Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder Read Free Page B

writings are not stand-alone essays on specific topics, with beginnings, ends, and expiration dates; rather, they are nonoverlapping chapters from that central idea, a main corpus focused on uncertainty, randomness, probability, disorder, and what to do in a world we don’t understand, a world with unseen elements and properties, the random and the complex; that is, decision making under opacity. The corpus is called
Incerto
and is constituted (so far) of a trilogy plus philosophical and technical addenda. The rule is that the distance between a random chapter of one book, say,
Antifragile,
and another random chapter of another, say,
Fooled by Randomness,
should be similar to the one between chapters of a long book. The rule allows the corpus to cross domains (by shifting across science, philosophy, business, psychology, literature, and autobiographical segments) without lapsing into promiscuity.
    So the relationship of this book to
The Black Swan
would be as follows: in spite of the chronology (and the fact that this book takes the Black Swan idea to its natural and prescriptive conclusion),
Antifragile
would be the main volume and
The Black Swan
its backup of sorts, and a theoretical one, perhaps even its junior appendix. Why? Because
The Black Swan
(and its predecessor,
Fooled by Randomness
) were written to convince us of a dire situation, and worked hard at it; this one starts from the position that one does not need convincing that (a) Black Swans dominate society and history (and people, because of ex post rationalization, think themselves capable of understanding them); (b) as a consequence, we don’t quite know what’s going on, particularly under severe nonlinearities; so we can get to practical business right away.
No Guts, No Belief
     
    To accord with the practitioner’s ethos, the rule in this book is as follows: I eat my own cooking.
    I have only written, in every line I have composed in my professional life, about things I have done, and the risks I have recommended that others take or avoid were risks I have been taking or avoiding myself. I will be the first to be hurt if I am wrong. When I warned about the fragility of the banking system in
The Black Swan,
I was betting on its collapse (particularly when my message went unheeded); otherwise I felt it would not have been ethical to write about it. That personal stricture applies to every domain, including medicine, technical innovation, and simple matters in life. It does not mean that one’s personal experiencesconstitute a sufficient sample to derive a conclusion about an idea; it is just that one’s personal experience gives the stamp of authenticity and sincerity of opinion. Experience is devoid of the cherry-picking that we find in studies, particularly those called “observational,” ones in which the researcher finds past patterns, and, thanks to the sheer amount of data, can therefore fall into the trap of an invented narrative.
    Further, in writing, I feel corrupt and unethical if I have to look up a subject in a library as part of the writing itself. This acts as a filter—it is the only filter. If the subject is not interesting enough for me to look it up
independently,
for my own curiosity or purposes, and I have not done so before, then I should not be writing about it at all, period. It does not mean that libraries (physical and virtual) are not acceptable; it means that they should not be the
source
of any idea. Students pay to write essays on topics for which they have to derive knowledge from a library as a self-enhancement exercise; a professional who is compensated to write and is taken seriously by others should use a more potent filter. Only distilled ideas, ones that sit in us for a long time, are acceptable—and those that come from reality.
    It is time to revive the not well-known philosophical notion of
doxastic commitment,
a class of beliefs that go beyond talk, and to which we are committed enough to take personal