I just read Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. It’s been super mindblowing and intellectual read, and there’s so much to unpack. I can now see how antifragility is akin to the foundational ‘physics’ of complex systems phenomena, from why startups can win large incumbents, to why catastrophes are increasing, or even why it’s important to tinker and iterate as makers. It’s a bit like a modern Tao Te Ching, or at least part of it. 

I have to write more about how I can apply antifragility to making products, entrepreneurship, lifestyle design and just about everything else! There’s a sense that antifragility might be the deeper underlying framework that show how luck happens. More to come for sure!

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 interpretations and categorisations of my own. This is part of my reading list for a new season.

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Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder

Prologue

Do you want to be a candle, or fire?

Wind extinguishes a candle but energizes fire. Likewise with randomness, uncertainty, chais: you want to use them, not hide from them. You want to be the fire and wish for the wind.

There’s no word for opposite of fragile, despite it being so common

In spite of ubiquity, there is no word for the exact opposite of fragile. Beyond resilience or robustness. Resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better. Antifragility determines the boundary of living and organic (or complex) eg human body, and what is inert, eg a physical object.

Choose one: Dumb but antifragile vs smart but fragile

Antifragile loves randomness and uncertainty, a certain class of errors, allowing us to deal with the unknown, to do things without understanding them and do them well. We’re largely better at doing than we are at thinking, thanks to antifragility. I’d rather be dumb and antifragile than extremely smart and fragile, any time.

Antifragility is not about predicting the future

Impossible to measure risk and predict Black Swans. Sensitivity to harm from volatility is measurable, than forecasting. Anything that has more upside than downside from random events/shocks is antifragile; the reverse is true.

Modernity fragilizes in general - bad

Natural systems when deprived of volatility and stressors will weaken, die or blow up. Our economy, politics, health, education is increasingly fragile due to top-down policies to suppress randomness. Top-down fragilizes and blocks antifragility and growth, bottom-up thrives under the right amount of stress and disorder. 

Antifragility-fragility game

At no point in history have so many non-risk-takers, those with no personal exposure and skin in the game, exerted so much control. Bureaucrats, bankers, politicians and academics game the system while citizens pay the price.

Antifragility helps us accept Black Swans

Black Swans are increasing because of the move away from ancestral and natural models to artificial and designed systems. But knowing and being able to calculate the fragility of systems allows us to accept that black swans will come sooner or later

Robust is not enough

Mother Nature is not just safe. Robust cannot last 4 billion years. Perfect robustness is unattainable. We need a mechanism by which the system regenerates itself continuously by using, rather than suffering from, random events. Antifragile gains from errors in the long run, hence many of such things should be dominating the world today. Technology is the result of antifragility, exploited by risk-takers in the form of tinkering, trial and error. 

Time is disorder

Time is functionally similar to volatility: the more time, the more events, the more disorder. If you can suffer limited harm and are antifragile to small errors, time brings the kind of errors or reverse errors that end up benefiting you. This is simply what your grandmother calls experience. 

The Triad, a fragility spectrum

Fragile-Robust-Antifragile are relative terms, not absolute. “Antifragile” is limited to specific sources of harm and up to a certain range of exposure, which is no more no less so than “fragile”. One can be fragile in one aspect but antifragile in another. Fragile wants tranquility, antifragile grows from disorder, robust doesn’t care too much. Fragile hates mistakes, antifragile loves mistakes. But things are antifragile up to a certain level of stress. Your body benefits from some amount of mishandling, but up to a point.

Examples of The Triad (fragile-robust-antifragile):

• Myth: Sword of Damocles-Phoenix-Hydra
• Businesses: Banking system-_-Silicon Valley startups, industry-small business-artisan, agency problem-___-principal operated
• Biological, economic systems: Efficiency/optimized-redundancy-degeneracy(functional redundancy)
• Errors: Hates mistakes-mistakes are just information-loves mistakes
• Science/tech: directed research-opportunistic research-stochastic tinkering
• Human body: ageing/atrophy-recovery-hypertrophy
• Ways of thinking: Modernity-medieval Europe-Ancient Mediterranean 
• Human relationships: friendship-kinship-attraction 
• Ethics: system without skin in the game-system with skin in the game-system with soul in the game
• Systems: concentrated sources of randomness-___-distributed sources of randomness
• Knowledge: explicit-tacit-tacit with convexity
• Financial dependence: corporate employment-dentist/niche worker-taxi-driver/artisan/prostitute
• Learning: classroom-real life-real life and library 
• Political systems: centralized nation state-___-decentralized collection of city states
• Social system: ideology-___-mythology 
• Psychological wellbeing: post traumatic stress-___-post traumatic growth
• Economic life: bureaucrats-___-entrepreneurs 
• Reputation: academic/corporate exec/pope/politician-truck driver/train conductor-artist/writer
• Medicine: additive treatment/give medication/treatment-___-substractive treatment (remove items from consumption, eg cigarettes, carbs)
• Philosophy: rationalism-empiricism-skeptical, subtractive empiricism 
• Stress: chronic stressors-___-acute stressors with recovery
• Literature: e-reader-book-oral tradition
• Education: soccer mum-street life-barbell: parental library, street fights
• Physical training: organized sports, gym machines-___-street fights

to be continued…