irresponsibility.
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Modernity starts with the state monopoly on violence, and ends with the state’s monopoly on fiscal irresponsibility.
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Fragile-Robust-Antifragile as Damocles-Phoenix-Hydra
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Makridakis, forecasting, and less is more: Makridakis et al. (1982, 1993), Makridakis and Hibon (2000), Makridakis and Taleb (2009).
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Heuristics as powerful—and necessary—shortcuts:
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Debt in ancient history: Babylonian jubilees, Hudson et al. (2002). Athens, Harrison (1998), Finley (1953). History of debt, Barty-King (1997), Muldrew (1993), Glaeser (2001). The latter has an anarchist view. He actually believes that debt precedes barter exchange.
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Mercier and Sperber have debunked the notion that we use reasoning in order to search for the truth. They showed in a remarkable study that the purpose of arguments is not to make decisions but to convince others—since decisions we arrive at by reasoning are fraught with massive distortions. They showed it experimentally, producing evidence that individuals are better at forging arguments in a social setting (when there are others to convince) than when they are alone.
9 months ago LikeShare 0 nik gaffney
Mercier, H., and D. Sperber, 2011, “Why Do Humans Reason? Arguments for an Argumentative Theory.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 34(2) 57–74. 9 months ago Avatar for nik gaffney
Tacit-Explicit knowledge: Colins (2010), Polanyi (1958), Mitchell (2006)
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INCERTO’S TECHNICAL COMPANION (freely available electronic volume) consisting of academic-style papers, miscellaneous notes, and (very) technical remarks.
9 months ago LikeShare 0 nik gaffney
https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&pid=explorer&chrome=true&srcid=0B_31K_MP92hUNjljYjIyMzgtZTBmNS00MGMwLWIxNmQtYjMyNDFiYjY0MTJl&hl=en_GB 9 months ago Avatar for nik gaffney
Zerubavel, Eviatar, 2006, The Elephant in the Room: Silence and Denial in Everyday Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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Radiation hormesis is the idea that low-level radiation causes hormetic overreaction with protective effects.
9 months ago LikeShare 0 nik gaffney
Neumaier, T., J. Swenson, et al., 2012, “Evidence for Formation of DNA Repair Centers and Dose-Response Nonlinearity in Human Cells.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 109(2): 443–448. 9 months ago Avatar for nik gaffney
Fasting and hormesis: Martin, Mattson et al. (2006). Cancer treatment and fasting, Longo et al. (2008), Safdie et al. (2009), Raffaghelo et al. (2010)); on yeast and longevity under restriction, Fabrizio et al. (2001); SIRT1, Longo et al. (2006), Michan et al. (2010); review work in Blagosklonny et al. (2010).
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Abrahamson, Eric, and David H. Freedman, 2007, A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder: How Crammed Closets, Cluttered Offices, and On-the-Fly Planning Make the World a Better Place. Little, Brown.
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nobody considers a plane crash as “anecdotal.”
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Sometimes researchers call a result “anecdotal” as a knee-jerk reaction when the result is exactly the reverse. Steven Pinker called John Gray’s pointing out the two world wars as counterevidence to his story of great moderation “anecdotal.”
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The obsession with measurement started with the right places, and progressively invaded the wrong ones.
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Randomizing politicians: Pluchino et al. (2011).
9 months ago LikeShare 0 nik gaffney
Pluchino, A., C. Garofalo, et al., 2011, “Accidental Politicians: How Randomly Selected Legislators Can Improve Parliament Efficiency.” Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and Its Applications 9 months ago Avatar for nik gaffney
Benjamin Barber, Long Now Foundation Lecture (2012), Khanna (2010), Glaeser (2011). Mayors are better than presidents at dealing with trash collection—and less likely to drag us into war.
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Michael Shermer, “The Unlikeliest Cult in History,” Skeptic vol. 2, no. 2, 1993, pp. 74–81.
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o 9 months ago Avatar for nik gaffney
Yaneer Bar-Yam, generously in his comments: “If we take a step back and more generally consider the issue of partitioned versus connected systems, partitioned systems are more stable, and connected systems are both more vulnerable and have more opportunities for collective action. Vulnerability (fragility) is connectivity without responsiveness. Responsiveness enables connectivity to lead to opportunity. If collective action can be employed to address threats, or to take advantage of opportunities, then the vulnerability can be mitigated and outweighed by the benefits. This is the basic relationship between the idea of sensitivity as we described it and your concept of antifragility.”
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fat tails are both severe and intractable—hence all methods with “squares” don’t work with socioeconomic variables: regression, standard deviation, correlation, etc. (technically 80% of the Kurtosis in 10,000 pieces of data can come from one single observation, meaning all measures of fat tails are just sampling errors).
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The more parameter uncertainty there is in a model designed to compute probabilities, the more small probabilities tend to be underestimated.
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. 9 months ago Avatar for nik gaffney
having the right model (which is a very generous assumption), but being uncertain about the parameters will invariably lead to an increase in fragility in the presence of convexity and nonlinearities.
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Portfolio fallacies:
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The reader should not interpret what I am saying to mean that specialization is not a good thing—only that one should establish such specialization after addressing fragility and second-order effects.
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the critical and dangerous mistake of confusing function of average and average of function. (Traditional Ricardian analysis assumes the variables are endogenous, but does not add a layer of stochasticity.)
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Something estimated needs to have an estimation error. So probability cannot be zero if it is estimated, its lower bound is linked to the estimation error; the higher the estimation error, the higher the probability, up to a point.
9 months ago LikeShare 0 nik gaffney
Markowitz incoherence 9 months ago Avatar for nik gaffney
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. We can build Black Swan–protected systems thanks to detection of concavity. We can take medical decisions by understanding the convexity of harm and the logic of Mother Nature’s tinkering, on which side we face opacity, which error we should risk. Ethics is largely about stolen convexities and optionality.
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Shaiy’s extraction was: Everything gains or loses from volatility. Fragility is what loses from volatility and uncertainty.
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Mistakes made collectively, not individually, are the hallmark of organized knowledge—and the best argument against it. The argument “because everyone is doing it” or “that’s how others do it” abounds. It is not trivial: people who on their own would not do something because they find it silly now engage in the same thing but in groups. And this is where academia in its institutional structure tends to violate science.
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There is a certain property of data: in large data sets, large deviations are vastly more attributable to noise (or variance) than to information (or signal).
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There exists an inverse Alan Blinder problem, called “evidence against one’s interest.” One should give more weight to witnesses and opinions when they present the opposite of a conflict of interest.
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Second, the difference between the letter and the spirit of regulation is harder to detect in a complex system.
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First, the more complicated the regulation, the more prone to arbitrages by insiders.
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“Isn’t this unethical?” I was then told in response “It is perfectly legal,”
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for Fat Tony, it was a very, very specific definition of a free person: someone who cannot be squeezed into doing something he would otherwise never do.
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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.
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Ethics (and Beliefs) → Profession or Profession → Ethics (and Beliefs)
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My suggestion to deter “too big to fail” and prevent employers from taking advantage of the public is as follows. A company that is classified as potentially bailable out should it fail should not be able to pay anyone more than a corresponding civil servant. Otherwise people should be free to pay each other what they want since it does not affect the taxpayer.
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Only a sense of honor can lead to commerce. Any commerce.
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I said about marketing by soft drink companies that it is meant to maximally confuse the drinker. Anything one needs to market heavily is necessarily either an inferior product or an evil one.
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small companies and artisans tend to sell us healthy products, ones that seem naturally and spontaneously needed; larger ones—including pharmaceutical giants—are likely to be in the business of producing wholesale iatrogenics, taking our money, and then, to add insult to injury, hijacking the state thanks to their army of lobbyists. Further, anything that requires marketing appears to carry such side effects.
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(wine seems to be the best argument in favor of the artisanal economy)
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The problem of the commercial world is that it only works by addition (via positiva), not subtraction (via negativa)
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The directors of such companies, however, being the managers rather of other people’s money than of their own, it cannot well be expected, that they should watch over it with the same anxious vigilance with which the partners in a private copartnery frequently watch over their own.
