Antifragile
Rating: 5 / 5 stars
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High-Level Thoughts
One of my favorite books in a long time. This book is statistically built to enhance the courage to make decisions given the variability of nature. The inclusion of graphs and tables prevents additional ways for the reader to understand deep concepts in a very simple way. A fascinating read I would revisit and recommend to anyone.
The best way to verify that you are alive is by checking if you like variations. Remember that food would not have a taste if it weren’t for hunger; results are meaningless without effort, joy without sadness, convictions without uncertainty, and an ethical life isn’t so when stripped of personal risks.
Summary Notes
“We are largely better at doing than we are at thinking, thanks to antifragility. I’d rather be dumb and antifragile than extremely smart and fragile, any time.”
“So the modern world may be increasing in technological knowledge, but paradoxically, it is making things a lot more unpredictable.”
“Less is more and usually more effective.”
“If you see fraud and do not say fraud, you are a fraud.”
“Recall that the fragile wants tranquility, the antifragile grows from disorder, and the robust doesn’t care too much.”
“Also, it is a well-known trick that if you need something urgently done, give the task to the busiest (or second busiest) person in the office. Most humans manage to squander their free time, as free time makes them dysfunctional, lazy, and unmoatived – the busier they get, the more active they are at other tasks.”
“Like many writers, I like to sit in cafes, working as they say, against resistance.”
“Like tormenting love, some thoughts are so antifragile that you feed them by trying to get rid of them, turning them into obsessions. Psychologists have shown the irony of the process of thought control: the more energy you put into trying to control your ideas and what you think about, the more your ideas end up controlling you.”
‘“My son, I am very disappointed in you,” he said. “I never hear anything wrong said about you. You have proven yourself incapable of generating envy.”’
“Much of aging comes from a misunderstanding of the effect of comfort–a disease of civilization: make life longer and longer, while people are more and more sick. In a natural environment, people die without aging–or after a very short period of agian. For instance, some markers, such as blood pressure, that tend to worsen over time for moderns do not change over the life of hunter-gathereers until the very end.”
“Adam Smith made the analogy of the economy as a watch or a clock that once set in motion continues on its own.”
“If you are not a washing machine or a cuckoo clock–in other words, if you are alive–something deep in your soul likes a certain measure of randomness and disorder.”
“And remarkably what the author is bored writing bores the reader.”
“Antifragility for one is fragility for someone else–Where we introduce the idea that we think too much, do very little–Fail for others to succeed–One day you may get a thank-you note”
“Sometimes you know about someone’s character after you harm them with an error for which you are solely responsible–I have been astonished at the gneerosity of some persons in the way they forgave me for my mistakes.”
“Most of you will fail, disrespected, impoverished, but we are grateful for the risks you are taking and the sacrifices you are making for the sake of the economic growth of the planet and pulling others out of poverty. You are the source of our antifragility. Our nation thanks you.”
“Consider, too, the other effects of scale: small corporations are less likely to have lobbyists.”
“Mistaking absence of evidence (of harm) for evidence of absence, a mistake that we will see tends to prevail in intellectual circles and one that is grounded in the social sciences.”
“When some systems are stuck in a dangerous impasse, randomness and only randomness can unlock them and set them free. You can see here that absence of randomness equals guaranteed death.”
“People are shocked and outraged when I tell them that absence of political instability, even war, lets explosive material and tendencies accumulate under the surface.”
“Incidentally, those who do too much somewhere do too little elsewhere–and editing provides a quite fitting example. Over my writing career I’ve noticed that those who overedit tend to miss the real typos (and vice versa)”
“Since procrastination is a message from our natural willpower via low motivation, the cure is changing the environment, or one’s profession, by selecting one in which one does not have to fight one’s impulses.”
“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.”
“The sea gets deeper as you go further into it, according to a Venetian proverb.”
“There is another dimension to the need to focus on actions and avoid words: the health-eroding dependence on external recognition”
“A man is honorable in proportion to the personal risks he takes for his opinion–in other words, the amount of downside he is exposed to.”
“Seneca often started his journeys with almost the same belongings he would have if he were shipwrecked, which included a blanket to sleep on the ground, as inns were sparse at times”
“Fragility implies more to lose than to gain, equals more downside than upside, equals (unfavorable) asymmetry. Antifragility implies more to gain than to lose, equals more upside than downside, equals (favorable) asymmetry”
“Optionality will take us many places, but at the core, an option is what makes you antifragile and allows you to benefit from the positive side of uncertainty, without a corresponding serious harm from the negative side.”
