I finally finished Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder, by Nassim Taleb, and completed writing down the book notes. It was a thick tome, and one with lots of refreshing ideas that needs careful illustration and examples to understand. It’s been a long time since I took my time to slowly devour every word, ruminate on every concept, reflect on how my thinking was previously limited. It took me 2 weeks of 1-2h readings per day to complete, but it’s definitely worth that mammoth task. If you don’t have the time, I’d recommend just reading the Prologue - it’s a condensed version of all the key concepts in brief. 

His style is interesting - literary, lots of references to ancient authors, philosophers, with an occasional hint of straight, dry humour. And lots of sacarsm. I love it. But the content is more about risk management, micro-economics and complexity science. What a strange but powerful intersection of ancient and modern, literary and science-y. 

He’s also a bold and original thinker. Antifragility is a concept widely found in nature and the world, but not something that’s been talked about in depth before. And he draws from sources so varied, across medicine, economics, finance, literature, nature, psychology, philosophy, academia. Definitely a polymath.

In the concept of antifragility, I discovered a mental model, an “a-ha!” moment, that explains so well: 

• why entrepreneurs succeed when they innovate through iteration and tinkering
• why intermittent fasting is good for health
• why over-/micro-management often makes things worse (and more susceptible to large unforeseen mistakes)
• why diversity is good for survival and not specialisation
• how antifragility can often be seen as luck
• …and many more (I must expand on this at a later date)

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. Read past notes:

• (1) Prologue
• (2) Book 1: Intro to antifragility ?

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Antifragile, Book 1:

Intro to antifragility

- There’s no exact reverse to “fragile”. It’s so alien a concept that it’s not part of our consciousness, though it’s part of our behaviour and of complex systems.

- You cannot rise and succeed without someone out there actively working to topple you. The risk is silent, inexorable and discontinuous, ie Black Swans

- Domain dependence of our minds makes us understand an idea in one domain but fail to recognize it in another. That’s why we miss antifragility, even though it’s so prevalent. 

- Intellectuals tend to focus in negative responses from randomness (fragility) rather than positive ones (antifragility)

- The mechanism of overcompensation (antifragility) hides in unlikely places: best horses win against better rivals, go to the gym instead of resting for post-flight fatigue, whisper, not shout to get attention, white noise helps concentration 

- Overcompensation is a form of redundancy - it seems like waste if nothing unusual happens, except that something unusual happens–usually. Redundancy is not necessarily wussy - it can be aggressive and opportunistic, eg extra capacity/strength can be used to some benefit in absence of hazard. Redundancy is often very efficient instead of inefficient. 

- Our bodies discover probabilities in a sophisticated manner and assess risk much better than out intellects do. We assume worst case scenario from the worse occurrence in the past, but when it happened, it exceeded the worst case at the time. Nature instead prepares for what has not happened before. Humans fight the last war, nature fights the next one. The body overshoots and overprepares for the future in exposure to weightlifting

- information is antifragile; it feeds more on attempts to harm it than it does on efforts to promote it, eg defending reputation harms it more. Spread info by disguising it as a secret. Banned books sell more.

- some jobs (bankers, civil servants) are fragile to reputational harm, some benefit from it (writers, minimum wage earners who don’t depend on reputation)

Distinction between organic and mechanical

- everything that has life is antifragile to some extent, but not the reverse 

- the biological is both antifragile and fragile depending on the source and range of the variation

- the inanimate, mechanical, may be robust but eventually undergoes material fatigue or break when stressed, and can’t self-repair

- the real distinction is complex vs noncomplex systems (not just biological vs inanimate, natural vs human-designed)

- antifragility have conditions - the frequenters of stressors matters. We do better with acute than chronic stressors, when we have ample time to recover from latter. Acute stressors are necessary, chronic are harmful for one’s health.

- measures that aim at reducing variability and swings in our lives also reduces variability and differences within society

- randomness has an existential aspect. We like a certain measure of disorder. Variety is spice of life.

Antifragility of some comes from the fragility of others, how errors benefits some, not others

- in a system, the sacrifices of some fragile units are often necessary got the well-being of other units or the whole. The fragility of individual entrepreneurs and their high failure rate is necessary for the economy to be antifragile. - failed entrepreneurs should be honoured like dead soldiers. They took risks so that the economy is antifragile.

- evolution works because of its antifragility. Individual organisms are fragile, but the gene pool benefits from shocks to enhance its fitness

- view thing in terms of populations, not individuals. There’s a fractal self-similarity. 

- when you’re fragile, you are predictive in approach, depend on things following the exact planned course, with as little deviation as possible. Ironically, predictive systems cause fragility. When you’re antifragile, you want deviations, you don’t care about the possible dispersion of outcomes that the future can bring, since most will be helpful.

- errors if carried out rationally, are a source of information about what doesn’t work, allowing you to zoom in on a solution. So every attempt in error becomes more valuable.

- learning from the mistakes of others. Partial, small mistakes are helpful for antifragility, not general, severe, terminal ones. Good systems are set up to have small errors, independent from each other.

- instead of “what doesn’t kill me makes me stronger”, it should be “what doesn’t kill me didn’t make me stronger, but spared me because I’m stronger than others; but it killed others and the population is now stronger because the weak are gone.” Someone paid a price for the system to improve. A visible tension between individual and collective interests.