9 months ago LikeShare 0 nik gaffney
The Wealth of Nations, Smith 9 months ago Avatar for nik gaffney
The tradition in Catalonia was to behead bankers in front of their own banks (bankers tended to skip town before failure was apparent, but that was the fate of at least one banker, Francesco Castello, in 1360)
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Some people suggest enforcing a “clawback provision” as a remedy, which consists of making people repay past bonuses in cases of subsequent failure. It would be done as follows: managers cannot cash their bonuses immediately, they can only do so three or five years later if there are no losses. But this does not solve the problem: the managers still have a net upside, and no net downside. At no point is their own net worth endangered. So the system still contains a high degree of optionality and transfer of fragility.
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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.
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The stock market: the greatest, industrial-sized, transfer of antifragility in history
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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.
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André Malraux
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Our mission is to make talk less cheap.
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Decision making in the real world, that is, deeds, are Thalesian, while forecasting in words is Aristotelian.
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The psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer has a simple heuristic. Never ask the doctor what you should do. Ask him what he would do if he were in your place. You would be surprised at the difference.
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Never ask anyone for their opinion, forecast, or recommendation. Just ask them what they have—or don’t have—in their portfolio.
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The Stiglitz Syndrome
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The past is fluid, marred with selection biases and constantly revised memories
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Because of the retrospective distortion, people who of course did not see an event coming will remember some thought to the effect that they did, and will manage to convince themselves that they predicted it, before proceeding to convince others. There will be after every event many more postdictors than true predictors, people who had an idea in the shower without taking it to its logical conclusion
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Fat Tony has two heuristics. First, never get on a plane if the pilot is not on board. Second, make sure there is also a copilot.
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Further, anyone producing a forecast or making an economic analysis needs to have something to lose from it, given that others rely on those forecasts (to repeat, forecasts induce risk taking; they are more toxic to us than any other form of human pollution).
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Ralph Nader has a simple rule: people voting for war need to have at least one descendant (child or grandchild) exposed to combat.
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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
9 months ago LikeShare 0 nik gaffney
Hammurabi’s code—now about 3,800 years old 9 months ago Avatar for nik gaffney
A lesson I learned from this ancient culture is the notion of megalopsychon (a term expressed in Aristotle’s ethics), a sense of grandeur that was superseded by the Christian value of “humility.” There is no word for it in Romance languages; in Arabic it is called Shhm—best translated as nonsmall. 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.
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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.
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The worst problem of modernity lies in the malignant transfer of fragility and antifragility from one party to the other, with one getting the benefits, the other one (unwittingly) getting the harm, with such transfer facilitated by the growing wedge between the ethical and the legal. This state of affairs has existed before, but is acute today—modernity hides it especially well.
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Note that if I had to find the anti-me, the person with diametrically opposite ideas and lifestyle on the planet, it would be that Ray Kurzweil fellow. It is not just neomania. While I propose removing offensive elements from people’s diets (and lives), he works by adding, popping close to two hundred pills daily. Beyond that, these attempts at immortality leave me with deep moral revulsion.
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So once again, religions with ritual fasts have more answers than assumed by those who look at them too literally. In fact what these ritual fasts do is try to bring nonlinearities in consumption to match biological properties.
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Jensen’s inequality: irregularity has its benefits in some areas; regularity has its detriments.
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And 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.
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So this idea of shedding possessions to go to the desert can be quite potent as a via negativa–style subtractive strategy
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Note that medical iatrogenics is the result of wealth and sophistication rather than poverty and artlessness, and of course the product of partial knowledge rather than ignorance.
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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.
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the “pursuit of happiness” is not equivalent to the “avoidance of unhappiness.”
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Ennius wrote, “The good is mostly in the absence of bad”; Nimium boni est, cui nihil est mali.
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telling people not to smoke seems to be the greatest medical contribution of the last sixty years. Druin Burch, in Taking the Medicine, writes: “The harmful effects of smoking are roughly equivalent to the combined good ones of every medical intervention developed since the war.… Getting rid of smoking provides more benefit than being able to cure people of every possible type of cancer.”
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Spyros Makridakis, a statistician and decision scientist who we introduced a few chapters ago as the first to find flaws in statistical forecasting methods.
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While female mortality from breast cancer decreases for the cohort subjected to mammograms, the death from other causes increases markedly. We can spot here simple measurable iatrogenics.
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Nor am I against the use of mathematics when it comes to gauging the importance of the unknown—this is the robust application of mathematics.
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Let me repeat: I am not against rationalized learned discourse, provided it is not fragile to error; I am first and last a decision maker hybrid and will never separate the philosopher-probabilist from the decision maker, so I am that joint person all the time, in the morning when I drink the ancient liquid called coffee, at noon when I eat with my friends, and at night when I go to bed clutching a book.
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In all cases they underestimate randomness and underestimate the uncertainty in the results. And we are talking about errors of interpretation made by the statisticians, not by the users of statistics such as social scientists and doctors.
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Why is this serious? If you think that the statistician really understands “statistical significance” in the complicated texture of real life (the “large world,” as opposed to the “small world” of textbooks), some surprises.
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Aenesidemus of Knossos, Antiochus of Laodicea, Menodotus of Nicomedia, Herodotus of Tarsus, and of course Sextus Empiricus.
9 months ago LikeShare 0 nik gaffney
empiricists 9 months ago Avatar for nik gaffney
Traditionally, medicine used to be split into three traditions: rationalists (based on preset theories, the need of global understanding of what things were made for), skeptical empiricists (who refused theories and were skeptical of ideas making claims about the unseen), and methodists (who taught each other some simple medical heuristics stripped of theories and found an even more practical way to be empiricists). While differences can be overplayed by the categorization, one can look at the three traditions not as entirely dogmatic approaches, but rather ones varying in their starting point, the weight of the prior beliefs: some start with theories, others with evidence.
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Let me phrase the last point a bit differently. If there is something in nature you don’t understand, odds are it makes sense in a deeper way that is beyond your understanding. So there is a logic to natural things that is much superior to our own. 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.
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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), and there is nothing to convince me that we have gotten better at risk management. In this particular case, because of the scalability of the errors, you are exposed to the wildest possible form of randomness
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The two professions of medical doctor and surgeon were kept professionally and socially separate, one was an ars, the other scientia, hence one was a craft built around experience-driven heuristics and the other reposed on theories, nay, a general theory of humans.
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Metric-lowering drugs are particularly vicious because of a legal complexity.
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Second principle of iatrogenics: it is not linear. We should not take risks with near-healthy people; but we should take a lot, a lot more risks with those deemed in danger.
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The first principle of iatrogenics is as follows: we do not need evidence of harm to claim that a drug or an unnatural via positiva procedure is dangerous.
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ultra-orthodox, ultra-rigorous, and ultra-scientific
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The researchers Paul Meehl and Robin Dawes pioneered a tradition to catalog the tension between “clinical” and actuarial (that is, statistical) knowledge, and examine how many things believed to be true by professionals and clinicians aren’t so and don’t match empirical evidence.
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The “do you have evidence” fallacy, mistaking evidence of no harm for no evidence of harm, is similar to the one of misinterpreting NED (no evidence of disease) for evidence of no disease. This is the same error as mistaking absence of evidence for evidence of absence
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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). It is the same as with government intervention. This is squarely Thalesian, not Aristotelian (that is, decision making based on payoffs, not knowledge).
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The history of medicine is the story—largely documented—of the dialectic between doing and thinking—and how to make decisions under opacity.
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There are secrets to our world that only practice can reveal, and no opinion or analysis will ever capture in full.
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what to read. “As little as feasible from the last twenty years, except history books that are not about the last fifty years,”
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In 2010, The Economist magazine asked me to partake in an exercise imagining the world in 2036.
9 months ago LikeShare 0 nik gaffney
http://www.economist.com/node/17509373 9 months ago Avatar for nik gaffney
it took close to one hundred and forty years to validate the contribution of one Jules Regnault, who discovered optionality and mapped it mathematically
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The problem in deciding whether a scientific result or a new “innovation” is a breakthrough, that is, the opposite of noise, is that one needs to see all aspects of the idea—and there is always some opacity that time, and only time, can dissipate.
