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.

Antifragile explained

Embracing Antifragile

Antifragile explained - mild profanity - 7 min.

This is How - Augusten Burroughs

In This is How  author Augusten Burroughs describes in brutally frank sometimes profane terms how to deal with the worst life has to throw at us.  This book is not a fuzzy warm blanket but a reasonably good guide to surviving hell on earth. He describes how he supports a friend with a terminal illness.  He regrets planning the funeral when he should have spent time with his friend.

Examine why something is only a want.  What is preventing it from being a need? What is the benefit to the status quo?  If something isn't changing in our lives and we want it to change but it is just not happening then its because we don't need it to change.  The author describes need with this analogy.  Your car has sunk into the bottom of the lake.  You need to open the door or the windows or you will die.  You do everything you can to get it done.  Motivation is not a problem.

Life isn't fair.  When something bad happens an apology is nice but it can not change the past.  Move forward and deal with what is happening now. Do not wallow in self pity hoping some adult will come along and make it all better.  People attend self pity parties alone because no one else wants to be there.

My Precious - Gollum

Living in the past is a trap.  Reliving it and creating a myth about it is attempting to mold invisible clay into something no one can see.  However, if we use the past as a source of inspiration for creation it allows for artistic expression to improve or inform the present and future. In my interpretation of his writing,  we can choose to treat memories from the past like Gollum's Precious Ring.  We bring it out on special occasions and carry it us with us everywhere showing it to only a special few.  It weighs us down as we obsess about it and prevents us from living it the moment.

He ends the book with the story of a 15 year old girl who changed the world by seeing the truth and bravely naming it.  The author encourages us to do the same.

James Lileks Interior Desecrations

James Lileks: Interior Desecrations: Hideous Homes from the Horrible '70s looks at the 1970's brass age of interior design.  He provides photographic evidence of modern designs from yesteryear.  Bold color schemes including yellow, lime green, brown and tangerine orange come to life again.  He wrote the book in part to head off any nostalgia for the interior design of the 70's.  He succeeds.

Relive the inch deep shag carpet, the round furniture and the multicolored drapes captured in faded Kodachrome.  Examine futuristic recycled furniture and interior furnishings decades before their time.

The perfect waif's sitting room - James Lilek's book

Typical photo from James Lilek's book advocating attractive repurposing of items

Visions by Michio Katu

Michio Kato's Visions was published in 1997.  The book offers predictions about ways science will change the twenty first century and beyond.  The topics cover the computer revolution, the biomolecular revolution and the quantum revolution. 

Most of his near term predictions about the computer revolution have come to pass regarding the expansion of the internet and e-commerce.

His discussion of energy and civilization classification was very thought provoking.  At present, the earth is a class 0 civilization obtaining most of it's energy from decayed plants or uranium.  With the expansion of energy needs additional resources will be needed for the planet using energy from the whole planet and the nearby solar system. 

Planetary societies to become "immortal" need to advance in their technological expertise to protect the planet from external forces, comets and asteroids and control climate and weather.  The species will need to expand the civilization across the galaxy to protect the survival of the species in the event of a local supernova event.  He advocates sending self replicating robots to progressively colonize other planets. 

The book Visions: How Science Will Revolutionize the 21st Century is available from Amazon.com and other retailers

2057 Humans Michio Katu 8 minutes

The world in 2030 64 minutes

 

Can nanotechnology create a utopia? 6 min.

 

The Happiness Advantage by Shawn Achor

 

 

The Happiness Advantage by Shawn Achor reviews the positive psychology research and provides seven principles to happiness at work.

I applied one of the principles: The Zorro spot- to cleaning my usually cluttered office.  Concentrate effort on one small aspect of the problem and defend that territory.  It can also be applied to writing a book or a screenplay.  You do not write a book, you write one page at a time.

He also reviews the literature on willpower:  It is an easily exhaustible resource and when it is gone performance on subsequent tasks suffers.  In my interpretation, the person transitions from caring about the problem and working hard to a state of "whatever".   He used the example of a chocolate cake temptation destroying a diet.  The way to break through the willpower resource depletion problem is to make an activity habitual so it can be done without much thought or effort like brushing teeth.    Initially establishing the behavior is difficult, like learning to juggle.  At first it impossible to attempt to juggle the balls without complete concentration. After weeks of practice,  the same task can be done while carrying on a conversation.

He also recommends interpreting a negative outcome or failure as falling up rather than falling down.  What can I learn from this adverse situation that will make me a better person?  When I was briefly disabled,  I decided to start to write blogs for several reasons, to improve my writing and to keep track of information I was discovering and off load part of my brain.  The larger purpose was to help others improve themselves through learning.  People can interpret bad situations as "Why did this happen to me?" or I recognize that what happened to me is awful but I will use it to appreciate what I have left and be a more grateful caring person.   

Shawn is also a believer that repeated failure leads to success if we do not fall into the trap of learned helplessness.  This was explored in more detail in the book Adapt by Tim Harford.  Students can apply a self identity model of "I am a smart person" as a fixed personality trait to be defended or as I am a person who learns from my mistakes.  The latter person is more willing to learn new things while expecting to fail.  This was noted in Jan McGonigal's book Reality is Broken.  People learning how to become better at computer games expect to fail initially as they start out.  The key is to start small and do the preparation first. 

