Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder Read online

  Copyright © 2012 by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  RANDOM HOUSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Taleb, Nassim.

  Antifragile : things that gain from disorder / Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-1-4000-6782-4

  eISBN: 978-0-679-64527-6

  1. Uncertainty (Information theory)—Social aspects. 2. Forecasting. 3. Complexity (Philosophy) I. Title.

  Q375.T348 2012

  155.2’4—dc23 2012028697

  Cover design: Keenan

  Cover Illustration: based on a photograph

  © Malerapaso/iStockphoto

  www.atrandom.com

  v3.1

  To Sarah Josephine Taleb

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter Summaries and Map

  Prologue

  APPENDIX: The Triad, or A Map of the World and Things Along the Three Properties

  BOOK I: THE ANTIFRAGILE: AN INTRODUCTION

  Chapter 1. Between Damocles and Hydra

  Half of Life Has No Name

  Please Behead Me

  On the Necessity of Naming

  Proto-Antifragility

  Domain Independence Is Domain Dependent

  Chapter 2. Overcompensation and Overreaction Everywhere

  How to Win a Horse Race

  Antifragile Responses as Redundancy

  On the Antifragility of Riots, Love, and Other Unexpected Beneficiaries of Stress

  Please Ban My Book: The Antifragility of Information

  Get Another Job

  Chapter 3. The Cat and the Washing Machine

  The Complex

  Stressors Are Information

  Equilibrium, Not Again

  Crimes Against Children

  Punished by Translation

  Touristification

  The Secret Thirst for Chance

  Chapter 4. What Kills Me Makes Others Stronger

  Antifragility by Layers

  Evolution and Unpredictability

  Organisms Are Populations and Populations Are Organisms

  Thank You, Errors

  Learning from the Mistakes of Others

  How to Become Mother Teresa

  Why the Aggregate Hates the Individual

  What Does Not Kill Me Kills Others

  Me and Us

  National Entrepreneur Day

  BOOK II: MODERNITY AND THE DENIAL OF ANTIFRAGILITY

  Chapter 5. The Souk and the Office Building

  Two Types of Professions

  Lenin in Zurich

  Bottom-up Variations

  Away from Extremistan

  The Great Turkey Problem

  Twelve Thousand Years

  War, Prison, or Both

  Pax Romana

  War or No War

  Chapter 6. Tell Them I Love (Some) Randomness

  Hungry Donkeys

  Political Annealing

  That Time Bomb Called Stability

  The Second Step: Do (Small) Wars Save Lives?

  What to Tell the Foreign Policy Makers

  What Do We Call Here Modernity?

  Chapter 7. Naive Intervention

  Intervention and Iatrogenics

  First, Do No Harm

  The Opposite of Iatrogenics

  Iatrogenics in High Places

  Can a Whale Fly Like an Eagle?

  Not Doing Nothing

  Non-Naive Interventionism

  In Praise of Procrastination—the Fabian Kind

  Neuroticism in Industrial Proportions

  A Legal Way to Kill People

  Media-Driven Neuroticism

  The State Can Help—When Incompetent

  France Is Messier than You Think

  Sweden and the Large State

  Catalyst-as-Cause Confusion

  Chapter 8. Prediction as a Child of Modernity

  Ms. Bré Has Competitors

  The Predictive

  Plus or Minus Bad Teeth

  The Idea of Becoming a Non-Turkey

  No More Black Swans

  BOOK III: A NONPREDICTIVE VIEW OF THE WORLD

  Chapter 9. Fat Tony and the Fragilistas

  Indolent Fellow Travelers

  The Importance of Lunch

  The Antifragility of Libraries

  On Suckers and Nonsuckers

  Loneliness

  What the Nonpredictor Can Predict

  Chapter 10. Seneca’s Upside and Downside

  Is This Really Serious?

