Chapter 9 Fat Tony and the Fragilistas

Summary: This chapter introduces two fictional figures: Fat Tony and Nero, who are mirror images of each other.  Fast Tondy does not read but has practical wisdom while Nero loves reading but dislikes bureaucratic structured employment. They share one commonality—make money based on suckers who believe in prediction. This conclusion seems to be consistent with Waren Buffet, as he often claims, ” Charline and I do not pay attention to economics predictions…”.  Nonetheless, there are a few very interesting observations in this chapter:

•  Men of leisure become salves to inner feelings of dissatisfaction and interests over which have little control. The freer Nero’s time, the more compelled he felt to compensate for lost time in filling gaps in his natural interests, things that he wanted to know a bit deeper. And, as he discovered, the worst thing one can do to feel one knows things a bit deeper is to try to go into them a bit deeper. According to a Venetian proverb, ” the sea gets deeper as you go further into it”.
• Nero learned that no matter how satisfied they could be with their work, these hotshots-who-depended-on-words were deprived of Tony’s serenity; they remained fragile to the emotion toll from the compliments they did not get, the ones others got, and from what someone of lower intellect stole from them. So Nero promised himself to escape all of this with his small ritual– opening an envelope containing the statements of investment portfolios from overseas countries.

Chapter 10—Seneca’s Upside and Downside

Less downside from life

“Men feel the good less intensely than the bad”-Livy. Success brings an asymmetry: you now have a lot more to lose than to gain. You are fragile. Seneca’s practical method to counter such fragility was to go through mental exercises to write off possessions, so when losses occurred he would not feel the sting-a way to wrest one’s freedom from circumstances. It is similar to buying an insurance contract against losses. For instance, Seneca often started his journeys with almost the same belongings he would have if he were shipwrecked, which included a blanket to sleep on the ground. The mental exercises of assuming every morning that the worst possible thing had actually happened-the rest day would be a bonus.

The domestication of emotions

Stoicism is about domestication, not necessarily the elimination of emotions. One trick that a Roman Stoic would use to separate anger from rightful action and avoid committing harm he would retreat later would be to wait at least a day before beating up a servant who committed a violation.

Seneca also provides us a catalog of social deeds: invest in good actions. Things can be taken away from us-not good deeds and acts of virtue. He said that wealth is the slave of the wise man and master of the fool.

You are antifragile for a source of volatility if potential gains exceed potential losses( and vice versa). Further, if you have more upside than downside, then you may be harmed by a lack of volatility and stressors.

Chapter 11 Never marry the rock star

On the irreversibility of broken packages

The first step toward antifragility consists in first decreasing downside, rather than increasing upside; that is, by lowering exposure to negative Black Swans and letting natural antifragility work by itself.

Mitigating fragility is not an option but a requirement. Fragility has a ratchet-like property, the irreversibility of damage. What matters is the route taken, the order of events, not just the destination—what scientists call a path-dependent property.

In other words, if something is fragile, its risk of breaking makes anything you do to improve it or make it “efficient” inconsequential unless you first reduce that risk of breaking. As Publilius Syrus wrote, nothing can be done both hastily and safely—almost nothing.

As to growth in GDP (gross domestic product), it can be obtained very easily by loading future generations with debt—and the future economy may collapse upon the need to repay such debt. GDP growth, like cholesterol, seems to be a Procrustean bed reduction that has been used in game systems.

Seneca’s Barbell

Biological systems are replete with barbell strategies. Females in the animal kingdom, in some monogamous species, tend to marry the equivalent of the accountant, someone stable who can provide, and once in a while they cheat with the aggressive alpha, the rock star, as part of a dual strategy. We see evidence of such a strategy with the so-called monogamous birds: they enjoy cheating, with more than a tenth of the broods coming from males other than the putative father. Evolutionary theorists claim that females want both economical-social stability and good genes for their children. Both cannot be always obtained from someone in the middle with all these virtues. But an alternative theory may be that they just want to have pleasure-or a stable life and good fun.

Away from the Golden Middle

In literature, the most uncompromising, most speculative, most demanding, and riskiest of all careers, there is a tradition with French and other European literary writers to look for a sinecure, say, the anxiety-free profession of civil servants, with few intellectual demands and high job security, the kind of low-risk job that ceases to exist when you leave the office, then spend their spare time writing, free to write whatever they want, under their own standards. There is a shockingly small number of academics among French authors.

American writers, on the other hand, tend to become members of the media or academics, which makes them prisoners of a system and corrupts their writing, and, in the case of research academics, makes them live under continuous anxiety, pressure, and indeed, the severe bastardization of the soul. On the other hand, sinecure-cum-writing is a quite soothing model, next best to having financial independence, or perhaps better than financial independence.

And professions can be serial: something very safe, then something speculative.

The domestication of uncertainty

With personal risks, you can easily barbell yourself by removing the chances of ruin in any area.

In social policy, it consists of protecting the very weak and letting the strong do their job, rather than helping the middle class to consolidate its privileges, thus blocking evolution and bringing all manners of economic problems that tend to hurt the poor the most. 

If you dislike someone, leave him alone or eliminate him; don’t attack him verbally.