Books For Your Mind: Anti Fragile- Things that Gain from Disorder

Saturday, September 14, 2013

Anti Fragile- Things that Gain from Disorder - Nassim Taleb

Nassim Taleb's book, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (Incerto) , covers a lot of ground including medicine, finance, religion and politics. The book represents a capstone to his other books - Black Swan and Fooled by Randomness. He provides evidence that modernity's attempt at suppressing variability makes the affected systems more fragile and susceptible to Black Swan events. The rare unpredictable events with large consequences.

Efforts to reduce variability in all aspects of our lives make us much more fragile. We need small diners to rise up and defy the odds and be successful. We also need other diners to fail and these need to happen. Big payoffs often occur after repeated small failures.

He uses the human body's ability to respond to good stress as an example of antifragility. The more the body is gradually pushed to higher performance the more resilient it becomes. This is the opposite for a machine, which wears out faster the more it is used.

He provides a table with a list of items that are categorized as fragile, robust and antifragile. Soccer Moms are listed as fragile, street fighters and those who learned from experience rather than from didactic learning are antifragile. He offers a strong critique of the didactic learning system at schools and universities.  These systems allow people to qualify for jobs that provide a comfortable living but do not produce the innovators and risk takers needed to improve society.

He gives examples on humans failed attempts to improve nature. These include, trans fats, high fructose corn syrup, artificial sweeteners. He also discourages spending money on supplements that attempt to optimize good health as there is only minor possible gain with the high likelihood of unintended side effects.

Medicine: Go after the really bad stuff. Trauma and serious diseases. Give the body a chance to fix the minor stuff and allow for the fact that there will be some natural variability in blood pressure and other health measurements.

Our bodies are not clean physics experiments with calories in and out being the sole determination of weight gain. We also have complex feedback loops that provide signals for the body to regulate many systems.

Introducing chemicals that have not been selected through the evolutionary process is more often than not likely to be harmful at worst and not beneficial at best. Humans have been produced by an evolutionary process of tinkering, adjustment to the environment. Adding something foreign to that environment for example: cigarette smoke, requires the proof of benefit not just the absence of harm.   Harm which may come 10 to 20 years after the minimal benefit (Thalidomide for example).

He also encourages increasing the amount of variability in our lives to make us more antifragile. It's OK to occasionally fast and skip a meal to give the body a bit of stress. Food taste better after you do physical labor. Being comfortable makes us fragile. Consider the region of the world your ancestors came from to determine your diet and possible intolerances. If you came from parts of the world where cow's milk was not a staple, you are more likely to not tolerate lactose.

Nassim is a strong advocate for skin in the game. If you take a risk you get the reward or the loss. He condemns systems designed to allow one group to reap all of the benefits with the risk of failure transferred to other people. He includes banks that "are too big to fail" in this category.   He expresses extreme pessimism about banks in general as they historically provide minimal gain while periodically collapsing leaving a wake of destruction.