I finally finished Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder, by Nassim Taleb, and I devoured every page of it, word for word. It’s been some time I enjoyed diving deep into a book. Hence, would like to really share what I took away from it, and later try to apply the key lessons into my work.

Book 6 again opens with an intriguing explorations into why taking away things often helps something be more antifragile, rather than adding on. When faced with difficulties, we often have a bias towards additive analysis and action, where we add on new solution, complexities, and over-compensate. Nassim Taleb says here that in our over-enthusiasm we might end up being counter-productive and making things more fragile. He talks about how, instead of adding on, we can subtract, deprive, or do less. Acts of omission might be more beneficial than acts of commission. This was such a mindblowingly refreshing idea, yet when I think about it, I recall this is similar to some nature-inspired schools of Eastern philosophy like those found in Zen Buddhism, Taoism (in the book Tao Te Ching). 

Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished. ~ Lao Tzu  

Sharing them here as reference for myself, and for anyone who might find it useful. This is not a book review, just raw notes lifted directly from the book, with some minor edits, interpretations and categorisations of my own. This is part of my reading list for a new season.

Read past notes:

• (1) Prologue
• (2) Book 1: Intro to antifragility
• (3) Book 2: Antifragility on a systems level and interventionism
• (4) Book 3: Be 90% accountant, 10% rock star - the bimodal strategy of antifragility
• (5) Book 4: Tinker, have options, don’t be axiomatic in business
• (6) Book 4: Education & fragility - How to be an antistudent
• (7) Book 4: Philosophy & fragility - Being ‘right’ is less important than the payoffs
• (8) Book 5: Simple rules to detect fragility/antifragility 
• (9) Book 6: Why subtraction adds to your life ?

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Antifragile, Book 6

Via negativa

We had no name for the colour blue but managed rather well without it. We did not have a name for antifragility, yet systems have relied on it effectively in the absence of human intervention. There are many things without words, matters that we know and can act on but cannot describe directly, cannot capture in human language or within the narrow human concepts that are available to us. Almost anything around us of significance is hard to grasp linguistically—and in fact the more powerful, the more incomplete our linguistic grasp. Via negativa express what something is by describing what it is not instead of what it is, since linguistics might not be able to describe it directly. Michelangeo “removed everything that is not David” to carve the status of David. “Keeping one’s distance from an ignorant person is equivalent to keeping company with a wise man.” ~ Arab saying. “Focus means saying no to a hundred other good ideas instead of saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on” ~ Steve Jobs. First remove fragilities to get antifragile, you can’t get antifragile directly.

Acts of commission vs omission

Acts of commission, positive action, doing, are naively glorified. Acts of omission—not doing something—are not considered acts. This is generally true across all domains, from medicine to business. 

The charlatans heuristic

Charlatans are recognizable by giving positive advice, and only positive advice, like “how to” books/articles. Yet in practice it’s the negative that’s used by the pros—people get rich by not going bust, learning about life is about what to avoid. One cannot really tell if a successful person has skills, or if a person with skills will succeed—but we can pretty much predict the negative, that a person totally devoid of skills will eventually fail.

Subtractive knowledge

The greatest and most robust contribution to knowledge consists in removing what we think is wrong. We know a lot more what is wrong than what is right, or negative knowledge (what’s wrong, what doesn’t work) is more robust to error than positive knowledge (what is right, what works). So knowledge grows by subtraction much more than by addition. One small observation can disprove a statement. Disconfirmation is more rigorous than confirmation, falsification of a theory.

Less is more

Pareto 80/20 rule: 20% of people make up 80% of the effect you are observing. These effects are very general, from wealth to book sales. But we’re moving into even more uneven distribution of 99/1: 99% of internet traffic comes from less than 1% of sites. Winner takes all effect. Convincing—and confident—disciplines, say, physics, tend to use little statistical backup, while political science and economics, are full of elaborate statistics and statistical “evidence”.

