PDF Summary:Antifragile, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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1-Page PDF Summary of Antifragile
Most people would say that the opposite of fragility is durability—that is, resistance to damage. However, there’s a step beyond durable, which we could call antifragile. Something that’s antifragile actually becomes stronger when it’s damaged, like the mythical Hydra growing two heads when one is cut off.
In Antifragile, Nassim Nicholas Taleb explores how we can leverage antifragility to make the world’s uncertainty work in our favor. He provides examples of both fragile and antifragile systems ranging from the historical to the modern, and in areas ranging from politics and economics to the human body. The verdict is clear: Antifragility is necessary if we are to thrive.
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The cab driver, on the other hand, is relatively protected from shocks like that. There’s no chance that he could suddenly lose his job, because people will always need cab drivers. If his income starts to drop, he improves his skills—becoming a “stronger” cab driver—and continues about his business. The cab driver’s career is variable, and therefore has the chance to be antifragile.
Size and Control Breed Fragility
Modern society also tends to create large, rigidly controlled systems: centralized governments, multinational corporations, and so on. Large systems are more vulnerable to fragility because they have, and need, many more resources. The effects when those systems break are also much more pronounced.
For example, if a large bank gets into financial trouble and has to suddenly sell off billions of dollars in stock, it creates a shock that affects the entire global market. However, a bank a 10th of that size in a similar situation might only have to sell stock valued at millions, not billions, which the market could absorb much more easily.
Along with size, another common cause of fragility is rigid, top-down control. Large organizations such as major banks, corporations, and even (or especially) governments are prone to this type of fragility. They’re run based on rules, predictions, and models, which almost inevitably fail sooner or later. When that happens, as in the above example of the bank, the results can be disastrous.
Perhaps the best “federal” government in the world is Switzerland’s, which can hardly be called a federal government at all. It’s a loose collection of small cantons or regional governments, each of which deals primarily with its own local issues. There’s no grand supreme leader handing down edicts to the cantons.
While there is occasional friction between cantons when an issue impacts more than one of them, that actually serves to strengthen the system as a whole. There’s some natural variation in how they run their affairs, which gives the entire system a chance to benefit from antifragility. Good policies survive, bad policies are eventually thrown out. This seems to be the ideal system of government: small, decentralized, and with some chance for small struggles.
The Risks of Human Intervention
Modern society tends to rely on predictive models to plan for the future. Rather than setting ourselves up for antifragility, we try to foresee everything that might go wrong and plan specifically for those events. This is reflected in everything from weather forecasts to quarterly projections at a corporation.
However, predictions and models are notoriously fragile and easily destroyed by a single piece of data that doesn’t fit. Decisions based on those models are similarly fragile, and often have harsh consequences: People lose jobs, stock markets crash, and sometimes people even die.
In spite of predictive models’ terrible track records, many people insist on using them to decide on courses of action. This is especially dangerous when people want to intervene in something that would be just fine if left alone.
Perhaps the best example of this tendency is in medicine. Medicine has always had risks and harm associated with it, which are called iatrogenics—unintended harm from treatments. For example, before we knew what germs were, countless people died of so-called “hospital fever.” Even now, medicines and treatments almost always have side effects, some of which can be more devastating than the disease they’re supposed to treat.
Therefore, ideally we’d only intervene when potential benefits outweigh potential risks. Someone who will die without heart medication should, of course, have it. Someone whose blood pressure is sometimes a bit high would probably do better without it—the side effects of the medication may be more harmful than the condition.
Iatrogenics and its non-medical equivalents happen because of a common logical fallacy: People mistake a lack of evidence for evidence. Smoking, for example, was once thought to have health benefits. There wasn’t yet evidence that it was harmful, so people took that as evidence that it wasn’t harmful. It wasn’t until decades later that people realized the horrific side effects.
We could avoid many harmful side effects if we simply shift the burden of proof. Rather than having to prove that something is harmful, we should have to prove that it isn’t harmful before starting to use it—guilty until proven innocent, so to speak.
How to Become Antifragile
The key to antifragility is having more potential benefits available than risks. When that’s the case, on average you’ll gain more than you lose from random events. For example, you might put a small amount of money into stocks with high potential to increase or decrease in value. If the stocks go down, you haven’t lost anything you couldn’t afford to lose. However, if they go up, you could stand to make a great deal of money.
One way to make sure you’re in an antifragile situation is to have many options available to you, so you can make the best choice at any given time.
