Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder

by Taleb, Nassim Nicholas

  The sword of Damocles represents the side effect of power and success: you cannot rise and rule without facing this continuous danger—someone out there will be actively working to topple you. And like the sword, the danger will be silent, inexorable, and discontinuous. It will fall abruptly after long periods of quiet, perhaps at the very moment one has gotten used to it and forgotten about its existence. Black Swans will be out there to get you as you now have much more to lose, a cost of success (and growth), perhaps an unavoidable penalty of excessive success. At the end, what matters is the strength of the string—not the wealth and power of the dining party. But, luckily, this is an identifiable, measurable, and tractable vulnerability, for those who want to listen. The entire point of the Triad is that in many situations we can measure the strength of the string.

  Further, consider how toxic such growth-followed-by-a-fall can be to society, as the fall of the dining guest, in response to the fall of the sword of Damocles, will bring what we now call collateral damage, harming others. For instance, the collapse of a large institution will have effects on society.

  Sophistication, a certain brand of sophistication, also brings fragility to Black Swans: as societies gain in complexity, with more and more “cutting edge” sophistication in them, and more and more specialization, they become increasingly vulnerable to collapse. This idea has been brilliantly—and convincingly—adumbrated by the archeologist Joseph Tainter. But it does not have to be so: it is so only for those unwilling to go the extra step and understand the matrix of reality. To counter success, you need a high offsetting dose of robustness, even high doses of antifragility. You want to be Phoenix, or possibly Hydra. Otherwise the sword of Damocles will get you.

  On the Necessity of Naming

  We know more than we think we do, a lot more than we can articulate. If our formal systems of thought denigrate the natural, and in fact we don’t have a name for antifragility, and fight the concept whenever we use our brains, it does not mean that our actions neglect it. Our perceptions and intuitions, as expressed in deeds, can be superior to what we know and tabulate, discuss in words, and teach in a classroom. We will have ample discussions of the point particularly with the potent notion of the apophatic (what cannot be explicitly said, or directly described, in our current vocabulary); so for now, take this curious phenomenon.

  In Through the Language Glass, the linguist Guy Deutscher reports that many primitive populations, without being color-blind, have verbal designations for only two or three colors. But when given a simple test, they can successfully match strings to their corresponding colors. They are capable of detecting the differences between the various nuances of the rainbow, but they do not express these in their vocabularies. These populations are culturally, though not biologically, color-blind.

  Just as we are intellectually, not organically, antifragility-blind. To see the difference just consider that you need the name “blue” for the construction of a narrative, but not when you engage in action.

  It is not well known that many colors we take for granted had no name for a long time, and had no names in the central texts in Western culture. Ancient Mediterranean texts, both Greek and Semitic, also had a reduced vocabulary of a small number of colors polarized around the dark and the light—Homer and his contemporaries were limited to about three or four main colors: black, white, and some indeterminate part of the rainbow, often subsumed as red, or yellow.

  I contacted Guy Deutscher. He was extremely generous with his help and pointed out to me that the ancients even lacked words for something as elementary as blue. This absence of the word “blue” in ancient Greek explains the recurring reference by Homer to the “wine-dark sea” (oinopa ponton), which has been quite puzzling to readers (including this one).

  Interestingly, it was the British Prime Minister William Gladstone who first made this discovery in the 1850s (and was unfairly and thoughtlessly reviled for it by the usual journalists). Gladstone, quite an erudite, wrote, during his interregnum between political positions, an impressive seventeen-hundred-page treatise on Homer. In the last section, Gladstone announced this limitation of color vocabulary, attributing our modern sensitization to many more nuances of color to a cross-generational training of the eye. But regardless of these variations of color in the culture of the time, people were shown to be able to identify the nuances—unless physically color-blind.

  Gladstone was impressive in many respects. Aside from his erudition, force of character, respect for the weak, and high level of energy, four very attractive attributes (respect for the weak being, after intellectual courage, the second most attractive quality to this author), he showed remarkable prescience. He figured out what few in his day dared to propose: that the Iliad corresponds to a true story (the city of Troy had not been discovered yet). In addition, even more prescient and of great relevance to this book, he was insistent upon a balanced fiscal budget: fiscal deficits have proven to be a prime source of fragility in social and economic systems.

  PROTO-ANTIFRAGILITY

  There have been names for two starter-antifragility concepts, with two precursor applications that cover some special cases of it. These are mild aspects of antifragility and limited to the medical field. But they are a good way to start.

  According to legend, Mithridates IV, king of Pontus in Asia Minor, while hiding after his father’s assassination, got himself some protection against poisoning by ingesting sub-lethal doses of toxic material in progressively larger quantities. He later incorporated the process into a complicated religious ritual. But this immunity got him in trouble a bit later as his attempt to take his own life by poisoning failed, “having fortified himself against the drugs of others.” So he had to ask for the services of an ally military commander to give him a blow with a sword.

