Book Notes and quotes on Anti-Fragile by Nassim Taleb

pg. 72. The story of Titanic and how if it didn't happen then they would have kept building larger and larger ships and there would have been a greater tragedy. This is in the subunits heading of "Learning from the Mistakes of Others." Every plane crash brings us closer to safety. This is where is allows it to be improved through flight but not the economy because the way it is built is not anti fragile.

pg. 74. A loser is someone who, after making a mistake, doesn't introspect, doesn't exploit it, feels embarrassed and defensive rather than enriched with new piece of information, and try to explain why he made a mistake rather than moving on. These types often consider themselves the victims of some large reply, a bad boss, bad weather.

Finally, I thought. He was never sent is less reliable than he who has only sent once. And someone who has made plenty of errors – though never the same area more than once – is more reliable than someone who has never made any.

pg. 100. The difference between the banker (fragile) and the taxi driver (comparatively anitfragile artisan taxi driver).

pg. 101. Confusing people a little bit is beneficial -- it is good for you and good for them. If someone comes home everyday at 6:00 and then he misses that time then his family will go nuts for being a few minutes late.

pg. 102. Consider the method of annealing (heat (metal or glass) and allow it to cool slowly in order to remove internal stresses and toughen it) in metallurgy).

pg. 102. Buridan's Donkey that comes from a medieval philosopher Jean de Burden where when some system are stuck in a dangerous impasse, randomness and only randomness can unlock them and set them free.

pg. 103. Randomness works well in search -- sometimes better than humans.

Pg. 103. The magic is that such change of regime, from chaos to order, did not take place by removing chaos but by adding random, completely random but low-intensity shocks.

pg. 105. The tyranny of choice which you can see in lengthen and complication of menus.

Pg. 107. And there are ethical issues I leave to Chapter 24, particularly casuistry (specious or excessively subtle reasoning intended to rationalize or mislead).

Argued about Iran where now the theocratic regime in Iran today is largely the result of such repression from the US's involvement by creating the Shah of Iran for stability. We need to learn to think in second steps, chains of consequences, and side effects.

Time for American policy makers to understand that the more they intervene in other countries for the sake of stability, the more they bring instability (except for emergency-room style cases.

