Book Review: Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, seems to have anticipated my project of reviewing it, and took pains to make it difficult for me. Writing on the book’s structure:
Someone in the business of “summarizing” books would have to write four or five separate descriptions. But I saw that they were not stand-alone essays at all; each deals with the applications of a central idea, going either deeper or into different territories: evolution, politics, business innovation, scientific discovery, economics, ethics, epistemology, and general philosophy.
Books to me are not expanded journal articles but reading experiences; and the academics who tend to read in order to cite in their writing—rather than read for enjoyment, curiosity, or simply because they like to read—tend to be frustrated when they can’t rapidly scan the text and summarize it in one sentence that connects it to some existing discourse in which they have been involved. Further, the textbook is the polar opposite of the textbook—mixing autobiographical musings and parables with more philosophical and scientific investigations. I write about probability with my entire soul and my entire experiences in the risk-taking business; I write with my scars, hence my thought is inseparable from autobiography. The personal essay form is ideal for the topic of incertitude.
A noble aim, even if it makes my job a bit tougher. To balance the scales, I too shall intrude on the text and offer autobiographical details of my own, when relevant. Though I will not, in the French style, beg forgiveness from you, dear reader, for such digressions. I impose them of my own accord.
Antifragile is certainly no textbook. It intermittently takes on the form of a morality tale, with clear heroes and villains. Taleb’s heroes include grandmothers, powerlifters, mafia dons, William Gladstone, the Stoics, Mulsim poets, Christian saints, Ralph Nader, flaneurs, artisans, and Mother Nature. His villains include suckers, naive rationalists, turkeys, ‘interventionistas’, bankers, Thomas Friedman, career academics, consultants, Myron Scholes, and Ray Kurzweil.
If you were worried that going mainstream might have sanded away his rough edges, rest assured that his eccentricities are back in full force. Taleb’s use of fictional characters has by no means gotten more subtle since The Black Swan. The work is sprinkled with the conversations of ruminating-bookreader Nero Tulip and boisterous-steak-eater Fat Tony. At one point, Taleb places Fat Tony in the Euthyphro dialogue with Socrates, and has his character trounce the old philosopher by reframing the questions.
And the key element of every Taleb book is present right from the start: everyone but him is wrong.
II. The Triad
The University of Chicago’s writing program urges its students (faculty and PhDs, not undergrads) to focus on creating value in their work before anything else. How do you create value? If nothing else, say someone is wrong and try to prove it.
Taleb would have passed such a course with flying colors. He accumulates a lengthy list of people who were wrong, whether of the “sucker,” “sissy,” “naive rationalist,” or “interventionista” flavor, which grows to include nearly all economists, great swaths of the business, technological and medical professions, and philosophers all the way back to Aristotle and Socrates.
He starts by criticizing dictionaries and thesauruses—all of them, in every major language—for making the same mistake. They all list the opposite of “fragility” as “robustness,” “toughness,” or somesuch. Taleb is unimpressed.
Almost all people answer that the opposite of fragile is “robust,” “resilient,” “solid” or something of the sort. But the resilient, robust (and company) are items that neither break nor improve, so you would not need to write anything on them—have you ever seen a package with “robust” in thick green letters stamped on it? Logically, the exact opposite of a “fragile” parcel would be a package on which one has written “please mishandle” or “please handle carelessly.”
The objects with this property—benefiting from shocks and randomness— are antifragile. They include all living things (at some level), ecologies, complex systems, information, and some people.
Taleb illustrates a triad, with fragility on the left, robustness in the center, and antifragility on the right, and ties each one to a mythological figure (Damocles-Phoenix-Hydra). Fragility and antifragility are each other’s opposites, twins with the signs flipped. Robustness is a null state between them. In models of fragility, these may be explicitly used as parameters from -1 to 1.
Taleb previously observed the effects of nonlinearities in The Black Swan, such as with the teacup, which suffers far more from a single drop from one foot than from twelve drops from one inch. But only now has the wider insight become clear. No matter how small the shocks, any object, no matter how robust, will eventually break if exposed to enough of them. It’s purely a matter of time, and the universe has nothing but time.
How is it then that anything has survived to the modern day, after billions of years of shocks, some very large? Surely, that which has survived must be more than robust.
This is the key distinction between the organic and inorganic; in Taleb’s lingo, the cat and the washing machine. The inorganic will necessarily break, each shock only brings it closer to that end. But the cat can survive very strong shocks and improve. Not only does it heal (say from accidentally crawling inside the washing machine) but there’s a good chance it will be stronger for the experience, after a suitable recovery period, and provided the shock was below the lethal or crippling threshold..