  Less Downside from Life

  Stoicism’s Emotional Robustification

  The Domestication of Emotions

  How to Become the Master

  The Foundational Asymmetry

  Chapter 11. Never Marry the Rock Star

  On the Irreversibility of Broken Packages

  Seneca’s Barbell

  The Accountant and the Rock Star

  Away from the Golden Middle

  The Domestication of Uncertainty

  BOOK IV: OPTIONALITY, TECHNOLOGY, AND THE INTELLIGENCE OF ANTIFRAGILITY

  Do You Really Know Where You Are Going?

  The Teleological Fallacy

  America’s Principal Asset

  Chapter 12. Thales’ Sweet Grapes

  Option and Asymmetry

  The Options of Sweet Grapes

  Saturday Evening in London

  Your Rent

  Asymmetry

  Things That Like Dispersion

  The Thalesian and the Aristotelian

  How to Be Stupid

  Nature and Options

  The Rationality

  Life Is Long Gamma

  Roman Politics Likes Optionality

  Next

  Chapter 13. Lecturing Birds on How to Fly

  Once More, Less Is More

  Mind the Gaps

  Search and How Errors Can Be Investments

  Creative and Uncreative Destructions

  The Soviet-Harvard Department of Ornithology

  Epiphenomena

  Greed as a Cause

  Debunking Epiphenomena

  Cherry-picking (or the Fallacy of Confirmation)

  Chapter 14. When Two Things Are Not the “Same Thing”

  Where Are the Stressors?

  L’Art pour l’Art, to Learn for Learning’s Sake

  Polished Dinner Partners

  The Green Lumber Fallacy

  How Fat Tony Got Rich (and Fat)

  Conflation

  Prometheus and Epimetheus

  Chapter 15. History Written by the Losers

  The Evidence Staring at Us

  Is It Like Cooking?

  The Industrial Revolution

  Governments Should Spend on Nonteleological Tinkering, Not Research

  The Case in Medicine

  Matt Ridley’s Anti-Teleological Argument

  Corporate Teleology

  The Inverse Turkey Problem

  To Fail Seven Times, Plus or Minus Two

  The Charlatan, the Academic, and the Showman

  Chapter 16. A Lesson in Disorder

  The Ecological and the Ludic

  The Touristification of the Soccer Mom

  An Antifragile (Barbell) Education

  Chapter 17. Fat
Tony Debates Socrates

  Euthyphro

  Fat Tony Versus Socrates

  Primacy of Definitional Knowledge

  Mistaking the Unintelligible for the Unintelligent

  Tradition

  The Sucker-Nonsucker Distinction

  Fragility, Not Probability

  Conflation of Events and Exposure

  Conclusion to Book IV

  What Will Happen Next?

  BOOK V: THE NONLINEAR AND THE NONLINEAR

  On the Importance of Attics

  Chapter 18. On the Difference Between a Large Stone and a Thousand Pebbles

  A Simple Rule to Detect the Fragile

  Why Is Fragility Nonlinear?

  When to Smile and When to Frown

  Why Is the Concave Hurt by Black Swan Events?

  Traffic in New York

  Someone Call New York City Officials

  Where More Is Different

  A “Balanced Meal”

  Run, Don’t Walk

  Small May Be Ugly, It Is Certainly Less Fragile

  How to Be Squeezed

  Kerviel and Micro-Kerviel

  How to Exit a Movie Theater

  Projects and Prediction

  Why Planes Don’t Arrive Early

  Wars, Deficits, and Deficits

  Where the “Efficient” Is Not Efficient

  Pollution and Harm to the Planet

  The Nonlinearity of Wealth

  Conclusion

  Chapter 19. The Philosopher’s Stone and Its Inverse

  How to Detect Who Will Go Bust

  The Idea of Positive and Negative Model Error

  How to Lose a Grandmother

  Now the Philosopher’s Stone

  How to Transform Gold into Mud: The Inverse Philosopher’s Stone

  BOOK VI: VIA NEGATIVA

  Where Is the Charlatan?