Pg. 108. His definition of modernity is humans' large scale domination of the environment, the systematic smoothing of the world's jaggedness, and the stifling of volatility and stressors. Pg. 108. Modernity is a Procrustean bed, good or bad -- a reduction of humans to what appears to be efficient and useful. Consider the lion in the zoo with the comfort and predictability of the zoo. Pg. 110. An example of kids getting their tonsils out and the break even point between benefits and harm. This would be "naive interventionism." Pg. 111. Iatrogenic -- induced unintentionally in a patient by a physician. Induced in a patient as a the result of a physician's words or actions. ahy-a-truh-jen-ik iatros -- in latin is a physician and genic -- producing Going to the doctor ran the risk of getting sicker. An example was George Washington where the bloodletting caused his death. Pg. 112. Pharma plays the game of concealed and distributed iatrogenic, and it has been growing. Pg. 113. Taking the concept of iatrogenic into non-medicine and to the impression that we humans are so necessary to making things function and push this word into political science, economics, urban planning, education, and more domains. Pg. 117. In social science we should call these constructs "chimeras" rather than theories. Note: a chimera is what international law is somewhat. Not based on reality but a fire-breathing female monster with a lion's head, a goat's body and a serpent's tail. Pg. 118. Just as a little bit of fire here and there gets rid of the flammable material in a forest, a little bit of harm here and there in an economy weeds out the vulnerable firms early enough to allow them to "fail early" and minimize the long-term damage to the system. Pg. 120-121. To create a protocol to determine when to intervene and when to leave systems alone. In Syria when should we intervene and what is the protocol. Pg. 121. Fabius Maximus what nicknamed Cunctator, "the Procrastinator" and drove Hannibal who had the military superiority, crazy by avoiding and delaying engagement. Pg. 122. A latin phrase "festina lente" meaning "make haste slowly." Pg. 123. Procrastination is a message from our natural willpower via low motivation and may be necessary in certain circumstances. Pg. 125. If you want to accelerate someone's death, give him a personal doctor. I don't mean provide him with a bad doctor ... we can see from the tonsillectomy story that access to data increases intervention, causing us to behave like the neurotic fellow. Michael Jackson's personal doctor has been sued for something equivalent to over intervention. Pg 126. The difference between noise and signal and as you observe dad on hourly basis, as people immersed in the news and market price variations do, the split becomes 99.5% noise to 0.5% signal Pg. Which is why anyone who listens to news except one very very significant events take place is one step below sucker. Pg. Consider that a iatrogenic of newspapers. Newspaper should be of two – line length on some days, 200 pages on others – and proportion with the intensity of the single. Pg. 135. He came up with the idea of Fragility - Robustness - Antifragility after listening to some Korean guy make a prediction. And forecasting cans be not neutral but it is all iatrogenics. Pg. 136. We need to switch the blame from the inability to see an event coming to the failure to understand namely, "why did we build some thing so fragile to these types of events?" Not seeing a tsunami or an economic event coming is excusable; building something fragile to them is not. Pg. 137. Social, economic, and cultural life lie in the Black Swan domain and the physical world less so. He wrote this but storms and other physical events could be the Black Swan. Pg. 138. What is nonmeasureable and non predictable will remain nonmeasuareable and non predictable, no matter how many PhDs with Russian and Indian names you put on the job. Pg. 150. But noise it was: wasted effort, cacophony, unaesthetic behavior, increased entropy <-- lack of order or predictability; gradual decline into disorder. Pg. 152. His point is that wisdom in decision making is vastly more important -- not just practically, but philosophically -- than knowledge. Pg. Apocryphal - a story or statement of doubtful authenticity, although widely circulated as being true. The story might be apocryphal, though from what I have witnessed, it Pg. 163. Stable life and good genes. Pg. 163. Yiddish proverb that says "provide for the worst; the best can take care of itself." This may sound like a platitude, but it is not: just observe how people tend to provide for the best and hope that the worst will take care of itself. Pg. 166. European writers are not attached to the media or academic world. Kafka was an insurance salesman, Spinoza was a lens maker which left their philosophy completely immune to any form of academic corruption. Pg. 165. There are some risk and others no risk. He doesn't smoke, no sugar, no motorcycle, ... Pg. 174. The worst side effect of weal this the social association it forces on its victims, as people with big houses tend to end up socializing with other people with big houses. Pg. 176. Sour grapes - as in Aesop's fable - is when someone convinces himself that the grapes he cannot reach are sour. 188. We use randomness to spoon-feed us with discoveries - which is why anti fragility is necessary. 