Comments: In this book, Caleb uses borrow “exclusion method”, via negativity. If there are several possibilities for a conclusion—then as soon as you find a case that violates a possibility, then you can eliminate that possibility.  This method will take you one step closer to the truth. In math, this method is often used when proving a conclusion is true is difficult, or when “we cannot express what something is exactly, we can say something about what it is not”. That is, the indirect rather than the direct expression.

Charlatans are recognizable in that they will give you positive advice, and only positive advice, exploiting our gullibility and sucker-proneness. Yet in practice, it is the negative that’s used by the pros, those selected by evolution: chess grandmasters usually win by not losing; people become rich by not going bust (particularly when others do); religions are mostly about interdicts; the learning of life is about what to avoid. You reduce most of your personal risks of accident thanks to a small number of measures.

In most circumstances fraught with a high degree of randomness, one cannot really tell if a successful person has skills, or if a person with skills will succeed—but we can pretty much predict the negative, that a person totally devoid of skills will eventually fail.

We know a lot more what is wrong than what is right, or, phrased according to the fragile/robust classification, negative knowledge (what is wrong, what does not work) is more robust to error than positive knowledge (what is right, what works). So knowledge grows by subtraction much more than by addition—given that what we know today might turn out to be wrong but what we know to be wrong cannot turn out to be right, at least not easily. If I spot a black swan (not capitalized), I can be quite certain that the statement “all swans are white” is wrong. But even if I have never seen a black swan, I can never hold such a statement to be true.

Rephrasing it again: since one small observation can disprove a statement, while millions can hardly confirm it, disconfirmation is more rigorous than confirmation.

keeping one’s distance from an ignorant person is equivalent to keeping company with a wise man.

Comments: This is consistent with a Chinese proverb,”近朱者赤近墨者黑“， meaning that you will become alike whom you socialized with or “孟母三迁”。 Mencius’s ( the sage often mentioned together with Confusious”) mother moved three times in order for her son to grow up in good company.

Less is more

There are domains in which the rare event (I repeat, good or bad) plays a disproportionate share and we tend to be blind to it, so focusing on the exploitation of such a rare event, or protection against it, changes a lot, a lot of the risky exposure. Just worry about Black Swan exposures, and life is easy.

Less is more is also associated with the “eighty/twenty” law.  Some people are aware of the eighty/twenty idea, based on the discovery by Vilfredo Pareto more than a century ago that 20 percent of the people in Italy owned 80 percent of the land, and vice versa. Few realize that we are moving into the far more uneven distribution of 99/1 across many things that used to be 80/20.  99 percent of Internet traffic is attributable to less than 1 percent of sites, 99 percent of book sales come from less than 1 percent of authors … and I need to stop because numbers are emotionally stirring. Almost everything contemporary has winner-take-all effects, which include sources of harm and benefits.

Comments: airplanes and the internet accelerates the velocity of worldwide trade, lengthens supply chains. Mobile social media makes ideas and thoughts transmit over seconds worldwide literally.  They will homogenize the world even faster and more vastly than the capitalization which has already pushed fried chicken wings, coco-cola, t-shirt, Hollywood movies, and New York besting selling books to all corners of the globe. As a result, the winner-takes-all effect will manifest in all realms of our societies.   Anyone who moved from other countries to the U.S. will realize this. No matter where you travel in the U.S., from gas station to grocery store to restaurant, to movie theaters, they are all the same. Mom-and-pop types of business are indeed minorities. Cities in the U.S. become identical de facto.   Only landscapes change; you will see palm trees in Florida or California, not in New York, or Massachusetts.  

When you cross the street, you remove data, anything but the essential threat.

Comments; the processing capacity of the human brain is extremely limited compared with even computers. To improve effectiveness, our brain filters out vast irrelevant information but zero in on key information such as information only relevant for us to cross a street safely. This conclusion has been verified by scientists–such as the “blind to gorilla” phenomenon discovered by psychologists.

If you have more than one reason to do something (choose a doctor or veterinarian, hire a gardener or an employee, marry a person, go on a trip), just don’t do it. It does not mean that one reason is better than two, just that by invoking more than one reason you are trying to convince yourself to do something. Obvious decisions (robust to error) require no more than a single reason.

Comments: The Internet offers a tool for many to seek advice on decisions such as which job offer to take, whom to marry so easier. However, when one poses such a question openly on an online forum; oftentimes this person already has an answer knowingly or unknowingly, he/she is only trying to seek confirmations online.

