Antifragile
I have a long-standing habit of writing down quotes as I read books. At the beginning of my career when I was reading voraciously, I compiled several years of quotes here.
As you may have guessed, I recently finished reading Antifragile by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. I wrote down my favorite quotes, and have added some comments after each of them.
You want to be the fire and wish for the wind.
This is a concise and poetic description of antifragility.
Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same: the antifragile gets better. 3
The opposite of fragile isn’t robust, even though that’s what we would normally think.
Anything that has more upside than downside from random events (or certain shocks) is antifragile; the reverse is fragile. 5
It was hard to wrap my head around this. Thankfully, Taleb keeps coming back to this throughout the book, and it finally sunk in.
Fiscal deficits have proven to be a prime source of fragility in social and economic systems. 36
I’ve always been confused by the way that our society treats lending and debt like the key to economic health. Yet, when you experience these things on a personal level, it has almost always led me into a fragile state. I’ve learned the hard way that while money can’t buy happiness, debt will make you sad.
Depriving systems of stressors, vital stressors, is not necessarily a good thing, and can be downright harmful. 38
Artificial stability will eventually lead to traumatizing instability. This reminds me of test-driven development, where software developers constantly create automated tests that fail, and then work to make them pass.
A little bit of agitation gives resources to souls and what makes the species prosper isn’t peace, but freedom. 96 (Rousseau citing Machiavelli)
Taleb continually came back to the need for some healthy amount of chaos to help complex systems and organisms grow stronger. He mentions weightlifting as a good example of this principle.
Injecting some confusion stabilizes a system. 101
See: chaos monkey
We have managed to transfer religious belief into gullibility for whatever can masquerade as science. 109
Taleb was ruthless at throwing down people in positions of intellectual authority who also didn’t have any skin in the game.
Georges Simenon, one of the most prolific writers of the twentieth century, only wrote sixty days a year, with three hundred days spent “doing nothing”. He published more than 200 novels. 165
Taleb focused on non-linearities. Things that respond positively to volatility in a non-linear way are anti-fragile. This author’s writing velocity responded positively to his volatile bouts of creativity.
Your work and ideas, whether in politics, the arts, or other domains, are antifragile if, instead of having one hundred percent of people finding your mission acceptable or mildly commendable, you are better off having a high percentage of people disliking you and your message (even intensely), combined with a low percentage of extremely loyal and enthusiastic supporters. Options like dispersion of outcomes and don’t care about the average too much. 179
Good to keep in mind. When I give conference talks, I always appreciate hearing from a few people who picked up what I was laying down. I think I need to work on being more opinionated so that I have a better shot at people intensely disliking what I have to say. This is a challenge for me.
Antifragility supersedes intelligence… 190
Manifesting the properties of an antifragile system is superior to making brilliant decsions from a state of fragility.
… a religious belief in the unconditional power of organized science, one that has replaced unconditional belief in organized religion. 229
Taleb was a big proponent in making your own observations and doing your own research, rather than putting your faith blindly in science.
Only the autodidacts are free. 242
As an autodidact, I approve this message.
What I was given to study in school I have forgotten; what I decided to read on my own, I still remember. 248
See: autodidact
There appears to be something about size that is harmful to corporations. 279
As someone who has always chaffed within large organizations and thrived in tiny ones, I’m inclined to agree with this.
If you have more than one reason to do something, just don’t do it. It does not mean that one reason is better than two, just that by invoking more than one reason you are trying to convince yourself to do something. Obvious decisions require no more than a single reason. 308
I’m a big fan of decisive action in cases where consequences are not life-threatening (to an organism, business, or relationship). Ready, fire, aim. Or, on a related note, as the wonderful Grace Hopper once said, “It’s easier to ask for forgiveness than permission.”
There are secrets to our world that only practice can reveal, and no opinion or analysis will ever capture in full. This secret property is, of course, only revealed through time… 335
Given enough time, all that is fragile will break down. And when you stop and think about it, the only thing that lasts beyond our typical comprehension is our planet and its laws of nature. Taleb repeatedly called for a return to allowing nature to take its course in our lives rather than falling into a viscous cycle or over-intervention with man-made solutions.
In a complex domain, only time — a long time — is evidence. 337
Complex systems are essentially incomprehensible, and need to be observed across long time periods before anything can be asserted about them.
Never ask a doctor what you should do. Ask him what he would do if he were in your place. 389
Taleb pushed back hard against the bias toward over-intervention of the medical and pharmaceutical industries.
At the core of the problem with capitalism lies the problem of units that are different from individuals. 404
While people can have a sense of honor and ethics, corporations (especially as they grow large) tend to take on a life of their own, devoid of any other motivation than survival, growth, and profit at all costs.
The best way to verify you are alive is by checking if you like variations. 423
Grow and breathe. Breathe and grow. 🧘