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Even after they are built, buildings keep incurring mutations as if they needed to slowly evolve and be taken over by the dynamical environment: they change colors, shapes, windows—and character. In his book How Buildings Learn, Stewart Brand shows in pictures how buildings change through time, as if they needed to metamorphose into unrecognizable shapes—strangely buildings, when erected, do not account for the optionality of future alterations.
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So we confuse the necessary and the causal: because all surviving technologies have some obvious benefits, we are led to believe that all technologies offering obvious benefits will survive.
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Information has a nasty property: it hides failures. Many people have been drawn to, say, financial markets after hearing success stories of someone getting rich in the stock market and building a large mansion across the street—but since failures are buried and we don’t hear about them, investors are led to overestimate their chances of success.
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a technology, being informational rather than physical, does not age organically, like humans, at least not necessarily so. The wheel is not “old” in the sense of experiencing degeneracy.
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The physicist Richard Gott applied what seems to be completely different reasoning to state that whatever we observe in a randomly selected way is likely to be neither in the beginning nor in the end of its life, most likely in its middle.
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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. So the longer a technology lives, the longer it can be expected to live.
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So it may be a natural property of technology to only want to be displaced by itself.
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Technology is at its best when it is invisible. I am convinced that technology is of greatest benefit when it displaces the deleterious, unnatural, alienating, and, most of all, inherently fragile preceding technology.
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This absence of literary culture is actually a marker of future blindness because it is usually accompanied by a denigration of history, a byproduct of unconditional neomania. Outside of the niche and isolated genre of science fiction, literature is about the past.
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When asked to imagine the future, we have the tendency to take the present as a baseline, then produce a speculative destiny by adding new technologies and products to it and what sort of makes sense, given an interpolation of past developments. We also represent society according to our utopia of the moment, largely driven by our wishes
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Tonight I will be meeting friends in a restaurant (tavernas have existed for at least twenty-five centuries)
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I 9 months ago Avatar for nik gaffney
There may be a selection bias: those people who engage in producing these accounts of the future will tend to have (incurable and untreatable) neomania, the love of the modern for its own sake.
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from Ovid (tempus edax rerum—time devours everything) to the no less poetic twentieth-century Franco-Russian poetess Elsa Triolet (“time burns but leaves no ashes”)
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Bergson’s razor: “A philosopher should be known for one single idea, not more”
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que de choses il faut ignorer pour agir—how many things one should disregard in order to act.
9 months ago LikeShare 0 nik gaffney
Paul Valéry 9 months ago Avatar for nik gaffney
The people involved were blind to the paradox that we have never had more data than we have now, yet have less predictability than ever.
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The less-is-more idea in decision making can be traced to Spyros Makridakis, Robyn Dawes, Dan Goldstein, and Gerd Gigerenzer, who have all found in various contexts that simpler methods for forecasting and inference can work much, much better than complicated ones.
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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.”
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In political systems, a good mechanism is one that helps remove the bad guy; it’s not about what to do or who to put in. For the bad guy can cause more harm than the collective actions of good ones. Jon Elster goes further; he recently wrote a book with the telling title Preventing Mischief in which he bases negative action on Bentham’s idea that “the art of the legislator is limited to the prevention of everything that might prevent the development of their [members of the assembly] liberty and their intelligence.”
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The Poverty of Historicism, in which he presents the limits of forecasting, shows the impossibility of an acceptable representation of the future.
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Karl Popper 9 months ago Avatar for nik gaffney
The greatest—and most robust—contribution to knowledge consists in removing what we think is wrong—subtractive epistemology.
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heuristic: charlatans are recognizable in that they will give you positive advice, and only positive advice,
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But if we cannot express what something is exactly, we can say something about what it is not—the indirect rather than the direct expression. The “apophatic” focuses on what cannot be said directly in words, from the Greek apophasis (saying no, or mentioning without mentioning).
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This hidden “convexity bias” comes from a mathematical property called Jensen’s inequality. This is what the common discourse on innovation is missing. If you ignore the convexity bias, you are missing a chunk of what makes the nonlinear world go round.
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Someone with a linear payoff needs to be right more than 50 percent of the time. Someone with a convex payoff, much less. The hidden benefit of antifragility is that you can guess worse than random and still end up outperforming. Here lies the power of optionality—your function of something is very convex, so you can be wrong and still do fine—the more uncertainty, the better.
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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. And the reverse when the function is concave (fragile).
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Do not cross a river if it is on average four feet deep.
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Finally, this method can show us where the math in economic models is bogus—which models are fragile and which ones are not. Simply do a small change in the assumptions, and look at how large the effect, and if there is acceleration of such effect. Acceleration implies—as with Fannie Mae—that someone relying on the model blows up from Black Swan effects.
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Remarkably—as has been shown—if you can say something straightforward in a complicated manner with complex theorems, even if there is no large gain in rigor from these complicated equations, people take the idea very seriously.
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I invited my friend Raphael Douady to collaborate in expressing this simple idea using the most opaque mathematical derivations, with incomprehensible theorems that would take half a day (for a professional) to understand.
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Now with the IMF we had a simple measure with a stamp. It looks simple, too simple, so the initial reaction from “experts” was that it was “trivial” (said by people who visibly never detected these risks before—academics and quantitative analysts scorn what they can understand too easily and get ticked off by what they did not think of themselves)
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The technique, a simple heuristic called the fragility (and antifragility) detection heuristic, works as follows.
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technique—detecting acceleration of harm—applies to anything that entails decision making under uncertainty, and risk management.
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Even at an individual level, wealth means more headaches; we may need to work harder at mitigating the complications arising from wealth than we do at acquiring it.
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Because of sticky contemporary habits, cultural contagion, and the rigidity of factories, we are led to the excessive use of specific products. This concentration is harmful. Extreme consumption of, say, tuna, can hurt other animals, mess with the ecosystem, and lead species to extinction. And not only does the harm scale nonlinearly, but the shortages lead to disproportional rises in prices.
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From this we can generate a simple ecological policy. We know that fossil fuels are harmful in a nonlinear way. The harm is necessarily concave (if a little bit of it is devoid of harm, a lot can cause climatic disturbances). While on epistemological grounds, because of opacity, we do not need to believe in anthropogenic climate change (caused by humans) in order to be ecologically conservative, we can put these convexity effects to use in producing a risk management rule for pollution. Simply, just as with size, split your sources of pollution among many natural sources. The harm from polluting with ten different sources is smaller than the equivalent pollution from a single source.
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Global disaster costs are today more than three times what they were in the 1980s, adjusting for inflation. The effect, noted a while ago by the visionary researcher on extreme events Daniel Zajdenweber, seems to be accelerating. The economy can get more and more “efficient,” but fragility is causing the costs of errors to be higher.
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The obvious is usually missed here: the Crystal Palace project did not use computers, and the parts were built not far from the source, with a small number of businesses involved in the supply chain. Further, there were no business schools at the time to teach something called “project management” and increase overconfidence. There were no consulting firms. The agency problem (which we defined as the divergence between the interest of the agent and that of his client) was not significant. In other words, it was a much more linear economy—less complex—than today. And we have more nonlinearities—asymmetries, convexities—in today’s world.
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But the puzzle was that such underestimation did not seem to exist in the past century or so, though we were dealing with the very same humans, endowed with the same biases. Many large-scale projects a century and a half ago were completed on time; many of the tall buildings and monuments we see today are not just more elegant than modernistic structures but were completed within, and often ahead of, schedule.
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Just as when you add uncertainty to a flight, the planes tend to land later, not earlier (and these laws of physics are so universal that they even work in Russia), when you add uncertainty to projects, they tend to cost more and take longer to complete. This applies to many, in fact almost all, projects.
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Someone unfamiliar with the business who naively optimizes the size of the place (Heathrow airport, for example) might miss the idea that smooth functioning at regular times is different from the rough functioning at times of stress.
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This is the type of argument the British advisors Rohan Silva and Steve Hilton have used in favor of small merchants, along the poetic “small is beautiful.” It is completely wrong to use the calculus of benefits without including the probability of failure.
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In project management, Bent Flyvbjerg has shown firm evidence that an increase in the size of projects maps to poor outcomes and higher and higher costs of delays as a proportion of the total budget. But there is a nuance: it is the size per segment of the project that matters, not the entire project—some projects can be divided into pieces, not others.