Neomania, the love for the new

Futurists tend to have neomania, the love for the modern for its own sake. Technologies are surprisingly persistent - silverware is Mesopotamian, cheese is several centuries old, food prepare using fire, an archaic tech, using kitchen tools unchanged since Romans. When asked to imagine the future, we have a tendency to take the present as a baseline, then produce a speculative future by adding technologies that sort of makes sense, given past trajectory. We over-technologize and underestimate the might of the old in the future. 

Technology at its best reverses technology

Technology is of greatest benefit when it’s unobtrusive and displaces the deleterious, unnatural, alienating and inherently fragile preceding technology. Eg absence of paperwork makes bureaucracy more palatable, or shoes that replicate being barefoot, or computer tablets that allows us to return to Babylonian roots of writing on stone tablets rather than through a keyboard.

Ageing in reverse: the Lindy effect

For the perishable/organic, every additional day in its life translates into a shorter additional life expectancy (eg human life). For the nonperishable/informational, every additional day may imply a longer life expectancy (eg ideas, genes, books, Great Pyramids). Of a book has been in print for forty years, I can expect it to be in print for another forty years. Things that have been around for a long time are not “ageing” like persons, but “ageing” in reverse. 

Young technology not always better

Much progress comes from the young, but the young proposes ideas that are fragile, not because they are young, but because most unseasoned ideas are fragile. How do we teach children skills of the 21st Century since we don’t know which skills will be needed then? Answer? Read the classics. The future is in the past.

Metrification

A metre might be more accurate but a foot which matches to the length of your foot, are more intuitive and we we can use them with minimal expenditure of cognitive effort. An inch corresponds to a thumb, a pound is what you can hold in your hands. Neomania is not always better in all senses.

Prophecy isn’t about prediction

Issuing warnings based on vulnerability, we’re closer to the original role of the prophet: to warn, not necessarily to predict, people of calamities if people don’t listen. Prophets usually talk about the present, what to do now, than look into the future. 

Antifragile doesn’t make sense

If something that makes no sense to you (say religion or some irrational age-old custom) and if that something has been around fir a very, very long time, then, irrational or not, you can expect it to stick around much longer, and outlive those who call for its demise. Technologies like reading and writing that have survived are because they correspond to something deep in our nature.

Medicinal antifragility

Doctors used to go by simple heuristics of via negativa - only resort to medical techniques when the health payoff is very large (say saving a life) and visibly exceeds its potential harm, such as surgery, bacterial exposure. Decision making based on payoffs, not knowledge. In these cases medicine has positive asymmetries and convexity effects, and outcome will less likely produce fragility. Otherwise, where benefits of a particular medicine, procedure, nutrition or lifestyle modification appear small—say, those aiming for comfort—we have a large potential fragility problem. 

The hidden costs of healthcare are largely in the denial of antifragility

There is no compelling empirical evidence in favour of reduction of swelling via ice. It was pure sucker-rationalism in the mind of doctors, following what made sense to boundedly intelligent humans, couples with interventionism, this need to do something, this defect of thinking that we knew better, and denigration of the unobserved. The tension between clinical and statistical knowledge

“Do you have evidence that this is harmful?”

The “do you have evidence” fallacy mistakes evidence of no harm for no evidence of harm. The 1st principle of iatrogenics: We do not need evidence of harm to claim that a drug or an unnatural via positiva procedure is dangerous. The turkey problem is that harm is in the future, not in the narrowly defined past.

Treat serious cases, ignore marginal ones

2nd principle of iatrogenics:

It’s not linear. We shouldn’t take risks with near-healthy people; but we should take a lot more risks with those deemed in danger. When hypertension is mild, benefitting from a certain drug is only 5.6%. But when blood pressure is high/severe, benefits are 26-72%. So the treatment is convex to condition (the benefits rise disproportionately, in an accelerated manner). In the very ill, benefits are large relative to harm. In the borderline, benefits are small. If patient is close to death, all speculative treatments should be encouraged. If patient is near healthy, then Mother Nature should be the doctor.