Chapter 20.  Time and Fragility

What is fragile will eventually break; and, luckily, we can easily tell what is fragile. Positive Black Swans are more unpredictable than negative ones. “Time has sharp teeth that destroy everything,” declaimed the sixth-century (B.C.) poet Simonides of Ceos, perhaps starting a tradition in Western literature about the inexorable effect of time.

The past—properly handled, as we will see in the next section—is a much better teacher about the properties of the future than the present. To understand the future, you do not need technoautistic jargon, obsession with “killer apps,” these sort of things. You just need the following: some respect for the past, some curiosity about the historical record, a hunger for the wisdom of the elders, and a grasp of the notion of “heuristics,” these often unwritten rules of thumb that are so determining of survival. In other words, you will be forced to give weight to things that have been around, things that have survived.

Comments: Warren buffet has a similar argument on stock picking. He and Charlie do not look at the future projections by analysts. Instead, they look at the past performance of companies; they are more reliable indicators than predictions which 98% of the time are incorrect.

Technology is at its best when it is invisible. I am convinced that technology is of greatest benefit when it displaces the deleterious, unnatural, alienating, and, most of all, inherently fragile preceding technology. In many respects, as unnatural as it is, the Internet removed some of the even more unnatural elements around us. For instance, the absence of paperwork makes bureaucracy—something modernistic—more palatable than it was in the days of paper files. With a little bit of luck, a computer virus will wipe out all records and free people from their past mistakes.

With something nonperishable, say a technology, that is not the case. We have two possibilities: either both are expected to have the same additional life expectancy (the case in which the probability distribution is called exponential), or the old is expected to have a longer expectancy than the young, in proportion to their relative age. In that situation, if the old is eighty and the young is ten, the elder is expected to live eight times as long as the younger one. Every year that passes without extinction doubles the additional life expectancy. This is an indicator of some robustness. The robustness of an item is proportional to its life! The proportionality of life expectancy does not need to be tested explicitly—it is the direct result of “winner-take-all” effects in longevity.

A FEW MENTAL BIASES

We do not see the wonderful novels that are now completely out of print, we just think that because the novels that have done well are well written (whatever that means), that what is well written will do well. So we confuse the necessary and the causal: because all surviving technologies have some obvious benefits, we are led to believe that all technologies offering obvious benefits will survive.

Another mental bias causing the overhyping of technology comes from the fact that we notice changes, not statics. The classic example, discovered by the psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, applies to wealth. (The pair developed the idea that our brains like minimal effort and get trapped that way, and they pioneered a tradition of cataloging and mapping human biases with respect to perception of random outcomes and decision making under uncertainty). If you announce to someone “you lost $10,000,” he will be much more upset than if you tell him “your portfolio value, which was $785,000, is now $775,000.” Our brains have a predilection for shortcuts, and the variation is easier to notice (and store) than the entire record. It requires less memory storage. This psychological heuristic (often operating without our awareness), the error of variation in place of total, is quite pervasive, even with matters that are visual.

Comments: I think the latter sentence” your portfolio value, which was $785000, is now $775000″ contains more information than the previous one because it not only conveys that this person is $10000 less wealthy”, because, $775000 is still a significant sum, meaning this person is still wealthy.

We notice what varies and changes more than what plays a large role but doesn’t change. We rely more on the water than on cell phones but because water does not change and cell phones do, we are prone to thinking that cell phones play a larger role than they do.

Comments: This feature of our brain is efficient and parsimonious in that statics things rarely impose a danger to us.  When we are young and healthy, we do not feel the importance of health; we even do not understand what ” healthy’ means. Only when a pinch of sand gets into our shoes, we feel the pain and the existence of our feet and would like to get the sand out ASAP. Anything that rarely changes are often taken for granted by us, being clean air, water, blue sky, or parental love, or mate’s affection for us.

These impulses to buy new things that will eventually lose their novelty, particularly when compared to newer things, are called treadmill effects. People acquire a new item, feel more satisfied after an initial boost, then rapidly revert to their baseline of well-being. So, when you “upgrade,” you feel a boost of satisfaction with changes in technology. But then you get used to it and start hunting for the new new thing.

Just as when Lebanese run into Syrians, they focus on the tiny variations in their respective Levantine dialects, but when Lebanese run into Italians, they focus on similarities.

Comments: this is because we do not pay attention to things that are taken as true. In the former case, it is common knowledge that the two Levantine dialects are almost the same; in the latter, again it is known that Lebanese and Italians are two quite different languages; we tend to follow automatically ” less is more”, focusing on those that are not commonly accepted truths.