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Monsieur Micro-Kerviel
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1978, when Richard Roll voiced the “hubris hypothesis,” finding it irrational for companies to engage in mergers given their poor historical record.
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In spite of what is studied in business schools concerning “economies of scale,” size hurts you at times of stress;
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Another intuitive way to look at convexity effects: consider the scaling property. If you double the exposure to something, do you more than double the harm it will cause? If so, then this is a situation of fragility. Otherwise, you are robust.
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An apt illustration of how convexity effects affect an overoptimized system, along with misforecasting large deviations, is this simple story of an underestimation made by New York City officials of the effect of a line closure on traffic congestion.
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This is a hint to a central problem of the world today, that of the misunderstanding of nonlinear response by those involved in creating “efficiencies” and “optimization” of systems. For instance, European airports and railroads are stretched, seeming overly efficient. They operate at close to maximal capacity, with minimal redundancies and idle capacity, hence acceptable costs; but a small increase in congestion, say 5 percent more planes in the sky owing to a tiny backlog, can give rise to chaos
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For the antifragile, shocks bring more benefits (equivalently, less harm) as their intensity increases (up to a point).
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For the fragile, the cumulative effect of small shocks is smaller than the single effect of an equivalent single large shock.
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when a collection of people write “There is nothing new here” and each one cites a different originator of the idea, one can safely say there is something effectively new.
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If you sat with a pencil and jotted down all the decisions you’ve taken in the past week, or, if you could, over your lifetime, you would realize that almost all of them have had asymmetric payoff, with one side carrying a larger consequence than the other. You decide principally based on fragility, not probability.
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The anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss showed that nonliterate peoples had their own “science of the concrete,” a holistic way of thinking about their environment in terms of objects and their “secondary,” sensuous qualities which was not necessarily less coherent than many of our scientific approaches and, in many respects, can be as rich as and even richer than ours.
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In his attack on Averroes, he expressed the famous idea that logic excludes—by definition—nuances, and since truth resides exclusively in the nuances, it is “a useless instrument for finding Truth in the moral and political sciences.”
9 months ago LikeShare 0 nik gaffney
Ernest Renan 9 months ago Avatar for nik gaffney
growth in knowledge—or in anything—cannot proceed without the Dionysian. It reveals matters that we can select at some point, given that we have optionality. In other words, it can be the source of stochastic tinkering, and the Apollonian can be part of the rationality in the selection process.
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While many attribute (mistakenly) the notion of “creative destruction” to the economist Joseph Schumpeter (not wondering how something insightful and deep can come out of an economist),2 while, as we saw, the more erudite source it to Karl Marx, it is indeed Nietzsche who was first to coin the term with reference to Dionysus, whom he called “creatively destructive” and “destructively creative.”
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“What is not intelligible to me is not necessarily unintelligent”
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Nietzsche 9 months ago Avatar for nik gaffney
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.
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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.
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Fat Tony to Socrates 9 months ago Avatar for nik gaffney
an answer is planted in every question; never respond with a straight answer to a question that makes no sense to you.
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the most severe mistake made in life is to mistake the unintelligible for the unintelligent
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applied mathematics: find a problem first, and figure out the math that works for it (just as one acquires language), rather than study in a vacuum through theorems and artificial examples, then change reality to make it look like these examples.
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The trick is to be bored with a specific book, rather than with the act of reading.
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Most of the tension in life will take place when the one who reduces and fragilizes (say the policy maker) invokes rationality.
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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
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Birgit Ulmer demonstrating that children’s ability to count degrades right after they are taught arithmetic.
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Note the initial peaking of iatrogenics after the academization—and institutionalization—of medicine with the onset of modernity. It has only recently started to reverse.
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The Romans were an anti-theoretical pragmatic bunch; the Arabs loved everything philosophical and “scientific” and put Aristotle, about whom nobody seemed to have cared much until then, on a pedestal. For instance we know very, very little of the skeptical empirical school of Menodotus of Nicomedia—we know a lot more about Galen, the rationalist. Medicine, for the Arabs, was a scholarly pursuit and founded on the logic of Aristotle and the methods of Galen; they abhorred experience.
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It is not very well noticed that Arabic thought favors abstract thinking and science in the most theoretical sense of the word — violently rationalistic, away from empiricism
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To Fail Seven Times, Plus or Minus Two
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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.
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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.
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evidence of absence is not absence of evidence, a simple point that has the following implications: 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.
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Oneida Silversmiths was a community religious cult but for regulatory reasons they needed to use as cover a joint stock company
9 months ago LikeShare 0 nik gaffney
“The company originated in a utopian community, the Oneida Community, established in the mid-nineteenth century. Oneida Limited's founder, John Humphrey Noyes, was the founder of the religious movement known as Perfectionism. Oneida was one of the earliest joint-stock companies in the United States in the late 1880s. Its religious philosophy helped inform the early development of the company, in which members of the Oneida Community received shares in the company. Its progressive nature also allowed for a woman, Harriet Joselyn, to sit on the board of directors — a departure from the norm for the time”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oneida_Limited#Origins 9 months ago Avatar for nik gaffney
Abrahamson and Friedman, in their beautiful book A Perfect Mess, also debunk many of these neat, crisp, teleological approaches. It turns out, strategic planning is just superstitious babble.
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Corporations are in love with the idea of the strategic plan. They need to pay to figure out where they are going. Yet there is no evidence that strategic planning works—we even seem to have evidence against it. A management scholar, William Starbuck, has published a few papers debunking the effectiveness of planning—it makes the corporation option-blind, as it gets locked into a non-opportunistic course of action.
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It has been difficult for people to understand that, historically, skepticism has been mostly skepticism of expert knowledge rather than skepticism about abstract entities like God, and that all the great skeptics have been largely either religious or, at least, pro-religion (that is, in favor of others being religious).
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Crucially, this is an argument for unpredictability and Black Swan effects: since you cannot forecast collaborations and cannot direct them, you cannot see where the world is going. All you can do is create an environment that facilitates these collaborations, and lay the foundation for prosperity.
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Claude Bohuon and Claude Monneret, Fabuleux hasards, histoire de la découverte des médicaments, and Jie Jack Li’s Laughing Gas, Viagra and Lipitor.
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An American ship carrying mustard gas off Bari in Italy was bombed by the Germans 1942. It helped develop chemotherapy owing to the effect of the gas on the condition of the soldiers who had liquid cancers (eradication of white blood cells). But mustard gas was banned by the Geneva Conventions, so the story was kept secret—Churchill purged all mention from U.K. records, and in the United States, the information was stifled, though not the research on the effect of nitrogen mustard.
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Morton Meyers, a practicing doctor and researcher, writes in his wonderful Happy Accidents: Serendipity in Modern Medical Breakthroughs: “Over a twenty-year period of screening more than 144,000 plant extracts, representing about 15,000 species, not a single plant-based anticancer drug reached approved status. This failure stands in stark contrast to the discovery in the late 1950s of a major group of plant-derived cancer drugs, the Vinca Alcaloids—a discovery that came about by chance, not through directed research.”
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Unlike technology, medicine has a long history of domestication of luck; it now has accepted randomness in its practice. But not quite.
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Note that I do not believe that the argument set forth above should logically lead us to say that no money should be spent by government. This reasoning is more against teleology than research in general. There has to be a form of spending that works.
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The Economic Laws of Scientific Research questions the conventional “linear model” (that is, the belief that academic science leads to technology)—for him, universities prospered as a consequence of national wealth, not the other way around.
9 months ago LikeShare 0 nik gaffney
Kealey, 9 months ago Avatar for nik gaffney
An extraordinary proportion of work came out of the rector, the English parish priest with no worries, erudition, a large or at least comfortable house, domestic help, a reliable supply of tea and scones with clotted cream, and an abundance of free time. And, of course, optionality. The enlightened amateur, that is.
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Knowledge formation, even when theoretical, takes time, some boredom, and the freedom that comes from having another occupation, therefore allowing one to escape the journalistic-style pressure of modern publish-and-perish academia to produce cosmetic knowledge
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Joseph Needham, who debunked quite a bit of Western beliefs and figured out the powers of Chinese science. As China became a top-down mandarinate (that is, a state managed by Soviet-Harvard centralized scribes, as Egypt had been before), the players somehow lost the zest for bricolage, the hunger for trial and error.