194: note- we learn thru trial and error and by optionality. When the girls get frustrated with some task it is really just trial and error. 196. Yiddish saying "if the student is smart,the teacher takes the credit" And iatrogenics is never part of the discovery when education hurts someone. Pg. 200. "We are suckers for the sophisticated." Academia is well equipped to tell us what it did for us, not what it did not Pg. 163. Stable life and good genes. Yiddish proverb that says "provide for the worst; the best can take care of itself." This may sound like a platitude, but it is not: just observe how people tend to provide for the best and hope that the worst will take care of itself. Pg. 166. European writers are not attached to the media or academic world. Kafka was an insurance salesman, Spinoza was a lens maker which left their philosophy completely immune to any form of academic corruption. Pg. 165. There are some risk and others no risk. He doesn't smoke, no sugar, no motorcycle, ... Pg. 174. The worst side effect of weal this the social association it forces on its victims, as people with big houses tend to end up socializing with other people with big houses. Pg. 176. Sour grapes - as in Aesop's fable - is when someone convinces himself that the grapes he cannot reach are sour. Pg. 188. We use randomness to spoon-feed us with discoveries - which is why anti fragility is necessary. Pg. 194: note- we learn thru trial and error and by optionality. When the girls get frustrated with some task it is really just trial and error. Pg. 196. Yiddish saying "if the student is smart,the teacher takes the credit" And iatrogenics is never part of the discovery when education hurts someone. Pg. 200. "We are suckers for the sophisticated." Academia is well equipped to tell us what it did for us, not what it did not Pg. 224. Epistemic - of or relating to knowledge or to the degree of its validation. In cooking recipes are derived entirely without conjectures about the chemistry of taste buds, with no role for any "epistemic base" to generate theories out of theories. Pg. 226. China did not have "European mania for tinkering and improving." Pg. 226-227. Bill Bryson's "Home" he found in ten times more vicars and clergymen leaving recorded traces for posterity than scientists, physicists, economists, and even inventors. Pg. 235. The following discussion will show how the unknown, what you don't see, can contain good news in one case and bad news in another. And in Extremistan territory, things get even more accentuated. Evidence of absence is not absence of evidence - for the anti fragile, good news tends to be absent from past data and for the fragile it is the bad news that doesn't show easily. Pg. 234. When engaging in tinkering you incur a lot of small losses, then once in a while you find something rather significant. Pg. 239. A "Charlatan" was held to be a synonym for empirical. The word "empiric" designated someone who relied on experiment and experience to ascertain what was correct. In other words, trial and error and tinkering. Pg. 242. Seneca - we study for life not in the classroom Pg. 246. He kept a log starting a log he picked a book on Hegel. Pg. 247. He is writing about philosophy. Pg. 248. "What I decided to read on my own I still remember" Pg. 255. "What is not intelligible to me is not necessarily unintelligent Pg. 261. "But we know that collectively society doesn't appear to advance with organized education" Pg. 264. It would be like prostitutes listening to technical commentary by nuns. Pg. 271. Concave (curve inward) and Convex (curve outward) 275. A life of redundancy - personal discipline forces me to build buffers, and carry a notebook, it allowed me to write an entire book of aphorisms (is a terse saying, expressing a general truth, principle, or astute observation, and spoken or written in a laconic and memorable form.) Pg. 278. "Defend a doctoral thesis in the history of German dance." Pg. 282. By getting too large we become fragile. Pg. 284. Projects and travel are examples of the asymmetry when it is delayed by time. Pg. 285. There is a over confidence bias Pg. 285. Globalization has had the effect of making connotations planetary - as if the entire world became a huge room with narrow exits and people rushing to the same doors, with accelerated harm. Pg. 291. Blow ups don't happen everyday and poorly built bridges don't collapse immediately Pg. 293. "If you can say something straightforward in a complicated manner with complex theorems, even if there is no large gain in rigor from these complicated equations, people take the idea very seriously. Pg. 294. Note. Wars like air travel and road traffic tend to get worse, not better. Traffic and wars do rarely experience the equivalent of positive disturbances. Pg. This one-sidedness brings both underestimation of randomness and underestimation of harm, since one is more exposed to harm than benefit from error.
pg. 298. The more nonlinear, the more the function of something divorces itself from the something. If traffic were linear, then there would be no difference in traffic time between the two following situations: 90,000, then 110,000 car on the one hand, or 100,000 cars on the other.

