Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder Read Free

(medical, economic, social planning) is one who makes you engage in policies and actions, all artificial, in which
the benefits are small and visible, and the side effects potentially severe and invisible
.
    There is the medical fragilista who overintervenes in denying the body’s natural ability to heal and gives you medications with potentially very severe side effects; the policy fragilista (the interventionist social planner) who mistakes the economy for a washing machine that continuously needs fixing (by him) and blows it up; the psychiatric fragilista who medicates children to “improve” their intellectual and emotional life; the soccer-mom fragilista; the financial fragilista who makes people use “risk” models that destroy the banking system (then uses them again); the military fragilista who disturbs complex systems; the predictor fragilista who encourages you to take more risks; and many more. 2
    Indeed, the political discourse is lacking a concept. Politicians in their speeches, goals, and promises aim at the timid concepts of “resilience,” “solidity,” not antifragility, and in the process are stifling the mechanisms of growth and evolution. We didn’t get where we are thanks to the sissynotion of resilience. And, what’s worse, we didn’t get where we are today thanks to policy makers—but thanks to the appetite for risks and errors of a certain class of people we need to encourage, protect, and respect.
Where Simple Is More Sophisticated
     
    A complex system, contrary to what people believe, does not require complicated systems and regulations and intricate policies. The simpler, the better. Complications lead to multiplicative chains of unanticipated effects. Because of opacity, an intervention leads to unforeseen consequences, followed by apologies about the “unforeseen” aspect of the consequences, then to another intervention to correct the secondary effects, leading to an explosive series of branching “unforeseen” responses, each one worse than the preceding one.
    Yet simplicity has been difficult to implement in modern life because it is against the spirit of a certain brand of people who seek sophistication so they can justify their profession.
    Less is more and usually more effective
. Thus I will produce a small number of tricks, directives, and interdicts—how to live in a world we don’t understand, or, rather, how to
not be afraid
to work with things we patently don’t understand, and, more principally, in what manner we should work with these. Or, even better, how to dare to look our ignorance in the face and not be ashamed of being human—be aggressively and proudly human. But that may require some structural changes.
    What I propose is a road map to modify our man-made systems to let the simple—and natural—take their course.
    But simplicity is not so simple to attain. Steve Jobs figured out that “you have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple.” The Arabs have an expression for trenchant prose:
no skill to understand it, mastery to write it
.
    Heuristics are simplified rules of thumb that make things simple and easy to implement. But their main advantage is that the user knows that they are not perfect, just expedient, and is therefore less fooled by their powers. They become dangerous when we forget that.

IV. THIS BOOK
     
    The journey to this idea of antifragility was, if anything, nonlinear.
    I suddenly realized one day that fragility—which had been lacking atechnical definition—could be expressed as
what does not like volatility,
and that
what does not like volatility
does not like randomness, uncertainty, disorder, errors, stressors, etc. Think of anything fragile, say, objects in your living room such as the glass frame, the television set, or, even better, the china in the cupboards. If you label them “fragile,” then you necessarily want them to be left alone in peace, quiet, order, and predictability. A fragile object would