Nassim Taleb on antifragility
Taleb argues that the true opposite of fragile is not robust but antifragile: things that need and gain from volatility, stressors and disorder. Fragility is the same thing as a nonlinear, accelerating response to harm, so he prescribes removing fragilities first, convex trial and error, barbell strategies, improvement by removal and restraint in medicine, and warns that smoothing out volatility in organic systems only stores up a bigger blowup.
16 points · 5 appearances · 2008–2023
How the view evolved
Disliking volatility is fragility, and it means nonlinearity → Convexity means liking volatility: ventilators, heart rate variability
In 2013 he defines fragility from the harm side: disliking volatility is the same as having a nonlinear response. By 2023 he states the gain side as convexity and backs it with evidence (ventilator variation, heart rate variability) that he says nobody believed when he was writing Antifragile.
What kills me makes others stronger → To be antifragile, first eliminate your fragilities
In 2013 he reworks "what doesn't kill me makes me stronger" into a system-level idea: what kills me makes others stronger. By 2023 he turns it into a rule for individuals: what kills you does not make you stronger, so the first step to antifragility is removing your fragilities.
Up next
2013–2020 · changed view
“Hammurabi's rule, and it says the following: if the architect builds a building and the building collapses and kills the owner of the building, what should happen to the architect? It should be put to death. I mean, it was Babylon 3,800 years ago, so they were not, you know -- didn't have a very sophisticated legal code, all right. And then of course if it kills the firstborn, the firstborn son of the architect is put to death. So they're really looking for symmetry. Now what was the idea of Hammurabi's code? It was not eye for eye -- eye for eye limiting damages, you know, and making things balanced. No, it was that you cannot walk away from risks you've created for others. You should own your risks. That's the idea of Hammurabi's code.”
2008–2024 · changed view
“Problem of most theorists, problem for universities, is you go from theory to practice, the degrees of freedom from theories of practice are considerably narrow, small. The reverse is monstrous. So let me give you this for: if I leave in a small piece of ice cube on the floor, okay, you can easily get someone in second year physics students to write the equation to tell you what's going, hard to predict, how that ice cube will melt. Okay, it's a very simple thing, the second rate student could do it. All right, right, know someone from Boston that is can do it. Okay, so the, yeah, so you can predict. So, but now, conditional on seeing water on the floor, is it easy to reverse-engineer the ice cube? No. You have an infinity of ice cubes.”
2008–2024
“The whole idea of the Black Swan, everything I've been telling everyone, every person I meet, is to bet on disruption, on unforeseen, to not be harmed by silent risk. Okay, that's the idea. The first thing is don't be harmed by it.”
2008–2024 · changed view
“So there was an expression until we saw Australia, and effectively one, the sighting of a single bird destroyed millennia of confirmation. So it was a post as a logical problem, by showing that there's no reason, you cannot rule out a Black Swan because you haven't seen any. Okay, my problem is not a logical question. My Black Swan is an event, it's not a bird. So, and it's an event that has three properties.”