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Now use this idea of cooking as a platform to grasp other pursuits: do other activities resemble it? If we put technologies through scrutiny, we would see that most do in fact resemble cooking a lot more than physics, particularly those in the complex domain.
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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. And the role of such formal knowledge will be overappreciated precisely because it is highly visible
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The thirteenth-century French architect Villard de Honnecourt documents with his series of drawings and notebooks in Picard (the language of the Picardie region in France) how cathedrals were built: experimental heuristics, small tricks and rules, later tabulated by Philibert de l’Orme in his architectural treatises. For instance, a triangle was visualized as the head of a horse. Experimentation can make people much more careful than theories.
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Wiener was articulating ideas about feedback control and digital computing that had long been in practice in the engineering world. Yet people—even today’s engineers—have the illusion that we owe the field to Wiener’s mathematical thinking
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David Mindell 9 months ago Avatar for nik gaffney
Scranton was polite and focused on situations in which innovation is messy, “distinguished from more familiar analytic and synthetic innovation approaches,”
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Scranton showed that we have been building and using jet engines in a completely trial-and-error experiential manner, without anyone truly understanding the theory. Builders needed the original engineers who knew how to twist things to make the engine work. Theory came later
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Phil Scranton 9 months ago Avatar for nik gaffney
The halo effect is largely the opposite of domain dependence.
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what Karl Popper has called evolutionary epistemology.
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All this does not mean that tinkering and trial and error are devoid of narrative: they are just not overly dependent on the narrative being true—the narrative is not epistemological but instrumental.
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opportunism and optionality.
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Optionality is Promethean, narratives are Epimethean—one has reversible and benign mistakes, the other symbolizes the gravity and irreversibility of the consequences of opening Pandora’s box.
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To him, economics is like a fable—a fable writer is there to stimulate ideas, indirectly inspire practice perhaps, but certainly not to direct or determine practice. Theory should stay independent from practice and vice versa—and we should not extract academic economists from their campuses and put them in positions of decision making. Economics is not a science and should not be there to advise policy.
9 months ago LikeShare 0 nik gaffney
Ariel Rubinstein 9 months ago Avatar for nik gaffney
Someone who escaped the conflation problem is Jim Simons, the great mathematician who made a fortune building a huge machine to transact across markets.
9 months ago LikeShare 0 nik gaffney
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Harris_Simons 9 months ago Avatar for nik gaffney
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. Now, the more asymmetries there are between the something and the function of something, then the more difference there is between the two. They may end up having nothing to do with each other
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This lesson “not the same thing” is quite general. When you have optionality, or some antifragility, and can identify betting opportunities with big upside and small downside, what you do is only remotely connected to what Aristotle thinks you do.
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Aside from the non-narrative view of things, another lesson. People with too much smoke and complicated tricks and methods in their brains start missing elementary, very elementary things.
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“There are so few occasions in one’s life, you can’t miss them,” he later told Nero during one of their lunches as he was convincing his non–New Jersey friend to bet on a collapse of the financial system.
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So that is how I learned the lesson that price and reality as seen by economists are not the same thing. One may be a function of the other but the function is too complex to map mathematically.
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So let us call the green lumber fallacy the situation in which one mistakes a source of necessary knowledge—the greenness of lumber—for another, less visible from the outside, less tractable, less narratable.
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Evolution does not rely on narratives, humans do. Evolution does not need a word for the color blue.
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Education makes individuals more polished dinner partners, for instance, something non-negligible. But the idea of educating people to improve the economy is rather novel.
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Further, let me remind the reader that scholarship and organized education are not the same.
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Alison Wolf debunks the flaw in logic in going from the point that it is hard to imagine Microsoft or British Aerospace without advanced knowledge to the idea that more education means more wealth. “The simple one-way relationship which so entrances our politicians and commentators—education spending in, economic growth out—simply doesn’t exist. Moreover, the larger and more complex the education sector, the less obvious any links to productivity become.”
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It can be obtained by looking at countries that are both wealthy and have some level of education and considering which condition preceded the other. Take the following potent and less-is-more-style argument by the rogue economist Ha-Joon Chang.
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There is something that escapes the Abu Dhabi model. Where are the stressors?
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The important difference between theory and practice lies precisely in the detection of the sequence of events and retaining the sequence in memory.
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“Granger cause”
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We can dig out epiphenomena in the cultural discourse and consciousness by looking at the sequence of events and checking whether one always precedes the other. This is a method refined by the late Clive Granger
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Whenever an economic crisis occurs, greed is pointed to as the cause, which leaves us with the impression that if we could go to the root of greed and extract it from life, crises would be eliminated. Further, we tend to believe that greed is new, since these wild economic crises are new. This is an epiphenomenon: greed is much older than systemic fragility.
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Random Tinkering (antifragile) → Heuristics (technology) → Practice and Apprenticeship → Random Tinkering (antifragile) → Heuristics (technology) → Practice and Apprenticeship …
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Mathematics → Ornithological navigation and wing-flapping technologies → (ungrateful) birds fly
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While this model may be valid in some very narrow (but highly advertised instances), such as building the atomic bomb, the exact reverse seems to be true in most of the domains I’ve examined. Or, at least, this model is not guaranteed to be true and, what is shocking, we have no rigorous evidence that it is true. It may be that academia helps science and technology, which in turn help practice, but in unintended, nonteleological ways, as we will see later (in other words, it is directed research that may well be an illusion).
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Consider two types of knowledge. 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—it is sometimes called apophatic—but that we do nevertheless, and do well. 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, rationalizable, formalizable, theoretizable, codifiable, Sovietizable, bureaucratizable, Harvardifiable, provable, etc.
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the modus operandi of Greg Stemm, who specializes in pulling long-lost shipwrecks from the bottom of the sea.
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Trial and error has one overriding value people fail to understand: it is not really random, rather, thanks to optionality, it requires some rationality. One needs to be intelligent in recognizing the favorable outcome and knowing what to discard.
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The historian David Wooton relates a gap of two centuries between the discovery of germs and the acceptance of germs as a cause of disease, a delay of thirty years between the germ theory of putrefaction and the development of antisepsis, and a delay of sixty years between antisepsis and drug therapy.
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Medical researchers call such lag the “translational gap,” the time difference between formal discovery and first implementation, which, if anything, owing to excessive noise and academic interests, has been shown by Contopoulos-Ioannidis and her peers to be lengthening in modern times.
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As we saw with the stories of Thales and the wheel, antifragility (thanks to the asymmetry effects of trial and error) supersedes intelligence. But some intelligence is needed. From our discussion on rationality, we see that all we need is the ability to accept that what we have on our hands is better than what we had before—in other words, to recognize the existence of the option
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heuristic: the simpler and more obvious the discovery, the less equipped we are to figure it out by complicated methods.
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The Half-Invented. For there is a category of things that we can call half-invented, and taking the half-invented into the invented is often the real breakthrough.
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The history of medicine is littered with the strange sequence of discovery of a cure followed, much later, by the implementation—as if the two were completely separate ventures, the second harder, much harder, than the first.
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For randomness plays a role at two levels: the invention and the implementation.
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François Jacob introduced into science the notion of options (or option-like characteristics) in natural systems, thanks to trial and error, under a variant called bricolage
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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
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Authors, artists, and even philosophers are much better off having a very small number of fanatics behind them than a large number of people who appreciate their work.
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The option is an agent of antifragility.
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The story of Thales has many morals, all of them linked to asymmetry (and the construction of an antifragile payoff)
9 months ago LikeShare 0 nik gaffney
That was the very first option on record. 9 months ago Avatar for nik gaffney
Never ask people what they want, or where they want to go, or where they think they should go, or, worse, what they think they will desire tomorrow.
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So let us call here the teleological fallacy the illusion that you know exactly where you are going, and that you knew exactly where you were going in the past, and that others have succeeded in the past by knowing where they were going.