In this light, shocks and stressors are necessary, not just helpful, since they represent information about the environment. This is true for cats as well as national economies. Naive attempts to cut shocks and stressors out of life creates long-term fragility, as an astronaut is weaker after going without gravity. And rest assured, everything comes falling back to earth in due time.
III. Barbell Everything
Taleb spends approximately half the book going on about asymmetries—especially convexity effects—and their applications to every field imaginable. He’s even managed to evolve one of the concepts previously debuted in The Black Swan: the barbell.
The barbell, or the less-Brooklyn “bimodal strategy,” places weight on the extremes. In vulgar finance, take extremely safe and extremely risky bets, but nothing moderate. But now, Taleb has expanded it to virtually every domain, with a little help from Lucius Annaeus Seneca.
He analogizes the Stoics’ teachings of denigrating possessions to cutting off downside from a bet. The Stoic is at the mercy of whimsical Fortuna, and does not know if he shall be wealthy or poor, successful or a failure. So he mentally writes off anything that he could possibly lose: every material possession, his net worth, even other people. No longer dreading the loss of those things, he is free to enjoy them, and if Fortuna sees fit to take them away, the Stoic feels as if he has lost nothing. He has domesticated Fortuna.
Taleb raises this to an aesthetic, and a full way of life. He writes accessible personal essays and highly technical works, never hybrids. He powerlifts, trying to break his previous record, and takes it easy the rest of the time. He doesn’t smoke, eat processed foods, ride motorcycles or mess with the mob, but he insults entire professions in books and takes nail-biting bets with his portfolio.
In conversation partners, seek out brilliant scientists and taxi drivers, never middle managers. Marry the accountant and have an affair with the rock star. Be an ascetic, then go to the craziest party in town once a week.
This is the domestication of uncertainty, minimizing how much it can hurt you, then opening yourself up to its rewards. When you’re barbelled, you benefit from volatility. When you’re not, you benefit from monotony. And monotony never lasts.
IV. Killing Volatility
Taleb complains bitterly about a particular modern tendency: the privileging of stability and predictability over volatility. The desire to eliminate major trauma leads to a life filled with high-frequency, low-intensity stressors. This drives him up the wall.
Our antifragilities have conditions. The frequency of stressors matters a bit. Humans tend to do better with acute than with chronic stressors, particularly when the former are followed by ample time for recovery, which allows the stressors to do their jobs as messengers. For instance, having an intense emotional shock from seeing a snake coming out of my keyboard or a vampire entering my room, followed by a period of soothing safety (with chamomile tea and baroque music) long enough for me to regain my emotions, would be beneficial for my health, provided of course that I manage to overcome the snake or vampire after an arduous, hopefully heroic fight and have a picture taken next to the dead predator. Such a stressor would be certainly better than the mild but continuous stress of a boss, mortgage, tax problems, guilt over procrastinating with one’s tax return, exam pressures, chores, emails to answer, forms to complete, daily commutes—things that make you feel trapped in life.
There are two ways to destroy an antifragile object. One, hit it with a shock too big for it to recover from. Meteors usually work. Two, prevent it from recovering. It’s how Heracles neutralized the antifragile Hydra, and how our ancestors chased down faster prey.
Unfortunately, modernity tends towards exactly this model of stressors. It abhors volatility, and prefers a steady and regular regimen of everything from food to exercise, learning to income. There’s no room to recover, and no room to suffer. As a counterpoint, Taleb advocates adding volatility back into your life: fasting and powerlifting are his favorite examples. The signals carry more weight when not drowned out by monotony. Life is more enjoyable with peaks and valleys.
It’s also more stable in the long term. Volatile stressors, so long as they remain non-lethal, expose the weaknesses in systems. Meanwhile, attempts to quash volatility, such as in the economy, only hide the signal and compress volatility. The system grows vulnerable, like a forest deprived of fire. When the shock finally comes—and it always comes—it will be worse than otherwise expected, and the system will be poorly prepared. In trying to iron out the boom-bust cycle, one only succeeds in creating a crash worse than any before seen.
Here we come to one of Taleb’s recurring villains, the fragilista. The empty suit who, thinking he can improve the system, only moves fragility around, priming the system for destruction. In politics as in economics as in demonology, tampering with forces beyond one’s ken has predictable results. They treat the economy as a washing machine, and the state as a sailing ship, as machines which must be maintained by a qualified repairman, instead of primal forces.
Social scientists use the term “equilibrium” to describe balance between opposing forces, say, supply and demand, so small disturbances or deviations in one direction, like those of a pendulum, would be countered by an adjustment in the opposite direction that would bring things back to stability. In short, this is thought to be the goal for an economy.