The more volatile the something - the more uncertainty - the more the function divorces itself from the something.

If the function is convex (anti-fragile), then the average of the function of something is going to be higher than the function of the average of something. And the reverse when the function is concave (fragile).

pg. 299. The grandmother does better at 70 degrees Fahrenheit than at an average of 70 degrees with one hour at 0, another at 140 degrees. The more dispersion around the average, the more harm for her.

pg. 300 . The more uncertainty, the more role of optionality to kick in, and the more you will outperform.

pg. 301. Recall that we had no name for the color blue but managed rather well without it. We stayed for a long part of our history culturally, not biologically, color blind. Similar to Anti-Fragile and not having a name for it but people relied on it.

Almost anything around us of significance is hard to grasp linguistically — and in fact the more powerful, the more incomplete our linguistic grasp.

The “apophatic” focuses on what cannot be said directly in words, from the Greek apophasis (swing no, or mentioning without mentioning).

The reader might thus recognize the logic behind the barbell. Remember from the logic of the barbell that it is necessary to first remove fragilities.

pg.303. Subtractive epistemology - contribution to knowledge consists in removing what we think is wrong… So knowledge grows by subtraction much more than by addition.

In political system, a good mechanism is one that helps remove the bad guy; it’s not about what to do or who to put in. For the bad guy can cause more harm than the collective actions of good ones.

pg. 305. Ali Bin Abi-Taleb said “keeping one’s distance from an ignorant person is equivalent to keeping company with a wise man.” A modern version is by Steve Jobs stating “People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully.”

Via negative lies in the less-is-more idea.

pg. 307. People want more data to “solve problems.” He once testified in Congress against a project to fund a crisis forecasting project. The people involved were blind to the paradox that we have never had more data than we have now, yet have less predictability than ever.

note: The problem with overeating and all the other issues in life. Just eliminate and make it less. Tim Ferriss had a podcast and a blog about this as well as in his 4-hour work week book.

pg.310. “Time has sharp teeth that destroys everything,” declaimed the sixth-century(B.C.) poet Simonides of Ceos.

pg. 311. So Simonides had the *adumbration* of the idea.

Adumbration - transitive verb. to give a sketchy outline.

pg. 313. When asked to imagine the future we have a tendency to take the present as a baseline, then produce speculative destiny by adding new technologies and products to it and what sort of makes sense.

pg. 314. There is a blindness to this over-technologizing.

pg. 319. But in general, the older the technology, not only the longer it is expected to last, but the more certainty he can attach to such a statement.

Pg. 320. Much progress comes form the young because of their relative freedom from the system and courage to take action that older people lost as they become trapped in life. But it is precisely the young who proposes ideas that are fragile, not because they are young, but because most seasoned ideas are fragile.

A friend of his, Paul Doolan, wrote him a letter about how could we teach the children skills for the twenty first century since we do not know which skills will be needed in the 21 century. He figured out an elegant applicator the large problem that Karl Popper called the error of historicism.

P.321. Information has a nasty property: it hides failure. Many people have been drawn to, say, financial markets and hearing success stores of someone getting rich in the stock market … but since failures are buried and we don’t hear about them, investors are led to overestimate their chances of success.

p322. Treadmill Effect where we look to new things all the time.

There is a strange inconsistency in the way we perceive items across the technological and real domains.

pg 324. Urban planning demonstrates the central property of the so-called top-down effect: top-down is usually irreversible, so mists tend to stick, whereas bottom-up is gradual and incremental, with creation and destruction along the way.

pg. 328. Naturally born weights have a logic to them. We use feet, miles, ponds, inches, furlongs … because these are remarkably intuitive and we can use them with minimum expenditure of cognitive effort. Likewise a stone (14 pounds) corresponds to … well, a stone.

pg. 337. Some questioned smoking and the response would be “do you have evidence that this is harmful?” As usual, the solution is simple, an extension of via negativa and Fat Tony’s **don’t-be-a-sucker** rule: the non-natural needs to prove its benefits, the the natural.
Nature is to be considered much less of a sucker than humans. In complex domain, only time - a long time - is evidence.

pg.337. The “do you have evidence” fallacy, mistaking evidence of no harm for no evidence of harm, is similar to the one of misinterpreting NED (no evidence of disease) for evidence of no disease.

pg. 339. We call diseases of civilization result from the attempt by humans to make life comfortable for ourselves against our own interest, since the comfortable is what fragilizes.

pg. 339. First principle of iatrogenics is as follows: we do not need evidence of harm to claim that a drug or an unnatural **via positive** procedure is dangerous.

pg 340. Margarine was to be believed to be good and a number of women’s pregnancy pills to avoid nausea episodes caused defects. These two mistakes are quite telling because, in both cases, the benefits appeared to be obvious and immediate, though small, and the harm remained delayed for year.

pg.341. Of the hundred and twenty thousand drugs available today, I can hardly find a **via positiva ** one that makes a healthy person unconditionally “better”.

pg. 342. the iatrogenic is in the patient, not in the treatment. If the patient is close to death, all speculative treatments should be encouraged — no hold barred. Conversely, if the patient is near healthy, then Mother Nature should be the doctor.