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This entire heritage of thinking, grounded in the sentence “An agent does not move except out of intention for an end,” is where the most pervasive human error lies, compounded by two or more centuries of the illusion of unconditional scientific understanding. This error is also the most fragilizing one.
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Summa Theologiae by Saint Thomas Aquinas is the kind of book that no longer exists, the book-as-monument, a summa being the comprehensive treatment of a given discipline, while freeing it from the structure the authorities had given it before—the antitextbook.
9 months ago LikeShare 0
So just as Stoicism is the domestication, not the elimination, of emotions, so is the barbell a domestication, not the elimination, of uncertainty.
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I find it preferable (and less painful) to work intensely for very short hours, then do nothing for the rest of the time (assuming doing nothing is really doing nothing), until I recover completely and look forward to a repetition
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“Provide for the worst; the best can take care of itself.”
9 months ago LikeShare 0 nik gaffney
Yiddish proverb 9 months ago Avatar for nik gaffney
Seneca’s asymmetry: more upside than downside can come simply from the reduction of extreme downside (emotional harm) rather than improving things in the middle.
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I initially used the image of the barbell to describe a dual attitude of playing it safe in some areas (robust to negative Black Swans) and taking a lot of small risks in others (open to positive Black Swans), hence achieving antifragility. That is extreme risk aversion on one side and extreme risk loving on the other, rather than just the “medium” or the beastly “moderate” risk attitude
9 months ago LikeShare 0 nik gaffney
bimodal strategy 9 months ago Avatar for nik gaffney
growth was very modest, less than 1 percent per head, throughout the golden years surrounding the Industrial Revolution, the period that propelled Europe into domination.
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Under path dependence, one can no longer separate growth in the economy from risks of recession, financial returns from risks of terminal losses, and “efficiency” from danger of accident.
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The first step toward antifragility consists in first decreasing downside, rather than increasing upside; that is, by lowering exposure to negative Black Swans and letting natural antifragility work by itself. Mitigating fragility is not an option but a requirement.
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Antifragility implies more to gain than to lose, equals more upside than downside, equals (favorable) asymmetry
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Fragility implies more to lose than to gain, equals more downside than upside, equals (unfavorable) asymmetry
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Simple test: if I have “nothing to lose” then it is all gain and I am antifragile
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For those readers who wonder about the difference between Buddhism and Stoicism, I have a simple answer. A Stoic is a Buddhist with attitude, one who says “f*** you” to fate.
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Stoicism is about the domestication, not necessarily the elimination, of emotions. It is not about turning humans into vegetables. My idea of the modern Stoic sage is someone who transforms fear into prudence, pain into information, mistakes into initiation, and desire into undertaking.
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Actually the method of mentally adjusting “to the worst” had advantages way beyond the therapeutic, as it made me take a certain class of risks for which the worst case is clear and unambiguous, with limited and known downside. It is hard to stick to a good discipline of mental write-off when things are going well, yet that’s when one needs the discipline the most.
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Seneca fathomed that possessions make us worry about downside, thus acting as a punishment as we depend on them. All upside, no downside. Even more: dependence on circumstances—rather, the emotions that arise from circumstances—induces a form of slavery.
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something grand and useless called “rational decision making,”
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wisdom in decision making is vastly more important—not just practically, but philosophically—than knowledge
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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. Why? Someone who predicts will be fragile to prediction errors. An overconfident pilot will eventually crash the plane. And numerical prediction leads people to take more risks.
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A man is honorable in proportion to the personal risks he takes for his opinion—in other words, the amount of downside he is exposed to.
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The ethics of betting against suckers will be discussed in Book VII, but there are two schools of thought. To Nero one should first warn people that they are suckers, while Tony was against the very notion of warning. “You will be ridiculed,” he said; “words are for sissies.” A system based on verbal warnings will be dominated by non-risk-taking-babblers. These people won’t give you and your ideas respect unless you take their money.
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Curiosity is antifragile, like an addiction, and is magnified by attempts to satisfy it—books have a secret mission and ability to multiply, as everyone who has wall-to-wall bookshelves knows well.
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And, as he discovered, the worst thing one can do to feel one knows things a bit deeper is to try to go into them a bit deeper. The sea gets deeper as you go further into it, according to a Venetian proverb.
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A Nonpredictive View of the World
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It is obvious to anyone before drinking time that we can put a man, a family, a village with a mini town hall on the moon, and predict the trajectory of planets or the most minute effect in quantum physics, yet governments with equally sophisticated models cannot forecast revolutions, crises, budget deficits, climate change. Or even the closing prices of the stock market a few hours from now.
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the Swedish government’s focus on total fiscal responsibility after their budget troubles in 1991—it makes them much less dependent on economic forecasts. This allowed them to shrug off later crises.
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What are the Quadrants? Combining exposures and types of randomness we get four combinations: Mediocristan randomness, low exposure to extreme events (First Quadrant); Mediocristan randomness, high exposure to extreme events (Second Quadrant); Extremistan randomness, low exposure to extreme events (Third Quadrant); Extremistan randomness, high exposure to extreme events (Fourth Quadrant). The first three quadrants are ones in which knowledge or lack of it bring inconsequential errors. “Robustification” is the modification of exposures to make a switch from the fourth to the third quadrant.
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Also, as to the naive type of utopianism, that is, blindness to history, we cannot afford to rely on the rationalistic elimination of greed and other human defects that fragilize society. Humanity has been trying to do so for thousands of years and humans remain the same, plus or minus bad teeth, so the last thing we need is even more dangerous moralizers (those who look in a permanent state of gastrointestinal distress). Rather, the more intelligent (and practical) action is to make the world greed-proof, or even hopefully make society benefit from the greed and other perceived defects of the human race.
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What makes life simple is that 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.
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Fragility-Robustness-Antifragility as a replacement for predictive methods.
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Political and economic “tail events” are unpredictable, and their probabilities are not scientifically measurable. No matter how many dollars are spent on research, predicting revolutions is not the same as counting cards; humans will never be able to turn politics and economics into the tractable randomness of blackjack.
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catalysts-as-causes confusion.
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The state exists as a tax collector, but the money is spent in the communes themselves, directed by the communes—for, say, skills training locally determined as deemed necessary by the community themselves, to respond to private demand for workers. The economic elites have more freedom than in most other democracies—this is far from the statism one can assume from the outside.
9 months ago LikeShare 0 nik gaffney
Denmark 9 months ago Avatar for nik gaffney
But often it is the state’s incompetence that can help save us from the grip of statism and modernity—inverse iatrogenics. The insightful author Dmitri Orlov showed how calamities were avoided after the breakdown of the Soviet state because food production was inefficient and full of unintentional redundancies, which ended up working in favor of stability.
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In business and economic decision making, reliance on data causes severe side effects—data is now plentiful thanks to connectivity, and the proportion of spuriousness in the data increases as one gets more immersed in it. A very rarely discussed property of data: it is toxic in large quantities—even in moderate quantities.
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Few can grasp the logical consequence that, instead, one should lead a life in which procrastination is good, as a naturalistic-risk-based form of decision making.
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Using my ecological reasoning, 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.
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Psychologists and economists who study “irrationality” do not realize that humans may have an instinct to procrastinate only when no life is in danger. I do not procrastinate when I see a lion entering my bedroom or fire in my neighbor’s library. I do not procrastinate after a severe injury. I do so with unnatural duties and procedures.
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the Fabian Society, named after the Cunctator
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Let me simplify my take on intervention. To me it is mostly about having a systematic protocol to determine when to intervene and when to leave systems alone. And we may need to intervene to control the iatrogenics of modernity—particularly the large-scale harm to the environment and the concentration of potential (though not yet manifested) damage, the kind of thing we only notice when it is too late. The ideas advanced here are not political, but risk-management based. I do not have a political affiliation or allegiance to a specific party; rather, I am introducing the idea of harm and fragility into the vocabulary so we can formulate appropriate policies to ensure we don’t end up blowing up the planet and ourselves.
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But one needs to be careful not to overgeneralize the Drachten effect, as it does not imply the effectiveness of removing all rules from society.
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Some libertarians use the example of Drachten, a town in the Netherlands, in which a dream experiment was conducted. All street signs were removed. The deregulation led to an increase in safety, confirming the antifragility of attention at work, how it is whetted by a sense of danger and responsibility. As a result, many German and Dutch towns have reduced the number of street signs.
