Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (79 page)

It was an aortic aneurism.

Nero was in the Levant for his annual celebration of the death and rebirth of Adonis. It was a period of mourning with wailing women, followed by a celebration of resurrection. He watched nature waking up from the mild Mediterranean winter, when the rivers are full of reddish water, the blood of the Phoenician god wounded by the boar, as the melted snow from the mountains swelled the rivers and rivulets.

Things in nature move ahead from resurrection to resurrection.

That was when Tony’s driver called. His name was also Tony, and while identified as Tony-the-driver he pretended he was a bodyguard (when in fact it looked like, given the comparative size, he was the one bodyguarded by Tony). Nero never liked him, always had that strange feeling of distrust, so the moment of sharing the news was odd. During his silence on the line, he felt sympathy for Tony-the-driver.

Nero was designated as the executor of Tony’s will, which made him initially nervous. He had somehow a fear that Tony’s wisdom would have a gigantic Achilles’ heel somewhere. But, it turned out, there was nothing serious, a flawless estate, of course debt-free, conservative, fairly distributed. There were some funds to discreetly provide to a woman likely to be a prostitute, for whom Tony had some antifragile obsessive love, of course helped by the fact that she was both older and much less attractive than Tony’s wife, that sort of thing. So nothing serious.

Except for the posthumous prank. Tony bequeathed to Nero a sum of twenty million dollars to spend at his discretion on … It was to be a secret mission; noble of course, but secret. And, of course, vague. And dangerous. It was the best compliment Nero ever got from Tony: trusting that Nero would be able to read his mind.

Which he did.

Triad:
The triplet Antifragility, Robustness, Fragility.

Fundamental Asymmetry
(also
Seneca’s Asymmetry
): When someone has
more upside than downside
in a certain situation, he is antifragile and tends to gain from (a) volatility, (b) randomness, (c) errors, (d) uncertainty, (e) stressors, (f) time. And the reverse.

Procrustean bed
: Procrustes got people to fit perfectly into his bed by cutting or stretching their limbs. Corresponds to situations in which simplifications are not simplifications.

Fragilista
: Someone who causes fragility because he thinks he understands what’s going on. Also usually lacks sense of humor. See
Iatrogenics.
Often Fragilistas fragilize by depriving variability-loving systems of variability and error-loving systems of errors. They tend to mistake organisms for machines and engineering projects.

Lecturing-Birds-How-to-Fly Effect
: Inverting the arrow of knowledge to read academia → practice, or education → wealth, to make it look as though technology owes more to institutional science than it actually does.

Touristification
: The attempt to suck randomness out of life. Applies to soccer moms, Washington civil servants, strategic planners, social engineers, “nudge” manipulators, etc. Opposite:
rational flâneur.

Rational flâneur
(or just
flâneur
): Someone who, unlike a tourist, makes a decision opportunistically at every step to revise his schedule (or his
destination) so he can imbibe things based on new information obtained. In research and entrepreneurship, being a flâneur is called “looking for optionality.” A non-narrative approach to life.

Barbell Strategy
: A dual strategy, a combination of two extremes, one safe and one speculative, deemed more robust than a “monomodal” strategy; often a necessary condition for antifragility. For instance, in biological systems, the equivalent of marrying an accountant and having an occasional fling with a rock star; for a writer, getting a stable sinecure and writing without the pressures of the market during spare time. Even trial and error are a form of barbell.

Iatrogenics
: Harm done by the healer, as when the doctor’s interventions do more harm than good.

Generalized Iatrogenics
: By extension, applies to the harmful side effects of actions by policy makers and activities of academics.

Tantalized Class
: An economic condition of making more than minimum wage
and
wishing for more wealth. Workers, monks, hippies, some artists, and English aristocrats escape it. The middle class tends to fall into it; so do Russian billionaires, lobbyists, most bankers, and bureaucrats. Members are bribable provided they are given an adequate narrative, mostly with the use of casuistry.

Black Swan Errors

Naturalistic Risk Management
: The belief that, when it comes to risk management, Mother Nature has a much, much more significant track record than rationalistic humans. It is imperfect, but much better.

Burden of evidence
: The burden of evidence falls on those who disrupt the natural, or those who propose
via positiva
policies.