Medicine is not modelled on nonlinearity of benefits to harm

Risks seem linearly extrapolated, causing both under-  and over-estimation of harm. Blood pressure in upper part of “normal” range is not “normotensive” but “pre-hypertensive” - nothing wrong with the classification if it leads to healthier lifestyle using via negativa measures—but such classification often drive more medication.

Mother Nature is right, we are wrong

Innocent until proven guilt—what Mother Nature does is rigorous until proven otherwise; what humans and science do is flawed until proven otherwise. 

Principal-agent problem of doctors

“No doctor derives pleasure from the health of his friends, no soldier from the peace of his city, etc.” - Montaigne

Wrongly treating variability

Variable nature of measurements like blood pressure get prescribed medicine they don’t need. Doctors who’re not sophisticated will overreact to noise.

Life expectancy and convexity

Life expectancy has increased thanks to medicine’s benefits in cases that are lethal. It’s a serious error to infer that if we live longer because of medicine, that all medical treatments make us live longer. Another mistake is to think because life expectancy at birth used to be 30 until the last century, that people lived just 30 years. The distribution is massively skewed, with bulk of deaths coming from birth and childhood mortality. Conditional life expectancy was high. Legal enforcement contributed more than doctors to increase of life expectancy. The gains are due to societal than scientific/medicinal advances. Our paranoia of some diseases like cancer leads us to an error of logic called affirming the consequent - treating the tumour that will not kill you actually shortens your life.

Subtraction adds to your life

Just raise the hurdle/cost of medical intervention in favour of cases that are most severe. Spend less to live longer. Our propensity to do something, via positiva, is the cause of fragility problems. So removing things can be quite potent, eg stop smoking instead of curing cancer.

Happiness is best dealt with as a negative concept

Same nonlinearity applies for happiness. Modern happiness researchers don’t use nonlinearities and convexity effects. They should lecture us about unhappiness; the pursuit of happiness is not equivalent to the avoidance of unhappiness. Each of us certainly knows not only what makes us unhappy, but also what to do about it. Same can’t be said about being certain about what makes us happiness.

Scantiness restores the system

“Sometimes scantiness of nourishment restores the system” - Plotinus. The ancients believed in purges, abstinence and restriction, just like how caloric restriction extends lives. Curative starvation. Reliance on painkillers encourages people to avoid addressing the root cause of the headache and allows them to keep destroying themselves with their old habits. Removal of products not found in their ancestral habitats help - soda, sugar, supplements, some fruits. 

Iatrogenics of money

The Romans had a strange relation to wealth: anything that softens you was seen negatively. They disliked comfort and understood its side effects. Shedding possessions to go to the desert or mountain can be quite potent as a via negativa subtractive strategy. Separating people from their fortunes would simplify their lives and bring greater benefits in the form of healthy stressors. So being poorer might not be completely devoid of benefits if one does it right.

True wealth

If true wealth consists in worriless sleeping, clear conscience, reciprocal gratitude, absence of envy, good appetite, muscle strength, physical energy, frequent laughs, no meals alone, no gym class, some physical labour/hobby, good bowel movements, no meeting rooms, periodic surprises, then it’s largely subtractive.

Irregularity and nutrition

Irregularities has benefits in some areas, detriments in others. Removing a few meals at random, or avoid steadiness of food consumption. Omnivores are responsive to more variegated environment with unplanned, haphazard and serial availability of sources. Specialization is the response to a very stable habitat free of abrupt changes, redundancy of pathways the response to a more variegated one. Diversification comes in response to variety. When we are herbivores, we eat steadily. Carnivores eat more randomly. Balanced nutrition doesn’t mean balance at every meal rather than serially so, spread out over different meals. 

Deprivation is a good stressor

Deprivation with adequate recovery is antifragile. Our metabolic reactions as omnivores are nonlinear. It should have some benefits. We are antifragile to randomness in food delivery and composition—at least over a certain range, or number of days. The Mediterranean diet for longevity missed out on a second-order effect—fasting for long periods of time like Lent. Food also tastes better after a fast, the antifragility of taste.