Looking deeper into what these social scientists want us to get into, such a goal can be death. For the complexity theorist Stuart Kaufman uses the idea of equilibrium to separate the two different worlds of Table 2. For the nonorganic, noncomplex, say, and object on the table, equilibrium (as traditionally defined) happens in a state of inertia. So for something organic, equilibrium (in that sense) only happens with death.
Life, especially the most interesting parts, occur in the swing of the pendulum, in the vortex, in the variance, not the mean. Stability is death.
If I could predict what my day would exactly look like, I would feel a little bit dead.
V. Against the Nerds
Of all the people to wind up devaluing academia, you wouldn't have expected Taleb. His father was an anthropologist, and his mother an oncologist. In a resounding win for nominative determinism, his father’s name was Nagib Taleb, which roughly translates as ‘Student Intelligent’ (or so Taleb claims), and he went on to be a national valedictorian in Lebanon. And his mother’s name was Minerva, all the more.
Nevertheless, Taleb did not attend the rigorous Lebanese Jesuit schools, and grew to understand the negatives of being an “Intelligent Student,” an intellectual deformity that selects for focusing on boring material. He went far in the opposite direction, claiming to be an autodidact in spite of his degrees. He relates his childhood habit of reading any book that wasn’t on the assigned list, of doing only enough work to not flunk and spend the rest of his time learning his own way.
Even so, he graduated from The University of Paris and Wharton Business School, the consummate foreign-educated upper-middle-class individual. How did he become so enamored with Brooklyn taxi drivers and mafia dons, and so anti-nerd?
My intellectual world was shattered as if everything I had studied was not just useless but an organized scam—as follows … I had to cohabit with foreign exchange traders—people who were not involved in technical instruments as I was; their job simply consisted of buying and selling currencies … Coming to this from a highly polished Ivy League environment, I was in for a bit of a shock. You would think that the people who specialized in foreign exchange understood economics, geopolitics, mathematics, the future price of currencies, differentials between prices in countries. Or that they read assiduously the economics reports published in glossy papers by various institutes. You might also imagine cosmopolitan fellows who wear ascots at the opera on Saturday night, make wine sommeliers nervous, and take tango lessons on Wednesday afternoons. Or spoke intelligible English. None of that.
My first day on the job was an astounding discovery of the real world. The population in foreign exchange was at the time mostly composed of New Jersey/Brooklyn Italian fellows. Those were street, very street people who had started in the back office of banks doing wire transfers, and when the market expanded, even exploded, with the growth of commerce and the free-floating of currencies, they developed into traders and became prominent in the business. And prosperous.
My first conversation with an expert was with a fellow called B. Something-that-ends-with-a-vowel dressed in a handmade Brioni suit. I was told he was the biggest Swiss franc trader in the world, a legend in his day—he had predicted the big dollar collapse in the 1980s and controlled huge positions. But a short conversation with him revealed that he could not place Switzerland on the map. Foolish as I was, I thought he was Swiss Italian, yet he did not know there were Italian-speaking people in Switzerland. He had never been there. When I saw that he was not the exception, I started freaking out watching all these years of education evaporating in front of my eyes. That very same day I stopped reading economic reports. I felt nauseous for a while during this enterprise of “deintellectualization”—in fact, I may not have recovered yet.
That … ought to do it.
Taleb derives from this that the price and the reality (or even worse, the economic theory) are not the same thing. You can predict war and still not realize that it necessarily means a rise in oil. You can know everything about Switzerland, and have no advantage (or be at a disadvantage owing to overconfidence and spurious details) when it comes to trading francs.
VI. Against the Predictors
Taleb derives a great error in thought from Aquinas, quoting Averroes, “An agent does not move except out of intention for an end.”
So let us call here the teleological fallacy the illusion that you know exactly where you are going, and that you knew exactly where you were going in the past, and that others have succeeded in the past by knowing where they were going.
Knowing where you are going seems a pretty valuable skill. If you’re planning a trip you’d like to have an itinerary. If you’re running a business, you’d like to have a business plan.
Yet Taleb rejects exactly this; detailed planning beyond general intention is actively harmful. He contrasts the tourist, who is the prisoner of a plan, to the rational flaneur, who changes their plans at each stop (or at least has the option of doing so). He modifies his targets as he gains more information, so the experience is continually refined!
The same goes for the dreaded business plan. Taleb cites a laundry list of prominent companies which began in domains totally disconnected to what finally made them rich; consider how Nokia started as a paper mill, and Raytheon started out making refrigerators.