9 months ago LikeShare 0 nik gaffney
But one needs to be careful not to overgeneralize the Drachten effect, as it does not imply the effectiveness of removing all rules from society. 9 months ago Avatar for nik gaffney
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.
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As we saw with the overzealous editor, over-intervention comes with under-intervention. Indeed, as in medicine, we tend to over-intervene in areas with minimal benefits (and large risks) while under-intervening in areas in which intervention is necessary, like emergencies.
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In social science we should call these constructs “chimeras” rather than theories.
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Physics is privileged; it is the exception, which makes its imitation by other disciplines similar to attempts to make a whale fly like an eagle.
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Theories are superfragile; they come and go, then come and go, then come and go again; phenomenologies stay, and I can’t believe people don’t realize that phenomenology is “robust” and usable, and theories, while overhyped, are unreliable for decision making—outside physics.
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For a theory is a very dangerous thing to have
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People with an engineering-oriented mind will tend to look at everything around as an engineering problem. This is a very good thing in engineering, but when dealing with cats, it is a much better idea to hire veterinarians than circuits engineers
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Perhaps the idea behind capitalism is an inverse-iatrogenic effect, the unintended-but-not-so-unintended consequences: the system facilitates the conversion of selfish aims (or, to be correct, not necessarily benevolent ones) at the individual level into beneficial results for the collective.
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Medicine has known about iatrogenics since at least the fourth century before our era—primum non nocere (“first do no harm”) is a first principle attributed to Hippocrates and integrated in the so-called Hippocratic Oath taken by every medical doctor on his commencement day. It just took medicine about twenty-four centuries to properly execute the brilliant idea. In spite of the recitations of non nocere through the ages, the term “iatrogenics” only appeared in frequent use very, very late, a few decades ago—after so much damage had been done.
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Medicine is comparatively the good news, perhaps the only good news, in the field of iatrogenics. We see the problem there because things are starting to be brought under control today; it is now just what we call the cost of doing business, although medical error still currently kills between three times (as accepted by doctors) and ten times as many people as car accidents in the United States. It is generally accepted that harm from doctors—not including risks from hospital germs—accounts for more deaths than any single cancer. The methodology used by the medical establishment for decision making is still innocent of proper risk-management principles, but medicine is getting better.
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The name for such net loss, the (usually hidden or delayed) damage from treatment in excess of the benefits, is iatrogenics, literally, “caused by the healer,” iatros being a healer in Greek.
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There is a dependence on narratives, an intellectualization of actions and ventures. Public enterprises and functionaries—even employees of large corporations—can only do things that seem to fit some narrative, unlike businesses that can just follow profits, with or without a good-sounding story.
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Violence is transferred from individuals to states. So is financial indiscipline. At the center of all this is the denial of antifragility.
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We need to learn to think in second steps, chains of consequences, and side effects.
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THAT TIME BOMB CALLED STABILITY
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One of the methods, called sortes virgilianae (fate as decided by the epic poet Virgil), involved opening Virgil’s Aeneid at random and interpreting the line that presented itself as direction for the course of action.
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the members of the Athenian assemblies were chosen by lot, a method meant to protect the system from degeneracy. Luckily, this effect has been investigated with modern political systems. In a computer simulation, Alessandro Pluchino and his colleagues showed how adding a certain number of randomly selected politicians to the process can improve the functioning of the parliamentary system.
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The idea of injecting random noise into a system to improve its functioning has been applied across fields.
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Buridan’s Donkey
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This adverse effect of stability is straightforward to model scientifically, but when I became a trader, I was told of a heuristic used by veterans, and only old seasoned veterans: when a market reaches a “new low,” that is, drops to a level not seen in a long time, there is “a lot of blood” to come, with people rushing to the exit. Some people unused to losing shekels will be experiencing a large loss and will incur distress. If such a low market level has not been seen in years, say two years, it will be called “a two-year low” and will cause more damage than a one-year low. Tellingly, they call it a “cleanup,” getting the “weak hands” out of the way. A “weak hand” is clearly someone who is fragile but doesn’t know it and is lulled by a false sense of security. When many such weak hands rush to the door, they collectively cause crashes.
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Injecting some confusion stabilizes the system. Indeed, confusing people a little bit is beneficial—it is good for you and good for them.
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Light control works; close control leads to overreaction, sometimes causing the machinery to break into pieces. In a famous paper “On Governors,” published in 1867, Maxwell modeled the behavior and showed mathematically that tightly controlling the speed of engines leads to instability.
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Note that people invoke an expression, “Balkanization,” about the mess created by fragmented states, as if fragmentation was a bad thing, and as if there was an alternative in the Balkans—but nobody uses “Helvetization” to describe its successes.
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a fissiparous and amorphous mass of small statelings and city-states in constant tension—but shifting alliances.
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Nation-states rely on centralized bureaucracy, whereas empires, such as the Roman empire and Ottoman dynasties, have relied on local elites, in fact allowing the city-states to prosper and conserve some effective autonomy—and, what was great for peace, such autonomy was commercial, not military. In reality, the Ottomans did these vassals and suzerains a favor by preventing them from involvement in warfare—this took away militaristic temptations and helped them thrive; regardless of how iniquitous the system seemed to be on the surface, it allowed locals to focus on commerce rather than war. It protected them from themselves. This is the argument brought by David Hume in his History of England in favor of small states, as large states get tempted by warfare.
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The northern Levant, roughly today’s northern part of Syria and Lebanon, stayed perhaps the most prosperous province in the history of mankind, over the long, very long stretch of time from the pre-pottery Neolithic until very modern history, the middle of the twentieth century. That’s twelve thousand years—compared to, say, England, which has been prosperous for about five hundred years, or Scandinavia, now only prosperous for less than three hundred years.
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The same bottom-up effect applies to law. The Italian political and legal philosopher Bruno Leoni has argued in favor of the robustness of judge-based law (owing to its diversity) as compared to explicit and rigid codifications. True, the choice of a court could be a lottery—but it helps prevent large-scale mistakes.
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The way people handle local affairs is vastly different from the way they handle large, abstract public expenditures: we have traditionally lived in small units and tribes and managed rather well in small units.
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It is not scalable (or what is called invariant under scale transformation): in other words, if you increase the size, say, multiply the number of people in a community by a hundred, you will have markedly different dynamics. A large state does not behave at all like a gigantic municipality, much as a baby human does not resemble a smaller adult.
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Note for now that this is the last major country that is not a nation-state, but rather a collection of small municipalities left to their own devices
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The friend, a writer, pointed out to me that Lenin, who lived in town, used to play chess in the café with the Dadaist poet Tristan Tzara. Yes, the Russian revolutionary Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, later known as Lenin, spent some time in Switzerland concocting his project of the great top-down modernist state and largest human experiment in centralized state control.
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This is the central illusion in life: that randomness is risky, that it is a bad thing—and that eliminating randomness is done by eliminating randomness
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Procrustes was an inn-keeper in Greek mythology who, in order to make the travelers fit in his bed, cut the limbs of those who were too tall and stretched those who were too short. But he had the bed fitting the visitor with total perfection.
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Clearly the system needs to be there for the individual to survive. So one needs to be careful in glorifying one interest against others in the presence of interdependence and complexity.
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I detest the ruthlessness of selection, the inexorable disloyalty of Mother Nature. I detest the notion of improvement thanks to harm to others. 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.
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as the anthropologist Scott Atran has pointed out, the first suicide bombers in the Levant were revolutionaries of Greek Orthodox background
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This visible tension between individual and collective interests is new in history: in the past it was dealt with by the near irrelevance of individuals. Sacrifice for the sake of the group is behind the notion of heroism: it is good for the tribe, bad for those who perish under the fever of war.
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We can mistake the antifragility of the system for that of the individual, when in fact it takes place at the expense of the individual (the difference between hormesis and selection).
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some class of rash, even suicidal, risk taking is healthy for the economy—under the condition that not all people take the same risks and that these risks remain small and localized.
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You may never know what type of person someone is unless they are given opportunities to violate moral or ethical codes.