Pg. 344. What made medicine mislead people for so long is that its success were prominently displayed, and its mistakes literally buried — just like so many other interesting stories in the cemetery of history.

Looking at the difference of rationalism and empiricism and relation to this book. Taleb I think believes more in empiricism because of the trial and error factor.

pg. 345. The difference between a surgeon and a doctor. One was built around experience-driven heuristics and the other reposed on theories, nay, a general theory of humans.
pg. 348. Evolution proceeds by undirected, convex bricolage or tinkering, inherently robust, i.e., with the achievement of potential stochastic gains thanks to continuous, repetitive, small, localized mistakes.

pg.349. If there is something in nature you don’t understand, odds are it makes sense in a deeper way that is beyond your understanding. So there is a logic to natural things that is much superior to our own. Just as there is a dichotomy in law: innocent until proven guilty as opposed until proven innocent, let me express my rule as follows: what Mother Nature does is rigorous until proven otherwise; what humans and science do it flawed until proven otherwise.

pg.349. Nothing can match the track record of nature.

pg.351. He is writing about health and makes a great point about the biology and looking at it from a minimum requirement because he just needs to look at the regularities of experience. Before he spoke about how theories always change, in other words, we have in biology a green lumber problem.

pg.351. For history of ancient and medieval medicine it was split into three traditions:

1. The rationalists (based on present theories, the need of global understanding of what things were made for)

2. Skeptical empiricists (who refused theories and were skeptical of idea making claims about the unseen)

3. Methodists (who taught each other some simple medical heuristics stripped of theories and found an even more practical way to be empiricists).

pg.359. Error of logic called "affirming the consequent".

pg.360. Druin Burch, in "Taking the Medicine” writes “the armful effects of smoking are roughly equivalent to the combined good ones of every medical intervention developed since the war …. Getting rid of smoking provides more benefit than being able to cure people of every possible type of cancer.”

The ancients, Ennius wrote, “The good is mostly in the absence of bad.”

pg.362. Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. put it “if all the medications were dumped in the sea, it would be better for mankind but worse for the fishes.”

He derived the rule that what is called “healthy” is generally unhealthy, just as “social” networks are antisocial, and the “knowledge” - based economy is typically ignorant.

pg.363-364. He is talking about the elimination diet like Tim Ferriss did. **Negativa**

pg.368. Indeed, the idea of breakfast as a main meal with cereals and other such materials has been progressively shown to be harming humans … we are not designed to be receiving foods from the delivery person. In nature, we had to expend some energy to eat. Lions hunt to eat, they don’t eat their meal then hunt for pleasure.

pg.368-369. We have ample evidence that intermittently depriving organism of food has been shown to engender beneficial effects on many functions.

pg.379. And the “ethical” middle class may work for a tobacco company — and thanks to casuistry call themselves ethical.

pg.379. … as a child, I had admired him before his erudition, but was not overly fazed since erudition on its own does not make a man.

pg.380. Hammurabi’s code — talking about a builder and if the building collapses then he, the builder, will be put to death. The entire idea is that the builder knows more, a lot more, than any safety inspector, particularly about what lies hidden in the foundations — making it the best risk management rule ever, as the foundation, with delayed collapse, is the best place to hide risk.

pg. 385. The past is fluid, marred with selection biases and constantly revised memories.

Pg. 386. **Verba volent**, words fly. Never have people who talk and don’t do been more visible, and played a larger role, than in modern times.

