Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Authors: Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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the arrival hall at Kennedy airport insistently offering me a ride and I calmly tell them to “f*** off,” they go away immediately. But there are severe drawbacks: some of the readers I meet at conferences have a rough time dealing with an intellectual who has the appearance of a bodyguard—intellectuals can be svelte or flabby and out of shape (when they wear a tweed jacket), but they are not supposed to look like butchers.
Something that will give the Darwinists some work, an observation made to me by the risk analyst, my favorite intellectual opponent (and personal friend) Aaron Brown: the term “fitness” itself may be quite imprecise and even ambiguous, which is why the notion of antifragility as something exceeding mere fitness can elucidate the confusion. What does “fitness” mean? Being exactly tuned to a given past history of a specific environment, or extrapolating to an environment with stressors of higher intensity? Many seem to point to the first kind of adaptation,missing the notion of antifragility. But if one were to write down mathematically a standard model of selection, one would get overcompensation rather than mere “fitness.” 5
Even the psychologists who studied the antifragile response of post-traumatic growth, and show the data for it, don’t quite get the full concept, as they lapse, when using words, into the concept of “resilience.”
ON THE ANTIFRAGILITY OF RIOTS, LOVE, AND OTHER UNEXPECTED BENEFICIARIES OF STRESS
Once one makes an effort to overcome domain dependence, the phenomenon of overcompensation appears ubiquitous.
Those who understand bacterial resistance in the biological domain completely fail to grasp the dictum by Seneca in
De clemencia
about the inverse effect of punishments. He wrote: “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.” For revolutions feed on repression, growing heads faster and faster as one
literally
cuts a few off by killing demonstrators. There is an Irish revolutionary song that encapsulates the effect:
The higher you build your barricades, the stronger we become.
The crowds, at some point, mutate, blinded by anger and a sense of outrage, fueled by the heroism of a few willing to sacrifice their lives for the cause (although they don’t quite see it as sacrifice) and hungry for the privilege to become martyrs. It is that political movements and rebellions can be highly antifragile, and the sucker game is to try to repress them using brute force rather than manipulate them, give in, or find more astute ruses, as Heracles did with Hydra.
If antifragility is what wakes up and overreacts and overcompensates to stressors and damage, then one of the most antifragile things you will find outside economic life is a certain brand of refractory love (or hate),one that seems to overreact and overcompensate for impediments such as distance, family incompatibilities, and every conscious attempt to kill it. Literature is rife with characters trapped in a form of antifragile passion, seemingly against their will. In Proust’s long novel
La recherche,
Swann, a socially sophisticated Jewish art dealer, falls for Odette, a demimondaine, a “kept” woman of sorts, a semi- or perhaps just a quarter-prostitute; she treats him badly. Her elusive behavior fuels his obsession, causing him to demean himself for the reward of a bit more time with her. He exhibits overt clinginess, follows her on her trysts with other men, hiding shamelessly in staircases, which of course causes her to treat him even more elusively. Supposedly, the story was a fictionalization of Proust’s own entanglement with his (male) driver. Or take Dino Buzzati’s semiautobiographical novel
Un amore,
the story of a middle-aged Milanese man who falls—accidentally, of course—for a dancer at the Scala who moonlights as a prostitute. She of course mistreats him,
Something that will give the Darwinists some work, an observation made to me by the risk analyst, my favorite intellectual opponent (and personal friend) Aaron Brown: the term “fitness” itself may be quite imprecise and even ambiguous, which is why the notion of antifragility as something exceeding mere fitness can elucidate the confusion. What does “fitness” mean? Being exactly tuned to a given past history of a specific environment, or extrapolating to an environment with stressors of higher intensity? Many seem to point to the first kind of adaptation,missing the notion of antifragility. But if one were to write down mathematically a standard model of selection, one would get overcompensation rather than mere “fitness.” 5
Even the psychologists who studied the antifragile response of post-traumatic growth, and show the data for it, don’t quite get the full concept, as they lapse, when using words, into the concept of “resilience.”
ON THE ANTIFRAGILITY OF RIOTS, LOVE, AND OTHER UNEXPECTED BENEFICIARIES OF STRESS
Once one makes an effort to overcome domain dependence, the phenomenon of overcompensation appears ubiquitous.
Those who understand bacterial resistance in the biological domain completely fail to grasp the dictum by Seneca in
De clemencia
about the inverse effect of punishments. He wrote: “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.” For revolutions feed on repression, growing heads faster and faster as one
literally
cuts a few off by killing demonstrators. There is an Irish revolutionary song that encapsulates the effect:
The higher you build your barricades, the stronger we become.
The crowds, at some point, mutate, blinded by anger and a sense of outrage, fueled by the heroism of a few willing to sacrifice their lives for the cause (although they don’t quite see it as sacrifice) and hungry for the privilege to become martyrs. It is that political movements and rebellions can be highly antifragile, and the sucker game is to try to repress them using brute force rather than manipulate them, give in, or find more astute ruses, as Heracles did with Hydra.
If antifragility is what wakes up and overreacts and overcompensates to stressors and damage, then one of the most antifragile things you will find outside economic life is a certain brand of refractory love (or hate),one that seems to overreact and overcompensate for impediments such as distance, family incompatibilities, and every conscious attempt to kill it. Literature is rife with characters trapped in a form of antifragile passion, seemingly against their will. In Proust’s long novel
La recherche,
Swann, a socially sophisticated Jewish art dealer, falls for Odette, a demimondaine, a “kept” woman of sorts, a semi- or perhaps just a quarter-prostitute; she treats him badly. Her elusive behavior fuels his obsession, causing him to demean himself for the reward of a bit more time with her. He exhibits overt clinginess, follows her on her trysts with other men, hiding shamelessly in staircases, which of course causes her to treat him even more elusively. Supposedly, the story was a fictionalization of Proust’s own entanglement with his (male) driver. Or take Dino Buzzati’s semiautobiographical novel
Un amore,
the story of a middle-aged Milanese man who falls—accidentally, of course—for a dancer at the Scala who moonlights as a prostitute. She of course mistreats him,
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