Today I am rereading Nassim Taleb’s <antifragile> book1, consisting of four chapters.  Each chapter is like a long essay.

 

Chapter 1 Between Damocles and Hydra.

The authors use parables and stories, mainly those borrowed from greek mythology to explain the concepts of “antifragility”, “fragility”, and “robust” or “resilience” in this chapter.

Fragile: Damocles–a Roman recycled version of a Greek myth, the Sicilian tyrant Dionysius II has the fawning courtier Damocles enjoy the luxury of a fancy banquet with a sword handing over his head, tied to the ceiling with a single hair from a horse’s tail. The tale explains the side effect of power and success: you cannot rise and rule without facing this continuous danger-someone out there will be actively working to topple you. 

comments by me: this thought coincides with ancient Chinese philosophy, the yin and yang concepts. Yin resides in yang. At noon, the sun reaches the highest point, the hottest in a day (the highest degree of yang); from then on, the temperature can only go down (thus, yin arises at the zenith of yang).

Comments by me: Modern technology makes the world more complicated and complex. Financial derivatives, extended supply chains through globalization make the works more susceptible to the fall of the Damocles sword.  Infectious diseases will spread much faster, and a glitch in the financial system can ripple through the whole world as demonstrated in the CovIP pandemic, and the subprime mortgage woe started in the US in 2007.

Antifragile–Hydra, the snake with numerous heads; each time one is cut off, two grow back; thus it represents antifragile.  Phoenix is also a good example of antifragile; it always returns to its initial state after being destroyed.   

comments by me: Then the author went on to justify the coining of “antifragile” from phenomena in Linguistics—we know more than we think we do, a lot more than we can articulate in language. After defining the concept of antifragile, then he went on to give more examples in many other fields including medicine:

antifragile in medicine: hormesis—when a small dose of a harmful substance is actually beneficial for the organism, acting as medicine.  Fasting or carolies intake restriction activates healthy reactions and switches that, among other benefits, lengthen life expectancy in laboratory animals.  

comments by me: Chinese also has such notion—-use poison to overcome poison (以毒攻毒), or whether a substance is a medicine or poison depends on the dose.  Plants (flowers) protect themselves from harm and fend off predators with poison.  Yellow tiger lily (黄花菜）– a household edible flower in Chinese cuisine–must be picked just before the bud opens up, for the stamen becomes poisonous once the flower blooms.   

Overall, depriving systems of stressors, vital stressors, is not necessarily good and can be downright harmful.

Then the author spent the rest of the chapter pointing out that people often cannot recognize knowledge once in a different context or domain.

chapter 2: the source of antifragility–overcompensation and overreaction

Overcompensation:In medicine—post-traumatic growth; in learning and innovation, “the excess energy released from overreaction to setbacks is what innovates!”  “any form of comfort is a road to waste”. As a negative testament of this rule,  in aeronautics, the automation of airplanes dulls the pilot’s attention and skills. 

Overcompensation mechanism in life: if you need sth urgently done, give the task to the busiest person in the office. with mafia dons, the most powerful traders were the last audible. we concentrate better with white noise.

Redundancy is another form of overcompensation. we humans have two kidneys. Nature loves redundancy. If you ingest 15 milligrams of a poisonous substance, your body may prepare for twenty or more, and as a side effect will get stronger overall. The mechanism is no different from our storing extra food in the fridge.

Prepare for the worst scenario, but the worse scenario may be yet to happen. only the fool believes that the highest mountain in the world is equal to the highest one he has observed. yet we consider the biggest object of any kind that we have seen in our lives or hear about as the largest item that can possibly exist.

Antifragile in social and cultural realms–riots, love, and other beneficiaries of stress. Seneca:” repeated punishment, while it crushes the hatred of a few, stirs the hatred of all.. just as trees that have been trimmed throw out again countless branches”–revolutions feed on repression. The crowds are fueled by the heroism of a few willing to sacrifice their lives for the cause and hungry for the privilege to become martyrs.