Pg. 388. Writing about Stieglitz and other academic writers, this is an illustration of the academics-who-write-papers-and-talk syndrome in its greatest severity. So many academics propose something in one paper, then the opposite in another paper, without penalty to themselves from having been wrong in the first paper since there is a need only for consistency within a single paper, not across one’s career.

Pg. 389. There is the iatrogenic of the medical Charlton and snake oil sales person causing harm but he sort of knows it and liesPG. 389. There is the iatrogenic of the medical Charlton and snake oil sales person causing harm but he sort of knows it and lies low after he is caught. And there is far more vicious form of iatrogenic by experts who use their more acceptable status to claim later that they warned of harm. As they did not know they were causing iatrogenic, they cure iatrogenic with iatrogenic. Then things explode.

Pg. 389. Doctor advice by psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer has a simple heuristic. Never ask the doctor what you should do. Ask him what he would do if he were in your place.

Pg. 390. To put in Fat Tony terms: suckers try to be right, nonsuccess try to make the buck, or : ****Suckers try to win arguments, nonsuccess try to win.**** To put it again in other words: it is rather good thing to lose arguments. NOTE: same thing Gerry Spence would say.

Pg. 391. For Mother Nature, opinions and predictions don’t count; surviving is what matters.

Pg. 391. His suggestion to deter “too big to fail” and prevent employers from taking advantage of the public is if a company is classified as bailable out should it fail then shouldn’t pay them any more than a civil servant.

Pg. 394. His childhood role model was the French adventurer and writer Andre Malraux.

Pg. 394. Problem of Insulation where Hume was said to leave his skeptical angst in the philosophical cabinet, then go party with his friends in Edinburgh.

Pg. 395. Harry Markowitz reported by Gerd Gigerenzer stated “portfolio selection” where his theories have no validity outside of academic endorsements and causes blowups.

Take the simple heuristic — does the scientific researcher whose ideas are applicable to the real world apply his ideas to his daily life? If so, take him seriously. Otherwise, ignore him.

Pg.400. In Book IV of The Wealth of Nations, Smith was extremely chary of the idea of giving someone upside without the downside and had doubts about the limited liability of joint-stock companies (the ancestor of the modern limited liability corporation).

Pg. 401. Coke or Pepsi … What business are they in? Selling you sugary water or substitutes for sugar, putting into your body stuff that messes you up your biological signaling system, causing diabetes and making diabetes vendors rich thanks to their compensatory drugs.

Pg. 402. A rule then hit him: excluding drug dealers, small companies and artisans tend to sell us healthy products, large one are likely to be in the business of producing wholesale iatrogenic, taking our money and then, to add insult to injury, hijacking the state thanks to their army of lobbyists… You certainly need an advertising apparatus to convince people that Coke brings them “happiness” — and it works.

Pg. 408. “Back to the sucker problem in believing that wealth makes people more independent. We need more evidence for it than what is taking place now: recall that we have never been more in debt (for the ancients, someone in debt was not free, he was in bondage).

Tantalus was the subject to an external punishment where he stood in a pool of water underneath a fruit tree and whenever he tried to grab the fruit it moved away and whenever he tried to drink, the water receded.

pg 409. You cannot possibly trust someone on a treadmill.
pg.411. In a way your profession does not identify you so much as other attributes. Pg.411. In the antique city-state … shame is the penalty for the violation of ethics — making things more symmetric. Banishment and exile, or, worse, ostracism were severe penalities — people did not move around voluntarily and considered uprooting a horrible calamity. Date: May 1, 2016 at 8:01:04 AM CDT Weather: 41°F Cloudy Location: 1405 Highway 71 N, Okoboji, IA, United States Pg. 414. The difference between the letter and the spirit of regulation is harder to detect in a complex system. Pg. 414. Alan Blinder problem Pg. 415. He was a conference and he stated that if you are doing something new to the planet, that the burden of evidence is on those who disturb natural systems, that Mother Nature knows more than he will ever know, not the other way around. Finished on May 1, 2016 Date: