Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder

[HowToBe]

By Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

I have not read this book, but it's now on my list of potential reads. I ran a search of the forum and found that it has been mentioned a few times. Any comments from those who have read it?

The Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antifragile

Taleb introduces the book as follows: "Some things benefit from shocks; they thrive and grow when exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder, and stressors and love adventure, risk, and uncertainty. Yet, in spite of the ubiquity of the phenomenon, there is no word for the exact opposite of fragile. Let us call it antifragile. Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better".[1] Hormesis is an example of mild antifragility, where the stressor is a poisonous substance and the antifragile becomes better overall from a small dose of the stressor. This is different from robustness or resilience in that the Antifragile system improves with, not withstands, stressors, where the stressors are neither too large or small. The larger point, according to Taleb, is that depriving systems of vital stressors is not necessarily a good thing and can be downright harmful. [This brings to mind the discovery that reducing the restrictions on children on the playground actually reduces the injury rate as well as improving classroom performance. Also, Jordan Peterson's explanations about the necessity of "rough and tumble play" for younger children, how people can sometimes benefit from flirting with the edge of safety in a controlled manner. The "point of maximal information flow" between Order and Chaos. The necessity of balance between the "conservative" and "creative" principles.]

More technically, Taleb defines antifragility as a nonlinear response: "Simply, antifragility is defined as a convex response to a stressor or source of harm (for some range of variation), leading to a positive sensitivity to increase in volatility (or variability, stress, dispersion of outcomes, or uncertainty, what is grouped under the designation "disorder cluster"). Likewise fragility is defined as a concave sensitivity to stressors, leading a negative sensitivity to increase in volatility. The relation between fragility, convexity and sensitivity to disorder is mathematical, obtained by theorem, not derived from empirical data mining or some historical narrative. It is a priori".[2]

Here are the forum mentions I could find:

They say that "failure is not an option". Well, that's horse crap. Failure is totally acceptable, as long as rapid, effective, and immediate remedial efforts are made.

Exactly. As I recently read in Antifragile, concerning the concepts of fragility and failure, the opposite of being fragile is not being unbreakable. Fragile things break easily during chaotic events and personal failure. Robust things are more difficult to break, but do not benefit from attempting to be broken. But this forum is antifragile; we actually benefit in growth and knowledge from chaos and attempts to be broken. That is one heck of an achievement, I do believe!!

Obyvatel mentions the book in relation to the low likelyhood of being able to predict the stock market (noting that Taleb has substantial stocks trading experience):
https://cassiopaea.org/forum/index.php/topic,31685.msg423810.html#msg423810

Obyvatel gives a much more detailed account of the book here:

I liked Nassim Taleb's latest book "Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder". He puts forward the notion of "antifragility" as a measurable quantity in mathematical terms (using convexity functions) for financial systems about which he appears quite knowledgeable. He also applies the same notion of antifragility in other areas of life not so readily amenable to description through equations.

According to Taleb, things/systems can be classified into three categories - fragile, robust and antifragile. Fragile things suffer from external stressors and great care needs to be taken to protect them from such events just like a glass jar. Robust things are resilient to external stressors to a limit, but they do not incur any benefit from such events. Antifragile things tend to benefit from external stressors and random events. Ayn Rand inspired objectivism and the way the capitalist financial system works are examples of extremely fragile systems. To take some of Taleb's examples, a centralized nation state is fragile, a decentralized system of city states is more antifragile. Corporate employment (like a mid-level bank employee) is fragile - in contrast an artisan or a taxi driver is more anti-fragile. Classroom learning is fragile, real life learning based on heuristics and empirical tinkering is antifragile.

In the medical field, he writes

I reckon if we ever get an interview with JP we'll come up with some points that'll give us a chance to say "gotcha!" to him.

One question I've always wanted to put to JP (wish I thought of this one when I saw him- ended up giving just a garden variety psychopath/ponerology question) was the idea that there could be "too much order". If order is the light, good, knowledge, how can there ever be too much of it? Maybe too much on a societal scale, since people of all stripes need lessons and a certain balance of order/chaos to attain it. But it seems like the goal of the work is to push all chaos out of our own psyches and our own human relationships. JP remarked before how amazing it is that an LED notice board could countdown the minutes until a bus shows up AND IT ACTUALLY SHOWS UP. We have order degrees of magnitude higher than many earlier human societies. But even those societies JP would say have had their struggles with "too much order" under tyrannical kings, brahim classes, etc.

Seems like there needs to be a distinction between order that is robust, and order that is fragile. Saudi Arabia is fragile order, Putin's Russia is robust order. Economic growth in the industrial age was robust, economic growth in the 2000's was fragile. Seems like the fragile forms of order are just temporary bandages to assuage chaos in their internal domains. This thinking of mine was inspired in part by Nassim Taleb's book Antifragile (VERY GOOD btw), which applies all sorts of mathematic and philosophical understandings related to fragility/robustness to complex systems like markets, political systems, the human body (he advocates ancestral diets and hates pharmaceuticals), social fads; even true scientific progress (when one reads the history) comes from methodical tinkering of enthusiasts, not large bureaucratic institutions "deciding" to invent things for the most part.

 

[Lamp of Orion]

I've read like half the book. So Antifragility is the opposite of fragility. Think of it this way: get a machine that lifts weights and a person who does the same. The machine will break down with time, but a person (under reasonable limits) will in fact adapt and come to lift the same weights with increasing ease.

So that's antifragility in an oversimplified, dare I say, description.

 

[HowToBe]

That's the impression I was getting. It seems like it relates well to The 5th Option by Shiller, regarding the reduction of entropy and informational properties within the Life System.