The key is optionality, and the preservation of optionality. Locking yourself into a single plan prevents you from revising and changing tactics as you gain more information and the landscape changes. It’s fragile.
Taleb makes an even bigger claim. Optionality is preferable to intelligence itself, or can serve as a substitute for intelligence.
If you “have optionality”, you don’t have much need for what is commonly called intelligence, knowledge, insight, skills, and these complicated things that take place in our brain cells. For you don’t have to be right that often. All you need is the wisdom to not do unintelligent things to hurt yourself (some acts of omission) and recognize favorable outcomes when they occur.
This is Taleb’s ‘philosopher’s stone’ aka convexity bias. It’s also the driving force behind evolution. Every mutation and recombination represents extra options for nature to choose from in selection. All that remains is to have a good filtering mechanism, and that comes for free.
All very convenient for Taleb, whose central thesis is “how to live in a world I don’t understand.” He might like the post-rationalists. Fragile systems require a great deal of intelligence to keep running. You need to accurately predict the future, and prepare for it. Taleb cites oil speculators in the leadup to the US invasion of Kuwait, who spent immense resources predicting if war would break out. In fact, they predicted war accurately, but not its consequence. Oil prices dropped instead of rising, and many sophisticated predictors lost their shirt. Meanwhile, Fat Tony observed all this from the sidelines, decided that they were all suckers, and made fat stacks without knowing the first thing about Kuwait, just by betting against the fragile predictors.
If you benefit from convexity bias—if you’re antifragile—you only need enough intelligence to avoid catastrophic risk and to pick up your shekels. The rest takes care of itself.
VII. Via Negativa
Seven sections into the review, and the core still eludes me. Well, instead of talking about the book, let’s talk about what the book isn’t. In Taleb’s own words, it’s non-sissy, non-predictive, non-turkey, non-interventionist. I suppose one could read it in a nonlinear fashion.
This method of talking about what a thing isn’t, via negativa, is a tool Taleb picks up and uses on everything. Rather than adding, he advocates subtraction wherever possible. Subtracting from your diet, from your doctor’s visits, from your reading list, from your portfolio, from knowledge. Remove errors first, and watch problems evaporate.
While in the emergency room for a swollen nose, Taleb grew suspicious of treating swelling with ice, and asked the doctor if there were any studies showing the effectiveness of ice therapy. The doctor replied:
You have a nose the size of Cleveland and you are now interested in … numbers?
To Taleb, this is an example of blind intervention, as his swollen nose clearly wasn’t an instance of danger from the swelling. The inflammation ought not be treated, as it is a necessary step in the body’s healing process.
But this is merely unwise and inconvenient, not dangerous. The unnecessary ice patch is the foundation upon which the edifice of iatrogenics (harm by the healer) is built! Taleb goes as far as to say that, if you want to hasten someone’s death, pay for them to have a personal doctor. They don’t have to be murderous, or even bad, simply having access to medical treatment encourages using it, and every additional procedure and pill removes one from Mother Nature’s time-tested methods.
Taleb would have you subtract from your life everything that hasn’t been around for at least a thousand years, or which doesn’t remove the effects of other technology. Wine and coffee are fine, but sodas aren’t. Digital technology is as well, because it removes inconveniences from the earlier modern and industrial eras. I can’t for the life of me see how Twitter meets this criteria, but I’m sure he has an elegant explanation elsewhere.
VIII. Against the Immortals
So, is there a great difference between Taleb and the rationalists?
On the surface, maybe not. He critiques the Nerd as someone “who thinks exceedingly inside the box” and the Naive Rationalist as “he who thinks the causes for things are knowable, and known to him.” Both are failure modes explicitly called out by the modern rationalist community.
Taleb, the pit trader-turned fund manager, rejects “verbalistic” pursuits, where being right is a matter of convincing others, and prefers instead to use correct knowledge to make money. He would probably approve of bet prediction sites and the rationalist virtue of making bets.
On the other hand… Taleb reminds me of Dumbledore. Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Dumbledore.
And, of course, we have this modern illusion that we should live as long as we can. As if we were each the end product. This idea of the “me” as a unit can be traced to the Enlightenment. And with it, fragility.
I was just reading in John Gray’s wonderful The Immortalization Commission about attempts to use science, in a postreligious world, to achieve immortality. I felt some deep disgust—as would any ancient—at the efforts of the “singularity” thinkers (such as Ray Kurzweil) who believe in humans’ potential to live forever. Note that if I had to find the anti-me, the person with diametrically opposite ideas and lifestyle on the planet, it would be that Ray Kurzweil fellow. It is not just neomania. While I propose removing offensive elements from people’s diets (and lives), he works by adding, popping close to two hundred pills daily. Beyond that these attempts at immortality leave me with a deep moral revulsion.