Neomania and dictatorship are an explosive combination

It took me almost two hours to cross London from one end to the other. As I was depleting the topics of conversation with the (Polish) driver, I wondered whether Haussmann was not right, and whether London would be better off if it had its Haussmann razing neighborhoods and plowing wide arteries to facilitate circulation. Until it hit me that, in fact, if there was so much traffic in London, as compared to other cities, it was because people wanted to be there, and being there for them exceeded the costs. More than a third of the residents in London are foreign-born, and, in addition to immigrants, most high net worth individuals on the planet get their starter pied-à-terre in Central London. It could be that the absence of these large avenues and the absence of a dominating state is part of its appeal. Nobody would buy a pied-à-terre in Brasilia, the perfectly top-down city built from scratch on a map.

I also checked and saw that the most expensive neighborhoods in Paris today (such as the Sixth Arrondissement or Île Saint-Louis) were the ones that had been left alone by nineteenth-century renovators.

Now modern technology allows us to merge with nature, and instead of a small window, an entire wall can be transparent and face lush and densely forested areas.

Time can act as a cleanser of noise by confining to its dustbins all these overhyped works. Some organizations even turn such scientific production into a cheap spectator sport, with ranking of the “ten hottest papers” in, say, rectal oncology or some such sub-sub-specialty. The worst effect of these prizes is penalizing those who don’t get them and debasing the field by turning it into an athletic competition.

Now try to get the proceedings of a random conference about the subject matter concerned that took place five years ago. Odds are it will feel no different from a five-year-old newspaper, perhaps even less interesting. So attending breakthrough conferences might be, statistically speaking, as much a waste of time as buying a mediocre lottery ticket, one with a small payoff. The odds of the paper’s being relevant—and interesting—in five years is no better than one in ten thousand. The fragility of science!

Even the conversation of a high school teacher or that of an unsuccessful college professor is likely to be more worthwhile than the latest academic paper, less corrupted with neomania.

Unlike dilettantes, career professionals are to knowledge what prostitutes are to love.

My recommendation seemed impractical, but, after a while, the student developed a culture in original texts such as Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and Hayek, texts he believes he will cite at the age of eighty. He told me that after his detoxification, he realized that all his peers do is read timely material that becomes instantly obsolete.

I’ve detected in the area of risk management a similar error, made by scientists trying to be new in a standard way. People in risk management only consider risky things that have hurt them in the past (given their focus on “evidence”), not realizing that, in the past, before these events took place, these occurrences that hurt them severely were completely without precedent, escaping standards. And my personal efforts to make them step outside their shoes to consider these second-order considerations have failed—as have my efforts to make them aware of the notion of fragility

Chapter 21 Medicine, Convexity, and Opacity 

This defect is not limited to our control of swelling: this confabulation plagues the entire history of medicine, along with, of course, many other fields of practice. The researchers Paul Meehl and Robin Dawes pioneered a tradition to catalog the tension between “clinical” and actuarial (that is, statistical) knowledge, and examine how many things believed to be true by professionals and clinicians aren’t so and don’t match empirical evidence. The problem is of course that these researchers did not have a clear idea of where the burden of empirical evidence lies (the difference between naive or pseudo empiricism and rigorous empiricism)—the onus is on the doctors to show us why reducing fever is good, why eating breakfast before engaging in activities is healthy (there is no evidence), or why bleeding patients is the best alternative (they’ve stopped doing so).

The hidden costs of health care are largely in the denial of antifragility. But it may not be just medicine—what we call diseases of civilization result from the attempt by humans to make life comfortable for ourselves against our own interest since the comfortable is what fragilizes.

Comments: many American Chinese refuse to turn their thermostat at home below 75 Faranhieght degrees, for they are afraid that man-mand comfort is not natural and thus detrimental to their health. Some even provide anecdotal evidence for it. They had such and such ailments; after the change of thermostat to make the environment more natural, say, summer is summer, and winter is winter, these ailments simply vanish without interventions of doctors. These claims may well be true as human bodies benet from nature’s tinkering over millions of years. 

Evolution proceeds by undirected, convex bricolage or tinkering, inherently robust, i.e., with the achievement of potential stochastic gains thanks to continuous, repetitive, small, localized mistakes. What men have done with top-down, command-and-control science has been exactly the reverse: interventions with negative convexity effects, i.e., the achievement of small certain gains through exposure to massive potential mistakes. Our record of understanding risks in complex systems (biology, economics, climate) has been pitiful, marred with retrospective distortions (we only understand the risks after the damage takes place, yet we keep making the mistake), and there is nothing to convince me that we have gotten better at risk management. In this particular case, because of the scalability of the errors, you are exposed to the wildest possible form of randomness. Simply, humans should not be given explosive toys (like atomic bombs, financial derivatives, or tools to create life).