This principle applies even in very mundane situations. For example, someone invited to a dinner party that isn’t especially interesting, but is better than eating alone, might call around first to see if any other friends are available that evening. If a more interesting opportunity presents itself, the person can skip the party and do that instead. If not, the party is available as a fallback option, with the key word being option.
This person has very little to lose and a fair amount to gain. At worst, he winds up at a party that’s less exciting than he’d hoped. At best, he finds something more fun to do and has an excellent evening.
Making proper use of options doesn’t take any great intellect or education, only rationality. Nature itself uses optionality to always find the best outcomes—or at least, the outcomes that will allow life to continue. Countless mutations and evolutionary trends fail, and the organisms carrying them die out. However, these failures don’t harm nature itself. At the same time, the beneficial mutations and trends propagate, making it ever-more-likely that life will continue to exist on Earth. You wouldn’t call nature intelligent, but there’s no arguing that it’s rational.
Related to the intelligence versus rationality point is the idea of the long shot. Many intelligent people will point out that lotteries and casinos—which offer very small chances of very large payouts—aren’t worth it. And they’re correct: The options that you get from lotteries and casinos are too expensive, giving you ever-increasing downsides that are unlikely to ever be offset by your winnings.
Where these intelligent-but-irrational people go wrong is in applying the same logic to any kind of long shot. For example, it’s extremely unlikely that buying stock in any given company will make you rich. However, if you invest a few dollars each in a lot of different companies—including, say, Amazon or Apple when they were first starting out—you’ll have limited cost with the potential for immense profits.
In short, decisions made based on traditional intelligence—which is to say, book smarts—tend to be fragile. They can easily go wrong if you misunderstand something, or incorrectly apply your knowledge, like how people who understand the lottery try to apply the same logic to the stock market. However, decisions based on rationality tend to benefit from antifragility; rationality is simply about examining your options and choosing the best one at any given time.
Exponential Benefit and Risk
Both fragility and antifragility have exponential effects. In other words, as the significance of an event increases, the effect of that event increases even faster.
For example, if you drummed your fingers against a window, you wouldn’t damage it at all; however, you could break it quite easily with a punch. Thousands of tiny impacts from your fingers don’t add up to the same effect as one large impact from your fist.
In the same way, a fragile situation has a limit to how good it can be, but the negative impacts increase infinitely (or near-infinitely). A window can never be anything more than a window, and once broken, it’s useless.
However, an antifragile situation is exactly the opposite, with limited risk but potentially infinite (or near-infinite) benefits. The previous example of many small stock purchases shows this principle: $100 invested in Amazon back in 1997 would be worth around $120,000 now.
We can sketch these situations with the graphs shown below:
In both cases, as the significance of an event increases (in other words, as we go farther to the right), the outcome of that effect becomes either much worse (for fragility) or much better (for antifragility).
The two graphs also illustrate why fragility dislikes randomness, and antifragility loves it. Imagine picking random points on each of the graphs; depending on where the point falls on the significance axis, it may have a positive or negative outcome. Now imagine that you keep picking such random points over and over again. Eventually you’re going to land on a point with enough significance that the outcome is either hugely negative (for the fragility graph) or hugely positive (for the antifragility graph).
The Ethics of Fragility
Finally, fragility and antifragility have an ethical component as well. Modern society makes it possible to give the benefits of a situation to one person or group and the harm of that situation to another—in other words, it makes one person’s situation antifragile by making others’ situations fragile, which is blatantly unfair.
The problem is imbalanced agency. Some people have the power to make decisions that affect many others, and the others have no choice but to accept the outcomes of those decisions. To give an extreme example, this imbalanced agency is how we end up with countries that have a handful of billionaires, and millions of people in poverty.
When we say agency, what we really mean is optionality. The people who have the power are the ones who have all the options and therefore, all the antifragility. They can shunt the fragility onto those who are less powerful, generally the poor and the marginalized. This is why the CEO of a failing bank can be let go with a severance package worth tens of millions, while taxpayers are being gutted to pay for his bank’s bailout.
The best way to correct this imbalance is by making sure that everyone has something to lose—some kind of fragility that they need to defend against. Remember that antifragility of the whole depends on the fragility of the parts, like muscles getting stronger after the weak parts of them break down. By allowing some people to gain all the benefits while others take on all the harm, modern society has overturned that principle.