  Subtractive Knowledge

  Barbells, Again

  Less Is More

  Chapter 20. Time and Fragility

  From Simonides to Jensen

  Learning to Subtract

  Technology at Its Best

  To Age in Reverse: The Lindy Effect

  A Few Mental Biases

  Neomania and Treadmill Effects

  Architecture and the Irreversible Neomania

  Wall to Wall Windows

  Metrification

  Turning Science into Journalism

  What Should Break

  Prophets and the Present

  Empedocles’ Dog

  What Does Not Make Sense

  Chapter 21. Medicine, Convexity, and Opacity

  How to Argue in an Emergency Room

  First Principle of Iatrogenics (Empiricism)

  Second Principle of Iatrogenics (Nonlinearity in Response)

  Jensen’s Inequality in Medicine

  Burying the Evidence

  The Never-ending History of Turkey Situations

  Nature’s Opaque Logic

  Guilty or Innocent

  Plead Ignorance of Biology: Phenomenology

  The Ancients Were More Caustic

  How to Medicate Half the Population

  The “Rigor of Mathematics” in Medicine

  Next

  Chapter 22. To Live Long, but Not Too Long

  Life Expectancy and Convexity

  Subtraction Adds to Your Life

  The Iatrogenics of Money

  Religion and Naive Interventionism

  If It’s Wednesday, I Must Be Vegan

  Convexity Effects and Random Nutrition

  How to Eat Yourself

  Walk-Deprived

  I Want to Live Forever

  BOOK VII: THE ETHICS OF FRAGILITY AND ANTIFRAGILITY

  Chapter 23. Skin in the Game: Antifragility and Optionality at the Expense of Others

  Hammurabi

  The Talker’s Free Option

  Postdicting

  The Stiglitz Syndrome

  The Problem of Frequency, or How to Lose Arguments

  The Right Decision for the Wrong Reason

  The Ancients and the Stiglitz Syndrome

  To Burn One’s Vessels

  How Poetry Can Kill You

  The Problem of Insulation

  Champagne Socialism

  Soul in the Game

  Options, Antifragility, and Social Fairness

  The Robert Rubin Free Option

  Which Adam Smith?

  The Antifragility and Ethics of (Large) Corporations

  Artisans, Marketing, and the Cheapest to Deliver

  Lawrence of Arabia or Meyer Lansky

  Next

  Chapter 24. Fitting Ethics to a Profession

  Wealth Without Independence

  The Professionals and the Collective

  The Ethical and the Legal

  Casuistry as Optionality

  Big Data and the Researcher’s Option

  The Tyranny of the Collective

  Chapter 25. Conclusion

  Epilogue

  Glossary

  Appendix I

  Appendix II

  Additional Notes, Afterthoughts, and Further Reading

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgments

  Other Books by This Author

  About the Author

  Chapter Summaries and Map

  Boldface terms are in the Glossary.

  BOOK I: THE ANTIFRAGILE: AN INTRODUCTION

  CHAPTER 1. Explains how we missed the word “antifragility” in classrooms. Fragile-Robust-Antifragile as Damocles-Phoenix-Hydra. Domain dependence.

  CHAPTER 2. Where we find overcompensation. Obsessive love is the most antifragile thing outside of economics.

  CHAPTER 3. The difference between the organic and the engineered. Touristification and attempts to suck volatility out of life.

  CHAPTER 4. The antifragility of the whole often depends on the fragility of the parts. Why death is a necessity for life. The benefits of errors for the collective. Why we need risk takers. A few remarks about modernity missing the point. A salute to the entrepreneur and risk taker.

  BOOK II: MODERNITY AND THE DENIAL OF ANTIFRAGILITY

  THE PROCRUSTEAN BED

  CHAPTER 5. Two different randomness categories, seen through the profiles of two brothers. How Switzerland is not controlled from above. The difference between Mediocristan and Extremistan. The virtues of city-states, bottom-up political systems, and the stabilizing effect of municipal noise.

  CHAPTER 6. Systems that like randomness. Annealing inside and outside physics. Explains the effect of overstabilizing organisms and complex systems (political, economic, etc.). The defects of intellectualism. U.S. foreign policy, and pseudostabilization.

  CHAPTER 7. An introduction to naive intervention and iatrogenics, the most neglected product of modernity. Noise and signal and overintervening from noise.