“Antifragility equals more to gain than to lose equals more upside than downside equals asymmetry (favorable) equals like volatility”
“Because here again, you have an option, not an obligation. In a way, uncertainty increases the worth of such privilege.”
“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.)”
“Option = asymmetry + rationality”
“An option hides where we don’t want it to hide. I will repeat that options benefit from variability, but also from situations in which errors carry small costs.”
“I do not consider that resisting new technology is necessarily irrational: waiting for time to operate its testing might be a valid approach if one holds that we have an incomplete picture of things.”
“Cherry-picking has optionality: the one telling the story (and publishing it) has the advantage of being able to show the confirmatory examples and completely ignore the rest–and the more volatility and dispersion, the rosier the best story will be (and the darker the worst story).”
“Evolution does not rely on narratives, humans do.”
“And my argument is that you don’t go to school to learn optionality, but the reverse: to become blind to it.”
“In theory there is no difference between theory and practice; in practice there is.”
“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”
“Now instead of looking into a scholar’s writings to see whether he is credible or not, it is always best to consider what his detractors say–they will uncover what’s worst in his argument.”
“Visibly the money should go to the tinkerers, the aggressive tinkerers who you trust will milk the option.”
“All you can do is create an environment that facilitates these collaborations, and lay the foundation for prosperity.”
“(i) Look for optionality; in fact, rank things according to optionality, (ii) preferably with open-ended, not closed-ended, payoffs; (iii) Do not invest in business plans but in people, so look for someone capable of changing six or seven times over his career, or more (an idea that is part of the modus operandi of the venture capitalist Marc Andreesen); one gets immunity from the backfit narratives of the business plan by investing in people. It is simply more robust to do so; (iv) Make sure you are barbelled, whatever that means in your business.”
“Much of what other people know isn’t worth knowing.”
“What I was given to study in school I have forgotten; what I decided to read on my own, I still remember.”
“Philosophers talk about truth and falsehood. People in life talk about payoff, exposure, and consequences (risks and rewards), hence fragility and antifragility, And sometimes philosophers and thinkers and those who study conflate Truth with risks and rewards.”
“For the antifragile, shocks bring more benefits (equivalently less harm) as their intensity increases (up to a point).”
“This also explains the irreversibility of time, in a way, if you consider the passage of time as an increase in disorder.”
“Just as about every child reads Harry Potter and joins (for now) Facebook, people when they get rich are starting to engage in the same activities and buy the same items.”
“Conditions under which the average–the first order effect—does not matter.”
“The more uncertainty, the more role for optionality to kick in, and the more you will outperform. This property is very central to life.”
“So knowledge grows by subtraction much more than by addition—given that what we know today might turn out to be wrong but what we know to be wrong cannot turn out to be right, at least not easily”
““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.””
“A philosopher should be known for one single idea, not more”
“The antifragile benefits from volatility and disorder, the fragile is harmed. Well, time is the same as disorder”
“Some respects for the past, some curiosity about the historical record, a hunger for the wisdom of the elders and a grasp of the notion of “heuristics,” those often unwritten rules of thumb that are so determining of survival.”
“If that something has been around for a very, very long time, then irrational or not, you can expect it to stick around much longer, and outlive those who call it for demise.”
“When deprived of external sources, the theories are that your cells start eating themselves, or breaking down proteins and recombining amino acids to provide materials for building other cells.”
“I am here to die a heroic death for the sake of the collective, to produce offspring (and prepare them for life and provide for them), or eventually, books–my information, that is, my genes, the antifragile in me, should be the ones seeking immortality not me.”
“The courage to stand up for an idea, and enjoy death in a state of thrill, simply because the privilege of dying for truth or standing up for one’s values, had become the highest form of honor.”
“Note that in traditional societies even those who fail–but have taken risks have a higher status than those who are not exposed.”
“I want predictors to have visible scars on their body from prediction errors, not distribute these errors to society.”
“Never ask anyone for their opinion, forecast, or recommendation. Just ask them what they have–or don’t have in their portfolio.”
“Suckers try to win arguments, nonsuckers try to win.”
“But he left us with a good lesson: never trust the words of a man who is not free.”
“‘The hand of the free is a scale.’ It is just that the definition of the free is not well understood: he is free who owns his own opinion.“
“Science is precisely about arguments standing on their own legs, and something proven to be wrong empirically or mathematically is plain wrong…And the very use of “other people” to back up one’s claims is indicative that the person—or the entire collective that composes the “other” — is a wimp.”
“Don’t do unto others what you don’t want them to do to you”