Rather than correcting this imbalance with complex rules and massive enforcement agencies (remember, large size and rigid controls make systems fragile), we could address it with simple laws. In fact, the Code of Hammurabi found an ideal solution almost four millennia ago.
One tenet in the Code stated that any injuries or deaths caused by the collapse of a house would also be inflicted on the one who built that house. If the owner of the house died, the builder would be executed; if the owner’s son died, the builder’s son would be executed, and so on.
It might sound brutal to our modern-day sensibilities, but the punishment wasn’t the point. The point was to give the builder a stake in what he was building. A craftsman knows his craft better than any government-sponsored team of safety inspectors, so this is the simplest and most effective way to make sure that what he makes is safe and of good quality.
So, in short, the best way to ensure ethical behavior is by making sure everyone has something to lose. Someone who has to shoulder the risks herself, rather than diverting them to those with fewer options, will most likely act in good faith.
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PDF Summary Chapters 1-2: What Is Antifragility?
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Now think about the phoenix, the legendary bird that’s reborn from its own ashes after it dies. This is durability: No matter what happens to it, the phoenix will always return to the same state as before.
Finally, consider the hydra, a monster from ancient Greek mythology that grows back two heads if one is cut off. Unlike the phoenix, which is reborn into an identical body, the hydra actually gets stronger by being hurt. This is antifragility.
While each book in Taleb’s Incerto series can be read on its own, they have some common themes and build on one another. In particular, Antifragile builds on ideas from The Black Swan, which is about the unexpectedly large impact of unpredictable and unlikely events. Antifragile teaches us how to turn such events to our advantage.
(Shortform note: You can read our summary of The Black Swan here.)
Why We Need Antifragility
We live in an unpredictable world. The models and theories we use to try to predict the future invariably fall apart as unforeseen events prove them wrong and, in turn, destroy the plans we made based on those models. Clearly, systems...
PDF Summary Chapter 3: Finding Antifragility
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A human body and a civil rights movement are complex systems: They have many parts that depend on and communicate with each other. For example, the various parts of your body don’t receive information from logical observations and thoughts, but from chemical stressors in the form of hormones. In a civil rights movement, of course, the various people in it will communicate with each other with all the usual methods that people use.
Political and economic systems are similarly complex, made up of many parts interacting with one another. To Adam Smith, the economy was a clock, a complex mechanism that could be wound up and left to run on its own. Plato, on the other hand, talked about the now-famous ship of state, likening a country to a ship that needs constant tending and a competent captain.
Regardless of who—if anyone—is in charge of the system, communication and interdependency are two of the keys to antifragility. When part of a system is able to communicate that it’s been damaged, and other parts of that system are able to compensate for that damage—or overcompensate, as discussed earlier—antifragility is the result.
The Dangers of Removing Stress and...
PDF Summary Chapter 4: Layers of Antifragility
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We can see here that there are actually two kinds of randomness at work: randomness in the species and randomness in the environment. The random environmental stressors will see which of the random differences in the species is most fit, and those will be the ones to survive.
These concepts also extend beyond biology. For example, a town known for its great restaurants could only get to that point if the mediocre restaurants went out of business. Environmental stress—in this case, in the form of competition—is necessary to keep the local restaurant scene strong.
Therefore, while many entrepreneurs and small business owners will see their businesses fail (possibly at great cost to themselves), we should admire them for taking the risk and thank them for making the economy as a whole stronger by their failure.
Whether organisms or businesses, the core concept of evolution is that individuals die, and as a result the “species” becomes more fit for the environment. Therefore, evolution is a sort of higher-level antifragility; rather than helping the individual facing the challenge, it helps the population as a whole.
When Helping Individuals Harms the Group
This chapter...
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Learn more about our summaries →PDF Summary Chapter 5: Variation Leads to Stability
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Large Systems Are Fragile
The key difference between the banker and the cab driver is the size of the system each belongs to. The banker is a fragile piece of a much larger system ruled from the top with a focus on eliminating risk and randomness. Those attempts to eliminate chance are another reason the system is so fragile—shielding the system from minor mistakes makes larger mistakes inevitable.
To illustrate this point, let’s move away from the bank job for a moment. Instead, imagine if a mechanic, rather than fixing a damaged vehicle, just slapped a fresh coat of paint on it and put it back on the road. It would only be a matter of time before the vehicle failed in some much more catastrophic way. That’s what the large, top-down banking system is doing: hiding and protecting itself from minor issues, but setting itself up for larger failures down the road that may cost our poor clerk his job.
On the other hand, the cab driver works within a very small system. Instead of having a single employer, he’s employed by many different people for short periods of time—just long enough to get them to their destinations. More crucially, none of them has the sort of power...
PDF Summary Chapters 6-7: Randomness Is Necessary
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To visualize simulated annealing, imagine a graph with numerous peaks and dips, some higher than others. A computer looking for the highest point on the graph might find one of those peaks, check to either side of it and find that the graph is going down, and determine that it’s found the best solution. However, a computer using simulated annealing would randomly pick various points on the graph and search for the highest point to either side of those points. By doing so, it’s more likely to find the actual highest point.
The annealing process applies to politics, too, and has since ancient times. Athenian assemblies, for example, were chosen by lottery. Much more recently, the physicist and mathematician Alessandro Pluchino used a computer simulation to show that a certain number of randomly selected members can make a parliament function more effectively, perhaps because those people bring different perspectives and ideas with them.
Nor was politics the only area where ancient Greeks took advantage of randomness; they used various methods of getting random results and called it divination. An Athenian faced with a difficult choice might open Virgil’s Aeneid to a random...
PDF Summary Chapters 8-11: The Fragility of Predictions
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On a similar note, the answers to society’s problems can’t be to make people “better,” by eliminating greed, for example. Humanity has been trying to do that for millennia and gotten nowhere. Rather, we must rethink society so that it is immune to, or even strengthened by, people’s shortcomings. Notably, that’s what capitalism was supposed to do: turn human greed into a driving force for improvement by letting people create and sell what they could, as best as they were able to.
At any rate, this naturally raises the question of how we can create something that is resistant or antifragile in the face of failure. The answer is to plan with failure in mind. Nuclear engineers realized this after the Fukushima disaster, and they started building smaller reactors with better protections around them. They designed these new reactors under the assumption that they would fail and melt down, and therefore they made sure that the damage would be minimal when that happened. The added protections are costly—inefficient, one might say—but more than worth it.
Out-Predicting the Predictors
This section moves away from talk of science, economics, and politics. Instead, it...
PDF Summary Chapters 12-13: Optionality and Rationality
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Remember that the basic pattern of antifragility is to have more upside available than downside—that being the case, on average you’ll gain more than you lose from random changes. The best way to make sure that happens is to have options available to you, so you can make the best choice at any given time.
This principle applies even in very mundane situations. For example, someone invited to a dinner party that isn’t especially interesting, but is better than eating alone, might call around first to see if any other friends are available that evening. If a more interesting opportunity presents itself, the person can skip the party and do that instead. If not, the party is available as a fallback option, with the key word being option. This person has very little to lose—at worst, he winds up at a party that’s rather less exciting than he’d hoped. At best, he finds something more fun to do and has an excellent evening.
Another person who benefits from optionality is any tenant in a rent-controlled apartment. This person can stay in the apartment for as long as he wants, largely protected from inflation. On the other hand, if rents in town somehow drop—or if the tenant...
PDF Summary Chapters 14-15: Practicing and Tinkering
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Coming from a polished Ivy League environment, Taleb was shocked by the money changers. Far from the refined, educated, politically aware people he expected, they were (to use Taleb’s words), “Street. Very street.” Many of them spoke English with so much slang or such heavy accents that it was barely recognizable as English. A man introduced as one of the biggest traders of Swiss francs in the world didn’t know the first thing about Switzerland.
Taleb recalls feeling his formal education vanishing in front of his eyes—a sign of its fragility. He’d been trained to think that knowledge and education were crucial for success, but these uneducated, barely literate men were handling enormous sums of money with ease.
How Fat Tony Got Fat
Now recall Fat Tony from Chapter 9. He didn’t get rich from any fancy formal education, but from the simple understanding that sooner or later, the economy would take a hit—in other words, by betting on fragility.
Specifically, he made his fortune in 1991, when the U.S. attacked Iraq near the end of the Gulf War. Economists, analysts, and journalists were all predicting that the price of oil would rise if the U.S. went to war....
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PDF Summary Chapters 16-17: How to Learn
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However, the real problem with soccer moms is that they try to eliminate trial and error from their children’s lives. They make a map and demand that the kids follow it exactly, which might turn them into good students, but makes them unable to handle the ambiguity and changeability of real life.
The best kind of education is the one kids pursue themselves. Ideally, through browsing a library at home, picking out whatever topics interest them, and augmenting that with trial and error in the real world. Children are natural autodidacts—self-teachers—and that should be encouraged rather than repressed.
Taleb’s Education
In discussing his own experience with education, Taleb first describes himself as an autodidact, but quickly amends it to note that he does have formal degrees. He describes his learning in terms of the barbell model: He devoted exactly as much time and energy as he needed to pass his classes, and he used the rest to study whatever caught his interest.
Taleb quickly noted the limited material available in schools and how schools tried to force students to study certain topics and authors and cultivate specific ways of thinking. This is harmful and...
PDF Summary Chapters 18-19: Exponential Benefit or Harm
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As we’ve previously discussed, when those significant events have negative effects, the situation is fragile. When they have positive effects, the situation is antifragile. We can roughly sketch this general concept as seen below:
A fragile situation has a limit to how good an outcome can be, but no limit (or almost no limit) to how bad an outcome can be. A graph of the situation has a concave shape: it flexes outward in the middle. An antifragile situation is exactly the opposite, and the graph has a convex shape: it flexes inward in the middle. An easy way to remember this is that fragility makes a frown, and antifragility makes a smile.
The two graphs also illustrate why fragility dislikes randomness, and antifragility loves it. Imagine picking random points on each of the graphs; depending on where the point falls on the significance axis, it may have a positive or negative outcome. Now imagine that you keep picking such random points over and over again. Eventually you’re going to land on a point with enough significance that the outcome is either hugely negative (for the...
PDF Summary Chapter 20: The Fragility of the New
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However, some of our most concrete advancements—personal, scientific, or what have you—come from negation. That is, getting rid of what isn’t working or what we know to be wrong. We, as a species, know much more about what’s untrue than what’s true.
For example, if someone thinks that all swans are white, seeing a single black swan is enough to disprove that theory. However, seeing a thousand white swans isn’t enough to prove it. No matter how many white swans that person sees, there’s always the chance that a swan of another color could be out there somewhere.
We can also improve our own health and happiness by negating—that is, getting rid of—things that negatively impact them. Just like antifragility is often about avoiding fragility, happiness is often about avoiding unhappiness. Consider what people think is necessary for happiness: good health (that is, lack of sickness), money (lack of worry about material goods), and purpose (lack of boredom), to give a few common answers.
As for health, the doctor Druin Burch wrote in Taking the Medicine that getting rid of smoking would be a greater net benefit to humanity than curing every type of cancer in the world....
PDF Summary Chapters 21-22: Interventionism and Fragility
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Statisticians have estimated that reducing medical expenditures (only up to a point and only on elective treatments) would actually increase the average lifespan in wealthy countries like the U.S. by reducing iatrogenics. This is one large-scale application of the “less is more” principle.
Convexity in Medicine
This isn’t an argument that medical care should never be given, just that we should be much more discerning about when and how much we intervene. The iatrogenics of any given drug or treatment are linear—they increase or decrease consistently with how much of the treatment is given. However, the benefits of that treatment can be convex (having accelerating benefits) based on how severe the patient’s condition is.
For example, there’s a particular drug that treats high blood pressure. When a patient suffers from mild hypertension, the effectiveness rate of this drug is only 5.6%. However, when the patient’s blood pressure is in the “high” range, the effectiveness rate is 26%; in the “severe” range it climbs to 72%. However, the side effects of the drug are consistent across all of those categories.
**Clearly, then, the trick is to only intervene when the benefits...
PDF Summary Chapters 23-25: Ethics and Stakes
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One tenet in the Code stated that any injuries or deaths caused from the collapse of a house would also be inflicted on the one who built that house. If the owner of the house died, the builder would be executed; if the owner’s son died, the builder’s son would be executed, and so on.
It might sound brutal to our modern-day sensibilities, but the punishment wasn’t the point. The point was to give the builder a stake in what he was building. A craftsman knows his craft better than any government-sponsored team of safety inspectors, so this is the simplest and most effective way to make sure that what he makes is safe and of good quality.
Fat Tony has a more modern take on this issue, seen in his two rules of thumb about flying:
- Don’t get on a plane until the pilot’s onboard.
- Make sure there’s a copilot.
The first rule is about avoiding the transfer of fragility—in simpler terms, making sure the pilot has something to lose before getting on the plane yourself. The second rule goes back to redundancy—making sure there’s a backup plan in case something goes wrong anyway.
Talk Is Cheap
One major source of fragility in our society is that we give a free pass...