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Variability causes mistakes and adaptations; it also allows you to know who your friends are. Both your failures and your successes will give you information.
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Every plane crash brings us closer to safety, improves the system, and makes the next flight safer—those who perish contribute to the overall safety of others. Swiss flight 111, TWA flight 800, and Air France flight 447 allowed the improvement of the system. But these systems learn because they are antifragile and set up to exploit small errors; the same cannot be said of economic crashes, since the economic system is not antifragile the way it is presently built.
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Antoine Danchin.
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Black Swan Management 101: nature (and nature-like systems) likes diversity between organisms rather than diversity within an immortal organism, unless you consider nature itself the immortal organism, as in the pantheism of Spinoza or that present in Asian religions, or the Stoicism of Chrisippus or Epictetus.
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So some parts on the inside of a system may be required to be fragile in order to make the system antifragile as a result. Or the organism itself might be fragile, but the information encoded in the genes reproducing it will be antifragile.
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What a tourist is in relation to an adventurer, or a flâneur, touristification is to life; it consists in converting activities, and not just travel, into the equivalent of a script like those followed by actors. We will see how touristification castrates systems and organisms that like uncertainty by sucking randomness out of them to the last drop—while providing them with the illusion of benefit.
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Yet the best way to learn a language may be an episode of jail in a foreign country.
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Our antifragilities have conditions. The frequency of stressors matters a bit. Humans tend to do better with acute than with chronic stressors, particularly when the former are followed by ample time for recovery, which allows the stressors to do their jobs as messengers.
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Let us consider bones again.
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In the complex world, the notion of “cause” itself is suspect; it is either nearly impossible to detect or not really defined—another reason to ignore newspapers, with their constant supply of causes for things.
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They are closer to the cat than to the washing machine but tend to be mistaken for washing machines.
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Inanimate—that is, nonliving—material, typically, when subjected to stress, either undergoes material fatigue or breaks
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Typically, the natural—the biological—is both antifragile and fragile, depending on the source (and the range) of variation. A human body can benefit from stressors (to get stronger), but only to a point.
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The bold conjecture made here is that everything that has life in it is to some extent antifragile (but not the reverse).
9 months ago LikeShare 0 nik gaffney
Another way to see it: machines are harmed by low-level stressors (material fatigue), organisms are harmed by the absence of low-level stressors (hormesis) 9 months ago Avatar for nik gaffney
(a heuristic): to estimate the quality of research, take the caliber of the highest detractor, or the caliber of the lowest detractor whom the author answers in print—whichever is lower.
9 months ago LikeShare 0 nik gaffney
Bowersock Metric 9 months ago Avatar for nik gaffney
Information is antifragile; it feeds more on attempts to harm it than it does on efforts to promote it. For instance, many wreck their reputations merely by trying to defend it.
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If antifragility is what wakes up and overreacts and overcompensates to stressors and damage, then one of the most antifragile things you will find outside economic life is a certain brand of refractory love (or hate), one that seems to overreact and overcompensate for impediments such as distance, family incompatibilities, and every conscious attempt to kill it.
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This method consisted of short episodes in the gym in which one focused solely on improving one’s past maximum in a single lift, the heaviest weight one could haul, sort of the high-water mark. The workout was limited to trying to exceed that mark once or twice, rather than spending time on un-entertaining time-consuming repetitions. The exercise got me into a naturalistic form of weightlifting, and one that accords with the evidence-based literature: work on the maximum, spend the rest of the time resting and splurging on mafia-sized steaks.
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the following inconsistency: this so-called worst-case event, when it happened, exceeded the worst case at the time.
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A system that overcompensates is necessarily in overshooting mode, building extra capacity and strength in anticipation of a worse outcome and in response to information about the possibility of a hazard. And of course such extra capacity or strength may become useful by itself, opportunistically. We saw that redundancy is opportunistic, so such extra strength can be used to some benefit even in the absence of the hazard
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Redundancy is ambiguous because it seems like a waste if nothing unusual happens. Except that something unusual happens—usually.
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Layers of redundancy are the central risk management property of natural systems. We humans have two kidneys (this may even include accountants), extra spare parts, and extra capacity in many, many things (say, lungs, neural system, arterial apparatus), while human design tends to be spare and inversely redundant,
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This paradox of attention has been a little bit investigated: there is empirical evidence of the effect of “disfluency.” Mental effort moves us into higher gear, activating more vigorous and more analytical brain machinery.
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It is said that the best horses lose when they compete with slower ones, and win against better rivals. Undercompensation from the absence of a stressor, inverse hormesis, absence of challenge, degrades the best of the best. In Baudelaire’s poem, “The albatross’s giant wings prevent him from walking”—many do better in Calculus 103 than Calculus 101.
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The world as a whole has never been richer, and it has never been more heavily in debt, living off borrowed money. The record shows that, for society, the richer we become, the harder it gets to live within our means. Abundance is harder for us to handle than scarcity.
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How do you innovate? First, try to get in trouble. I mean serious, but not terminal, trouble.
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post-traumatic growth, the opposite of post-traumatic stress syndrome, by which people harmed by past events surpass themselves.
9 months ago LikeShare 0 nik gaffney
popular culture has an awareness of its equivalent, revealed in the expression “it builds character.” 9 months ago Avatar for nik gaffney
It is not part of the accepted way of thinking about success, economic growth, or innovation that these may result only from overcompensation against stressors. Nor do we see this overcompensation at work elsewhere.
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Hormesis, a word coined by pharmacologists, is when a small dose of a harmful substance is actually beneficial for the organism, acting as medicine. A little bit of an otherwise offending substance, not too much, acts to benefit the organism and make it better overall as it triggers some overreaction.
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Let us call Mithridatization the result of an exposure to a small dose of a substance that, over time, makes one immune to additional, larger quantities of it.
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Through the Language Glass, the linguist Guy Deutscher reports that many primitive populations, without being color-blind, have verbal designations for only two or three colors. But when given a simple test, they can successfully match strings to their corresponding colors.
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as Cato the Elder, Nietzsche, Thales of Miletus, the potency of the system of city-states, the sustainability of artisans, the process of discovery, the onesidedness of opacity, financial derivatives, antibiotic resistance, bottom-up systems, Socrates’ invitation to overrationalize, how to lecture birds, obsessive love, Darwinian evolution, the mathematical concept of Jensen’s inequality, optionality and option theory, the idea of ancestral heuristics, the works of Joseph de Maistre and Edmund Burke, Wittgenstein’s antirationalism, the fraudulent theories of the economics establishment, tinkering and bricolage, terrorism exacerbated by death of its members, an apologia for artisanal societies, the ethical flaws of the middle class, Paleo-style workouts (and nutrition), the idea of medical iatrogenics, the glorious notion of the magnificent (megalopsychon), my obsession with the idea of convexity (and my phobia of concavity), the late-2000s banking and economic crisis, the misunderstanding of redundancy, the difference between tourist and flâneur, etc.
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the robust or resilient is neither harmed nor helped by volatility and disorder, while the antifragile benefits from them. But it takes some effort for the concept to sink in. A lot of things people call robust or resilient are just robust or resilient, the other half are antifragile
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My experience is that money and transactions purify relations; ideas and abstract matters like “recognition” and “credit” warp them, creating an atmosphere of perpetual rivalry.
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It is time to revive the not well-known philosophical notion of doxastic commitment, a class of beliefs that go beyond talk, and to which we are committed enough to take personal risks.
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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.
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Fragility is quite measurable, risk not so at all, particularly risk associated with rare events.
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Sensitivity to harm from volatility is tractable, more so than forecasting the event that would cause the harm.
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By grasping the mechanisms of antifragility we can build a systematic and broad guide to nonpredictive decision making under uncertainty in business, politics, medicine, and life in general—anywhere the unknown preponderates, any situation in which there is randomness, unpredictability, opacity, or incomplete understanding of things.
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Sensitivity to harm from volatility is tractable, more so than forecasting the event that would cause the harm.
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By grasping the mechanisms of antifragility we can build a systematic and broad guide to nonpredictive decision making under uncertainty in business, politics, medicine, and life in general—anywhere the unknown preponderates, any situation in which there is randomness, unpredictability, opacity, or incomplete understanding of things.
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