Antifragile. It's my new favorite word. It's the title of Nassim Nicholas Taleb's latest book.
I'm only a few chapters into it, but already love the notion that what sustains nature, life, economies, just about everything, isn't rigid robustness. Stresses that leave us the same aren't growthful. What we want is to be able to thrive on unpredictability, not-knowing, random stresses.
Wind extinguishes a candle and energizes fire.
Likewise with randomness, uncertainty, chaos: you want to use them, not hide from them. You want to be the fire and wish for the wind... The mission is how to domesticate, even dominate, the unseen, the opaque, and the inexplicable.
How?
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.
...I want to live happily in a world I don't understand.
Beautiful.
Imagine how wonderful it would feel to no longer need to chase after illusory answers, like those offered by religions. We'd be happy not knowing what will happen after death, after this year, after this day, after this moment.
We wouldn't worry about making mistakes, sinning, screwing up, falling down. Every experience would teach us something valuable. We'd understand that since life is unpredictably chaotically random, it isn't possible to know exactly where we're going to go.
Detours and deadends not only are inevitable; they're joyous surprises on the road of life.
...If you are not a washing machine or a cuckoo clock -- in other words, if you are alive -- something deep in your soul likes a certain measure of randomness and disorder. There is a titillating feeling associated with randomness.
...If I could predict what my day would exactly look like, I would feel a little bit dead.
...When you are fragile, you depend on things following the exact planned course, with as little deviation as possible -- for deviations are more harmful than helpful. This is why the fragile needs to be very predictive in its approach, and, conversely, predictive systems cause fragility.
When you want deviations, and you don't care about the possible dispersion of outcomes that the future can bring, since most will be helpful, you are antifragile.
...If every trial provides you with information about what does not work, you start zooming in on a solution -- so every attempt becomes more valuable, more like an expense than an error. And of course you make discoveries along the way.
...He who has never sinned is less reliable than he who has only sinned once. And someone who has made plenty of errors -- though never the same error more than once -- is more reliable than someone who has never made any.
Taleb arouses varying opinions, because he's highly opinionated. I like his style, and most of his core ideas. Here's a rather detailed summary of Taleb's book; looks good, though I didn't read the whole thing.
And here's a video interview of Taleb talking about his book.
Im not sure I really like these pop soft-science books. I'm not saying that these chaps dont come up with an interesting thought or two, usually distilled into some smart-arse pithy buzzword - like anti-fragility.
And I'm not sure it really helps to define things in negative terms, for example in terms of what something is not. It just emphasises how vague the underlying principle being discussed really is.
Its a bit like the Tao Te Ching, which in my limited understanding, attempts to try define absolute reality in terms of what it is not.
How the fuck does anyone know what absolute reality is not?
Thank you kindly and seasons greetings. In the immortal words of Mike Myers: "Lets get pissed!"
Posted by: George | January 01, 2013 at 12:03 PM
George, I think you'd like "Antifragile." It's not at all abstract or hypothetical. And Taleb describes antifragility in very positive terms. It's a quality of natural and human systems which can be observed and measured.
Taleb made his living as a trader for quite a while. He's very much into concrete practical life, not airy-fairy theorizing. In fact, he detests theories, preferring phenomenology. This causes that. Or this leads to that, in an observable fashion.
However, Taleb correctly observes that often we can't predict what will happen. Yet theorists believe they can. I like his emphasis on understanding how a system responds to the world, rather than trying to predict exactly what the system will do.
Posted by: Brian Hines | January 01, 2013 at 10:11 PM
Brian,
yes, there is something interesting about systems, i can see why it grabbed your fancy with your background.
It is a bizarre phenomena, where it seems that so many systems are more than the sum of their constiuent parts.
the cell system made up of countless atoms, the body system made up of countless cells, the earth system (if there's anything to lovelock's gaia), etc and possible the universal system.
but the interesting thing about these systems is how them seem to form to offer more than their parts, some sort of emergent complexity.
the body made of cells, which in turns is made of atoms. the cells in our body are constantly being divided and destroyed and renewed until death, our physical form ages with our body system being formed of a completely different set of atoms, and yet consciousness somehow still exists. The sense of self is maintained.
I presume your system theory studies were more on physical (material) systems, but i suspect your personal interest in spirituality, and the holistic rather than reducible approach seemingly adopted by many mystic traditions, made you ask similar questions.
Posted by: George | January 02, 2013 at 01:37 PM