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.
This chapter was interesting for me as I did philosophy in university. Socrates was one of the first philosophers we studied, so his story of going around Athens questioning people’s beliefs and his unfortunate but brave death were familiar to me. So the below book notes might not make much sense to you if you’re not already familiar with Socrates.
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 ?
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Philosophy and fragility
The shocker - did the father of Greek philosophy deserve his death?
“Socrates deserves to be put to death.” - Fat Tony
How to argue and win
Fat Tony’s power in life is that he never lets the other person frame the question. An answer is planted in every question; never respond with a straight answer to a question that makes no sense to you.
Not all of life needs to be examined rationally for it be be lived meaningfully
Fat Tony: You’re asking me to define what characteristic makes a difference between pious and nonpious. Do I really need to be able to tell you what it is to be able to conduct a pious action? Does a child need to define mother’s milk to understand the need to drink it? Why do you think we need to fix the meaning of things?
Socrates: We need to know what we are talking about when we talk about things. The entire idea of philosophy is to be able to reflect and understand what we are doing, examine our lives. An unexamined life is not worth living.
Fat Tony: The problem is that you are killing the things we know but cannot express. And if I asked someone riding a bicycle just fine, to give me the theory behind his bicycle riding, he would fall from it. By bullying and questioning people you confuse them and hurt them.
Why Socrates deserve death
My dear Socrates…you know why they are putting you to death? It is because you make people feel stupid for blindly following habits, instincts, and traditions. You may be occasionally right. But you may confuse them about things they’ve been doing just fine without getting into trouble. You are taking the joy of ignorance out of things we don’t understand. And you have no answer; you have no answer to offer them.
This primacy of definitional knowledge leads to fragility.
Perhaps what is not intelligible to me is not necessarily unintelligent? Perhaps there is a realm of wisdom from which the logician is exiled? The myth that knowledge is the cure, error is evil. Nietzsche questioned the very goodness of knowledge. Is definitional knowledge innately good?
Logic excludes nuances, and is therefore limited (even if useful/common)
Structured learning likes the impoverishment and simplification of naive rationalism, easy to teach, not the rich texture of empiricism. Logic excludes—by definition—nuances, and since truth resides exclusively in the nuances, it is “a useless instrument for finding Truth in the moral and political sciences.”
Naive rationalism tries to impose order on the way we know things, in a manner that will introduce fragility
Things are too complicated to be expressed in words. Naive rationalism, by impoverishing—rather than enhancing —thought, it introduces fragility. They knew that incompleteness —half knowledge—is always dangerous. Wittgenstein gave an insight into the inexpressible with words. He doubted the ability of language to express the literal.
Being ‘right’ is less important than the payoffs
The need to focus on the payoff from your actions instead of studying the structure of the world has been largely missed in intellectual history. True and False play a poor, secondary role in human decisions; it is the payoff from the True and the False that dominates. You decide principally based on fragility, not probability or True/False.
How people lived before philosophy and science, and how it can still work for us
The courage to accept to live in a world they knew they did not understand. And they enjoyed it.