It is the same kind of deep internal disgust that takes hold of me when I see a rich eighty-two-year-old man surrounded with “babes,” twentysomething mistresses (often Russian or Ukrainian). I am not here to live forever, as a sick animal. Recall that the antifragility of a system comes from the morality 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.
Then say goodbye, have a nice funeral in St. Sergius (Mar Sarkis) in Amioun, and, as the French say, place aux autres—make room for others.
It’s fair to say Taleb isn’t onboard with the transhumanist mission.
I intrude here. How is it that two of my greatest influences, Taleb and Yudkowsky, who have both offered me insights which have transformed my life, could be at such odds, not on any trivial matter, but perhaps the most important?
I foresee the simplest answer: Taleb is completing a Deeply WiseTM cache native to his Greek Orthodox background. Yet, I’m not comfortable writing him off like this. His belief flows from his other positions and arguments smoothly. He expresses elsewhere that nature’s abhorrence of the individual, the evolutionary necessity to sacrifice the organism or the long-term survival of the species, horrifies him. Yet he admires the primacy of nature too much to offer it any defiance.
This is where Taleb and I must part ways.
IX. Autobiography
What more can I say? I reject the vulgar practice of assigning scores or stars to reviews. If my above description of the book’s contents and arguments don’t convince you to read it, I can hardly imagine what will. So I will indulge, and write about myself.
I first read Antifragile in the summer before my junior year of high school (actually, I listened to the audiobook). Growing up, I was the consummate nerd, in Taleb’s vocabulary. Extraordinarily risk-averse, anti-social, eager-to-please to a destructive extent, and widely dismissive and resentful of others.
Antifragile wasn’t the book that burst me out of that bubble; it was Twelve Rules for Life, whose sequel is actually coming out soon. But Antifragile was the next major source of insights, confirming much of Twelve Rules for me while encouraging me to move on from the Golden Lobster Idols. In particular, Antifragile is the book that got me into mathematics.
I didn’t grow up as a ‘math person.’ At a young age I could do mental math quite well, but the insistence on writing out what I could do in my head just fine antagonized me to such an extent that I refused to value the subject. I conceived myself as an essayist, or maybe a writer.
Then came a book which seemed to explain so much, and backed up its arguments with statistics. Not much statistics mind you, but simple, accessible notions. I dug further into Taleb’s writing, and began to idolize him. For the first time, the beauty of mathematics and what it could do were apparent. That year, I took Pre-Calculus, and my instructor (an acerbic, humorous teacher whom I loved and my best friend hated) stoked that flame even hotter.
It wasn’t long after that I first read Scott’s Meditations on Moloch (I wrote a poetry chapbook riffing off it my senior year) and the Sequences. Without Taleb and that professor to bridge the gap and give me an appreciation for quantitative fields, I might have bounced off rationality entirely.
What more can a book do for me? When writing my college admissions letter, I reached back to Taleb and syncretized his notions of antifragility with the school’s mascot, the Phoenix (a little white lie—the proper representation would be Hydra, which isn’t as sexy—but they can’t un-admit me now!). For all I know, that tipped the scales towards admission, and I now study statistics there.
More? I lent the book to a girl my freshman year of college. That didn’t go anywhere. I suppose expecting a book to get me hookups is a bit too much to ask. Still, very useful.
Scott already mentioned in his review of The Black Swan that Taleb was trying to revive certain archaic ideas about the intellectual with Greek and Roman names. Here’s another for that list: megalopsychon, the great-souled man, who takes risks and remains dignified in the face of all things, before whom the words of non-risk-taking suckers are as the sounds of animals!
The arrogance! I adore it! It is a concept, a stance for which I have cried out without knowing it. The hero who is high! The unbridled ego of Taleb! The confidence to stare down whole professions!
Taleb! Taleb! Fragile economies! Wicked doctors! Steak dinners! Partial veganism!
Suckers to be fleeced! Saints to be praised! Consultants weeping in the audience!
But I get ahead of myself—ecstatic beat poetry is not appropriate for a book review.
I collect the voices of my favorite authors and let them battle it out in my head. He and Peterson have such wonderful discussions in there! I put them on as masks too. The Taleb mask has served me well. When I need confidence, when I need to face down a narcissist, when I need to defend my worldview from the enemy, I reach for him.
If you too want to have the voice of a Lebanese volatility specialist in your ear, judging every aspect of your life, read Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder.
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