  The method named Antidotum Mithridatium, celebrated by Celsus, the ancient world’s famous doctor, had to be rather fashionable in Rome, since about a century later it brought some complication to the emperor Nero’s attempts at matricide. Nero had been obsessed with the idea of killing his mother, Agrippina, who, to make things more colorful, was Caligula’s sister (and, even more colorful, was the alleged lover of the philosopher Seneca, more on whom later). But a mother tends to know her son rather well and predict his actions, particularly when he is her only child—and Agrippina knew something about poison, as she might have used the method to kill at least one of her husbands (I said things were quite colorful). So, suspecting that Nero had a contract on her, she got herself Mithridatized against the poisons that would have been available to her son’s underlings. Like Mithridates, Agrippina eventually died by more mechanical methods as her son (supposedly) had assassins slay her, thus providing us with the small but meaningful lesson that one cannot be robust against everything. And, two thousand years later, nobody has found a method for us to get “fortified” against swords.

  Let us call Mithridatization the result of an exposure to a small dose of a substance that, over time, makes one immune to additional, larger quantities of it. It is the sort of approach used in vaccination and allergy medicine. It is not quite antifragility, still at the more modest level of robustness, but we are on our way. And we already have a hint that perhaps being deprived of poison makes us fragile and that the road to robustification starts with a modicum of harm.

  Now consider a case when the poisonous substance, in some dose, makes you better off overall, one step up from robustness. Hormesis, a word coined by pharmacologists, is when a small dose of a harmful substance is actually beneficial for the organism, acting as medicine. A little bit of an otherwise offending substance, not too much, acts to benefit the organism and make it better overall as it triggers some overreaction. This was not interpreted at the time in the sense of “gains from harm” so much as “harm is dose dependent” or “medicine is dose dependent.” The interest to scientists has been in the nonlinearity of the dose-response.

  Hormesis was well known by the ancients (and like
the color blue was known but not expressed). But it was only in 1888 that it was first “scientifically” described (though still not given a name) by a German toxicologist, Hugo Schulz, who observed that small doses of poison stimulate the growth of yeast while larger doses cause harm. Some researchers hold that the benefits of vegetables may not be so much in what we call the “vitamins” or some other rationalizing theories (that is, ideas that seem to make sense in narrative form but have not been subjected to rigorous empirical testing), but in the following: plants protect themselves from harm and fend off predators with poisonous substances that, ingested by us in the right quantities, may stimulate our organisms—or so goes the story. Again, limited, low-dose poisoning triggers healthy benefits.

  Many claim that caloric restriction (permanent or episodic) activates healthy reactions and switches that, among other benefits, lengthen life expectancy in laboratory animals. We humans live too long for researchers to test if such restriction increases our life expectancy (if the hypothesis is true, then the subjects of the test would outlive the researchers). But it looks like such restriction makes humans healthier (and may also improve their sense of humor). But since abundance would bring the opposite effect, this episodic caloric restriction can be also interpreted as follows: too much regular food is bad for you, and depriving humans of the stressor of hunger may make them live less than their full potential; so all hormesis seems to be doing is reestablishing the natural dosage for food and hunger in humans. In other words, hormesis is the norm, and its absence is what hurts us.

  Hormesis lost some scientific respect, interest, and practice after the 1930s because some people mistakenly associated it with homeopathy. The association was unfair, as the mechanisms are extremely different. Homeopathy is based on other principles, such as the one that minute, highly diluted parts of the agents of a disease (so small they can hardly be perceptible, hence cannot cause hormesis) can help cure us of the disease itself. Homeopathy has shown little empirical backing and because of its testing methodologies belongs today to alternative medicine, while hormesis, as a phenomenon, has ample scientific evidence to back it up.

  But the larger point is that we can now see that depriving systems of stressors, vital stressors, is not necessarily a good thing, and can be downright harmful.

  DOMAIN INDEPENDENCE IS DOMAIN DEPENDENT

  This idea that systems may need some stress and agitation has been missed by those who grasp it in one area and not in another. So we can now also see the domain dependence of our minds, a “domain” being an area or category of activity. Some people can understand an idea in one domain, say, medicine, and fail to recognize it in another, say, socioeconomic life. Or they get it in the classroom, but not in the more complicated texture of the street. Humans somehow fail to recognize situations outside the contexts in which they usually learn about them.

  I had a vivid illustration of domain dependence in the driveway of a hotel in the pseudocity of Dubai. A fellow who looked like a banker had a uniformed porter carry his luggage (I can instantly tell if someone is a certain type of banker with minimal cues as I have physical allergies to them, even affecting my breathing). About fifteen minutes later I saw the banker lifting free weights at the gym, trying to replicate natural exercises using kettlebells as if he were swinging a suitcase. Domain dependence is pervasive.

  Further, the problem is not just that Mithridatization and hormesis can be known in (some) medical circles and missed in other applications such as socioeconomic life. Even within medicine, some get it here and miss it there. The same doctor might recommend exercise so you “get tougher,” and a few minutes later write a prescription for antibiotics in response to a trivial infection so you “don’t get sick.”