Ludic Fallacy
: Mistaking the well-posed problems of mathematics and laboratory experiments for the ecologically complex real world. Includes mistaking the randomness in casinos for that in real life.

Antifragile Tinkering, Bricolage
: A certain class of trial and error, with small errors being “the right” kind of mistakes. All equivalent to
rational flâneur.

Hormesis
: A bit of a harmful substance, or stressor, in the right dose or with the right intensity, stimulates the organism and makes it better, stronger, healthier, and prepared for a stronger dose the next exposure. (Think of bones and karate.)

Naive Interventionism
: Intervention with disregard to
iatrogenics.
The preference, even obligation, to “do something” over doing nothing. While this instinct can be beneficial in emergency rooms or ancestral environments, it hurts in others in which there is an “expert problem.”

Naive Rationalism
: Thinking that the reasons for things are, by default, accessible to university buildings. Also called the
Soviet-Harvard illusion.

Turkey and Inverse Turkey
: The turkey is fed by the butcher for a thousand days, and every day the turkey pronounces with increased statistical confidence that the butcher “will never hurt it”—until Thanksgiving, which brings a Black Swan revision of belief for the turkey. The
inverse turkey
error is the mirror confusion, not seeing opportunities—pronouncing that one has evidence that someone digging for gold or searching for cures will “never find” anything.

Doxastic Commitment
, or
“Soul in the Game”
: You must only believe predictions and opinions by those who committed themselves to a certain
belief, and had something to lose, in a way to pay a cost in being wrong.

Heuristics
: Simple, practical, easy-to-apply rules of thumb that make life easy. These are necessary (we do not have the mental power to absorb all information and tend to be confused by details) but they can get us in trouble as we do not know we are using them when forming judgments.

Opaque Heuristic
: Routine performed by societies that does not seem to make sense yet has been done for a long time and sticks for unknown reasons.

Dionysian
: Opaque heuristic seemingly irrational, named after Dionysos (or Bacchus for Romans), the god of wine and revelling. Is contrasted to the Apollonian, which represents order.

Agency Problem
: Situation in which the manager of a business is not the true owner, so he follows a strategy that cosmetically seems to be sound, but in a hidden way benefits him and makes him antifragile at the expense (fragility) of the true owners or society. When he is right, he collects large benefits; when he is wrong, others pay the price. Typically this problem leads to fragility, as it is easy to hide risks. It also affects politicians and academics. A major source of fragility.

Hammurabi Risk Management
: The idea that a builder has more knowledge than the inspector and can hide risks in the foundations where they can be most invisible; the remedy is to remove the incentive in favor of delayed risk.

Green Lumber Fallacy
: Mistaking the source of important or even necessary knowledge—the greenness of lumber—for another, less visible from the outside, less tractable one. How theoreticians impute wrong weights to what one should know in a certain business or, more generally, how many things we call “relevant knowledge” aren’t so much so.

Skin in the Game / Captain and Ship Rule
: Every captain goes down with every ship. This removes the
agency problem
and the lack of
doxastic commitment.

Empedocles’ Tile
: A dog sleeps on the same tile because of a natural, biological, explainable or nonexplainable match, confirmed by long series of recurrent frequentation. We may never know the reason, but the match is there. Example: why we read books.

Cherry-picking
: Selecting from the data what serves to prove one’s point and ignoring disconfirming elements.

Ethical Problems as Transfers of Asymmetry (fragility)
: Someone steals antifragility and optionality from others, getting the upside and sticking others with the downside. “Others’ skin in the game.”

Rational Optionality
: Not being locked into a given program, so one can change his mind as he goes along based on discovery or new information. Also applies to
rational flâneur.

Ethical Inversion
: Fitting one’s ethics to actions (or profession) rather than the reverse.

Narrative Fallacy
: Our need to fit a story, or pattern, to a series of connected or disconnected facts. The statistical application is data mining.

Narrative Discipline
: Discipline that consists of fitting a convincing and good-sounding story to the past. Opposed to experimental discipline. A great way to fool people is to use statistics as part of the narrative, by ferreting out “good stories” from the data thanks to cherry picking; in medicine, epidemiological studies tend to be marred with the narrative fallacy, less so controlled experiments. Controlled experiments are more rigorous, less subjected to
cherry-picking.