Guilty or Innocent

Let me phrase the last point a bit differently. If there is something in nature you don’t understand, odds are it makes sense in a deeper way that is beyond your understanding. So there is a logic to natural things that is much superior to our own. Just as there is a dichotomy in law: innocent until proven guilty as opposed to guilty until proven innocent, let me express my rule as follows: what Mother Nature does is rigorous until proven otherwise; what humans and science do is flawed until proven otherwise.

Everything unstable or breakable has had ample chance to break over time. Further, the interactions between components of Mother Nature had to modulate in such a way as to keep the overall system alive. What emerges over millions of years is a wonderful combination of solidity, antifragility, and local fragility, sacrifices in one area made in order for nature to function better. We sacrifice ourselves in favor of our genes, trading our fragility for their survival. We age, but they stay young and get fitter and fitter outside us. Things break on a small scale all the time, in order to avoid large-scale generalized catastrophes.

The doctor and medical essayist James Le Fanu showed how our understanding of the biological processes was coupled with a decline of pharmaceutical discoveries as if rationalistic theories were blinding and somehow a handicap. In other words, we have in biology a green lumber problem!

Chapter 22 To live long but not too long

The good is mostly in the absence of bad.

Starting from the iatrogenic to the cure, rather than the other way around. Whenever possible, replace the doctor with human antifragility. But otherwise don’t be shy with aggressive treatments.

The “pursuit of happiness” is not equivalent to the “avoidance of unhappiness.” Each of us certainly knows not only what makes us unhappy (for instance, copy editors, commuting, bad odors, pain, the sight of a certain magazine in a waiting room, etc.), but what to do about it.

There is a seemingly apocryphal (but nevertheless interesting) story about Pomponius Atticus, famous for being Cicero’s relative and epistolary recipient. Being ill, incurably ill, he tried to put an end to both his life and his suffering by abstinence, and only succeeded in ending the latter, as, according to Montaigne, his health was restored.

Eating an orange or an apple is not biologically equivalent to drinking orange or apple juice.) From such examples, I derived the rule that what is called “healthy” is generally unhealthy, just as “social” networks are antisocial, and the “knowledge”-based economy is typically ignorant.

The Iatrogenic of Money

Consider that construction laborers seem happier with a ham and cheese baguette than businessmen with a Michelin three-star meal. Food tastes so much better after exertion.

Note that medical iatrogenic is the result of wealth and sophistication rather than poverty and artlessness, and of course the product of partial knowledge rather than ignorance.

If true wealth consists in sound sleeping, good conscience, reciprocal gratitude, absence of envy, good appetite, muscle strength, physical energy, frequent laughs, no meals alone, no gym class, some physical labor (or hobby), good bowel movements, no meeting rooms, and periodic surprises, then it is largely subtractive (elimination of iatrogenic).

Religion and Naive Interventionism

And it seems to me that human nature does, deep down, know when to resort to the solace of religion, and when to switch to science.

Among other things the role of religion is to tame the iatrogenic of abundance—fasting makes you lose your sense of entitlement. But there are more subtle aspects.

So if you agree that we need “balanced” nutrition of a certain combination, it is wrong to immediately assume that we need such balance at every meal rather than serially so. Assuming that we need on average certain quantities of the various nutrients that have been identified, say a certain quantity of carbohydrates, proteins, and fats. There is a big difference between getting them together, at every meal, with the classical steak, salad, followed by fresh fruits, or having them separately, serially.

I am convinced (an inevitable result of nonlinearity) that our bodies are antifragile to randomness in food delivery and composition—at least over a certain range or number of days.

He tried the result experimentally and found out that mice, in the initial phases of starvation, can withstand high doses of chemotherapy without visible side effects. Scientists use the narrative that starvation causes the expression of a gene coding a protein called SIRT, SIRT1, or sirtuin, which brings longevity and other effects. The antifragility of humans manifests itself in the response with up-regulation of some genes in response to hunger.

This idea of  “me” as a unit can be traced to the Enlightenment. And, with it, fragility. Before that, we were part of the present collective and future progeny. Both present and future tribes exploited the fragility of individuals to strengthen themselves. People engaged in sacrifices, sought martyrdom, died for the group, and derived pride from doing so; they worked hard for future generations.

Recall that the antifragility of a system comes from the mortality of its components—and I am part of that larger population called humans. I am here to die a heroic death for the sake of the collective, to produce offspring (and prepare them for life and provide for them), or eventually, books—my information, that is, my genes, the antifragile in me, should be the ones seeking immortality, not me.