  Another expression of domain dependence: ask a U.S. citizen if some semi-governmental agency with a great deal of independence (and no interference from Congress) should control the price of cars, morning newspapers, and Malbec wine, as its domain of specialty. He would jump in anger, as it appears to violate every principle the country stands for, and call you a Communist post-Soviet mole for even suggesting it. OK. Then ask him if that same government agency should control foreign exchange, mainly the rate of the dollar against the euro and the Mongolian tugrit. Same reaction: this is not France. Then very gently point out to him that the Federal Reserve Bank of the United States is in the business of controlling and managing the price of another good, another price, called the lending rate, the interest rate in the economy (and has proved to be good at it). The libertarian presidential candidate Ron Paul was called a crank for suggesting the abolition of the Federal Reserve, or even restricting its role. But he would also have been called a crank for suggesting the creation of an agency to control other prices.

  Imagine someone gifted in learning languages but unable to transfer concepts from one tongue to another, so he would need to relearn “chair” or “love” or “apple pie” every time he acquires a new language. He would not recognize “house” (English) or “casa” (Spanish) or “byt” (Semitic). We are all, in a way, similarly handicapped, unable to recognize the same idea when it is presented in a different context. It is as if we are doomed to be deceived by the most superficial part of things, the packaging, the gift wrapping. This is why we don’t see antifragility in places that are obvious, too obvious. It is not part of the accepted way of thinking about success, economic growth, or innovation that these may result only from overcompensation against stressors. Nor do we see this overcompensation at work elsewhere. (And domain dependence is also why it has been difficult for many researchers to realize that uncertainty, incomplete understanding, disorder, and volatility are members of the same close family.)

  This lack of translation is a mental handicap that comes with being a human; and we will only start to attain wisdom or rationality when we make an effort to overcome and break through it.

  Let us get deeper into overcompensation.

  1 Just as concavity is convexity with a negative sign in front of it and is sometimes called anticonvexity.

  2 I checked in addition to Brooklyn English most Indo-European languages, both ancient (Latin, Greek) and modern branches: Romance (Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese), Slavic (Russian, Polish, Serbian, Croatian), Germanic (German, Dutch, Afrikaans), and Indo-Iranian (Hindi, Urdu, Farsi). It is also absent from non-Indo-European families such as Semitic (Arabic, Hebrew, Aramaic) and Turkic (Turkish).

  CHAPTER 2

  Overcompensation and Overreaction Everywhere

  Is it easy to write on a Heathrow runway?—Try to get the Pope to ban your work—How to beat up an economist (but not too hard, just enough to go to jail)

  My own domain dependence was revealed to me one day as I was sitting in the office of David Halpern, a U.K. government advisor and policy maker. He informed me—in response to the idea of antifragility—of a phenomenon called post-traumatic growth, the opposite of post-traumatic stress syndrome, by which people harmed by past events surpass themselves. I had never heard about it before, and, to my great shame, had never made the effort to think of its existence: there is a small literature but it is not advertised outside a narrow discipline. We hear about the more lurid post-traumatic disorder, not post-traumatic growth, in the intellectual and so-called learned vocabulary. But popular culture has an awareness of its equivalent, revealed in the expression “it builds character.” So do the ancient Mediterranean classics, along with grandmothers.

  Intellectuals tend to focus on negative responses from randomness (fragility) rather than the positive ones (antifragility). This is not just in psychology: it prevails across the board.

  How do you innovate? First, try to get in trouble. I mean serious, but not terminal, trouble. I hold—it is beyond speculation, rather a conviction—that innovation and sophistication spark from initial situations of necessity, in ways that go far beyond the satisfaction of such necessity (from the unintended side effects of, say, an initial invention or attempt at invention). Na
turally, there are classical thoughts on the subject, with a Latin saying that sophistication is born out of hunger (artificia docuit fames). The idea pervades classical literature: in Ovid, difficulty is what wakes up the genius (ingenium mala saepe movent), which translates in Brooklyn English into “When life gives you a lemon …”

  The excess energy released from overreaction to setbacks is what innovates!

  This message from the ancients is vastly deeper than it seems. It contradicts modern methods and ideas of innovation and progress on many levels, as we tend to think that innovation comes from bureaucratic funding, through planning, or by putting people through a Harvard Business School class by one Highly Decorated Professor of Innovation and Entrepreneurship (who never innovated anything) or hiring a consultant (who never innovated anything). This is a fallacy—note for now the disproportionate contribution of uneducated technicians and entrepreneurs to various technological leaps, from the Industrial Revolution to the emergence of Silicon Valley, and you will see what I mean.

  Yet in spite of the visibility of the counterevidence, and the wisdom you can pick up free of charge from the ancients (or grandmothers), moderns try today to create inventions from situations of comfort, safety, and predictability instead of accepting the notion that “necessity really is the mother of invention.”

  Many, like the great Roman statesman Cato the Censor, looked at comfort, almost any form of comfort, as a road to waste.1 He did not like it when we had it too easy, as he worried about the weakening of the will. And the softening he feared was not just at the personal level: an entire society can fall ill. Consider that as I am writing these lines, we are living in a debt crisis. The world as a whole has never been richer, and it has never been more heavily in debt, living off borrowed money. The record shows that, for society, the richer we become, the harder it gets to live within our means. Abundance is harder for us to handle than scarcity.