Comments by me: This rule also applies to the realm of love and seduction. In love and seduction, elusive behaviors fuel obsession even against the person’s own will. We can’t order ourselves to stop thinking certain thoughts. Thought control is not possible. The more energy you put into trying to control your ideas and what you think about them, the more your ideas end up controlling you.

Antifragile in information, be books or ideas–it feeds more on attempts to harm it than it does on efforts to promote it. The more you insist that it remains a secret, the more it will spread. criticism for a book is a truthful, unfaked badge of attention, signaling that it is not boring; and boring is the only very bad thing for a book. Almost no scandal would hurt artists or writers. Only those clean-shaven types who dress in suits and ties are fragile to information about them.

Somehow it is only when you don’t care about your reputation that you tend to have a good one. Just as in matters of seduction, people lend the most to those who need them the least.

Those from whom we have benefited the most aren’t those who have tried to help us but rather those who have actively tried but eventually failed to harm us, i.e., enemies.

 

Chapter 3. The cat and the Washing machine.

Things fragile or antifragile: Everything that has life in it is to some extent antifragile. It looks like the secret of life is antifragility. Many things such as society, economic activities and markets, and cultural behavior are apparently man-made but grow on their own to reach some kind of self-organization. They may not be strictly biological, but they resemble the biological in that, in a way, they multiply and replicate–think of rumors, ideas, technologies, and businesses.

We can also distinguish between complicated and complex systems. Many man-made things are complicated, but not complex in that different parts of the things do not interact. With complex systems, interdependencies are severe, like ecology. One action can have complicated series of cascading side effects.  Manmade things that are linked through stress and information are complex. If you shut down a bank in New York, it will cause ripple effects from Iceland to Mongolia.

The crux of complex systems is that they convert information through stressors. Your body gets information about the environment not through your logical apparatus, your intelligence and ability to reason, compute and calculate, but through stress, via hormones or other messengers we haven’t discovered yet. We cannot isolate any causal relationship in a complex system.

If you are alive-something deep in your soul likes a certain measure of randomness and disorder. For the nonorganic, noncomplex, equilibrium happens in a state of inertia. For something organic, equilibrium only happens with death.

 

Chapter 4 what kills me makes others stronger

Evolution and antifragile

Nature prefers to let the game continue at the informational level, the genetic code. So organisms need to die for nature to be antifragile. Nature is opportunities, ruthless, and selfish.

Evolution benefits from randomness by two different routes: randomness in the mutations, and randomness in the environment. Both routes act in a similar way to cause changes in the traits of the surviving next generations. 

why are all living things mortal? To satisfy the conditions for immortality, organisms need to predict the future with perfection–near perfection is not enough. However, by letting the organisms go one lifespan at a time with modifications between successive generations, nature does not need to predict future conditions beyond the extremely vague idea of which direction things should be heading. Actually, even a vague direction is not necessary. Every random event will bring its own antidote in the form of ecological variations. It is as if nature changed itself at every step and modified its strategy every instant.

Nature likes diversity between organisms rather than diversity within an immortal organism.

While hormesis corresponds to situations by which the individual organism benefits from direct harm to itself, evolution occurs when harm makes the individual organism perish and the benefits are transferred to others, the surviving ones, and future generations. What kills us makes others stronger.

Individual and collective

Fractal self-similarity— a tree has many branches, and these look like small trees; further, these large branches have many smaller branches that sort of look like even smaller trees. A strengthening mechanism for the species comes at the expense of some organisms; in turn, the organism strengthens at the expense of some cells, all the way down and all the way up as well- that is, survival pressures within the organism play a role in its overall improvement under external stress.

Variability causes mistakes and adaptations; it also allows you to know who your friends are. Both your failures and your successes will give you information. You may never know what type of person someone is unless they are given opportunities to violate moral or ethical codes. He who never sins is less reliable than he who has only sinned once. And someone who has made plenty of errors–though never the same error more than once–is more reliable than someone who has never made any.

Me and us: the enlightenment and the political systems that emerged from it freed us to some extent from the domination of society, the tribe, and the family that had prevailed throughout history. Heroism and the respect it commands is a form of compensation by society for those who take risks for others. Entrepreneurship is a risky and heroic activity, necessary for growth or even the mere survival of the economy.