Shawn describes a high powered executive who wanted to become a marathon runner in one month.  She failed miserably because she was not willing to do the small initial steps to prepare herself for her larger task.  If you want it all now you will never have it.

Shawn provides a lot of helpful advice and it is a good review of other author's and researcher's work on positive psychology.  Use your creative brain and not let circumstances define who you are but allow yourself the grace to be grateful for what you have and use this information to fall up to a becoming a better person.

Shawn Achor is available as a public speaker on many topics.  His book The Happiness Advantage is available at Amazon.com and other retailers.

Happiness Advantage - 3 minute summary

 

Shawn Achor at Ted Ex in Bloomington, Indiana - 12 minutes

 

Black Swan by Nassim Taleb

Black Swan by Nassim Talib covers the topic of predicting the future when it is chaotic an opaque.  People often foolishly believe they have much more control over the future than they actually have. 

When compensating the performance of people predicting highly random events it is important to note that pure chance may have more of an influence than skill.  Individuals will take very small snippets of information and construct beautiful idealized theories that utterly fail to predict reality.

Black swan events cover things with a low probability of occurring but with a big impact.  These events are difficult to predict.   I was fortunate enough to anticipate the need for a back up power supply for the sump pump in my house.  Roughly once in every five to ten years a strong rainstorm will cause the power to go out and I was fortunate to be able to run the sump on back up battery power.  I had purchased the back up unit approximately 5 years ago for just that event.  If I had used evidence from the past three years when we had no loss if power I would have had a wet basement.

The misuse of mathematics to predict the future in a random unpredictable world is fraught with problems.  It is also easy to fall in love with a theory and to cherry pick evidence for it.

Evidence based medicine when properly applied is a way of getting a better sense of the truth.  I've watched cancer tests on research animals that have been very helpful in accurately predicting the efficacy of treatment regimes.   Anecdotal evidence does not control for the random positive effects that occur and cause people to chase treatment options that may be harmful, useless or less helpful than a placebo. 

Nassim does not suffer fools.  He is in a position to call them out and speak truth to ignorance.  I found the book to be refreshing and helpful in making decisions about predicting and unpredictable future.  We need to assume that our assumptions about the status quo are wrong. 

Black Swan - A book review (11 min)

Nassim Talib - Google book talks (60 min)

For further information about Nassim Talib go to his website Fooled by Randomness.



Jared Diamond - The World Until Yesterday

Jared Diamond's book, The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? , compares and contrasts paleolithic cultures with present day western cultures.  Jared was able to visit some of these areas because some cultures were untouched by civilization.  Portions of New Guinea have made the 10,000 year transition from primitive to modern culture in the space of 70 years starting with their discovery in the 1930's.

He advocates constructive paranoia in dealing with dangers in society.  These change based on location.  In the  primitive cultures, death from falling or from dead trees falling on people is a major problem.  That is why smart people in these cultures do not sleep under dead trees.  These would fit the definition of Nassim Talib's Black Swan event.   I was surprised at the high number fatalities from thorn scratches resulting from untreated bacterial infections. 

He does not romanticize ancient cultures finding the brutal inter tribal warfare and the practice of killing strangers, killing widows and the high rate of communicable diseases in the primitive cultures to be undesirable.  He does find the basic creativity of building your own toys and making your own fun to be more desirable than having the fun created for you.  If you build it yourself you know how it works.

He compares and contrasts state society and primitive cultures concluding that the legal system provides a cap on revenge killing.  He also asks the question of why people choose to have a parasitic ruling class over anarchy and concludes that people prefer stability and security to anarchy.

The scourge of modern culture is the NCD's - Non communicable diseases.  He focuses on type II diabetes and high blood pressure as examples and explains the natural selection process that makes groups of individuals more susceptible to these chronic illnesses. 

In primitive cultures far from salt water, salt is a difficult commodity to acquire requiring natives to ash leaves, dissolve them and rehydrate bitter salts.  When these native cultures are converted to modern diets they find the readily available salt to tempting to pass up and the rates of hypertension and heart attacks in these groups is very high. 

Type II diabetes is problematic in cultures subjected to periodic bouts of starvation.  Only the members of the culture who most efficiently process food survive by acquiring a "thrifty gene".  When these people start eating three meals a day and reduce their activity level as they don't have to work as hard to acquire food, the rates of obesity and type II diabetes go from zero to 30 to 40 %.

Jared provides a thoughtful discussion about religion and why people invest so much time into it. He notes the reasons for religion have changed over time.  Karen Armstrong covers this in greater detail in her Short History of Myth.  The original need to explain how the world works has declined.  The need for comfort in times of trouble is still present as is the need to ascribe meaning to life and the need for group support.  As most of us will hit a crisis of religious belief in our life it is important to understand what we want out of it.  Belief in magical thinking such as the need for water diviners increases when the outcome is highly variable as in areas with a complex geology and unpredictable aquifers.  These people are not needed when the outcome is predictable. 

Jared Diamond - The World Until Yesterday -21 minutes

Go to Jared Diamond's Book page for further thoughts from the author.