Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder

by Taleb, Nassim Nicholas

  Again, I wasn’t exactly an autodidact, since I did get degrees; I was rather a barbell autodidact as I studied the exact minimum necessary to pass any exam, overshooting accidentally once in a while, and only getting in trouble a few times by undershooting. But I read voraciously, wholesale, initially in the humanities, later in mathematics and science, and now in history—outside a curriculum, away from the gym machine so to speak. I figured out that whatever I selected myself I could read with more depth and more breadth—there was a match to my curiosity. And I could take advantage of what people later pathologized as Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder (ADHD) by using natural stimulation as a main driver to scholarship. The enterprise needed to be totally effortless in order to be worthwhile. The minute I was bored with a book or a subject I moved to another one, instead of giving up on reading altogether—when you are limited to the school material and you get bored, you have a tendency to give up and do nothing or play hooky out of discouragement. The trick is to be bored with a specific book, rather than with the act of reading. So the number of pages absorbed could grow faster than otherwise. And you find gold, so to speak, effortlessly, just as in rational but undirected trial-and-error-based research. It is exactly like options, trial and error, not getting stuck, bifurcating when necessary but keeping a sense of broad freedom and opportunism. Trial and error is freedom.

  (I confess I still use that method at the time of this writing. Avoidance of boredom is the only worthy mode of action. Life otherwise is not worth living.)

  My parents had an account with the largest bookstore in Beirut and I would pick up books in what seemed to me unlimited quantities. There was such a difference between the shelves of the library and the narrow school material; so I realized that school was a plot designed to deprive people of erudition by squeezing their knowledge into a narrow set of authors. I started, around the age of thirteen, to keep a log of my reading hours, shooting for between thirty and sixty a week, a practice I’ve kept up for a long time. I read the likes of Dostoyevsky, Turgenev, Chekhov, Bishop Bossuet, Stendhal, Dante, Proust, Borges, Calvino, Céline, Schultz, Zweig (didn’t like), Henry Miller, Max Brod, Kafka, Ionesco, the surrealists, Faulkner, Malraux (along with other wild adventurers such as Conrad and Melville; the first book I read in English was Moby-Dick) and similar authors in literature, many of them obscure, and Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Marx, Jaspers, Husserl, Lévi-Strauss, Levinas, Scholem, Benjamin, and similar ones in philosophy because they had the golden status of not being on the school program, and I managed to read nothing that was prescribed by school so to this day I haven’t read Racine, Corneille, and other bores. One summer I decided to read the twenty novels by Émile Zola in twenty days, one a day, and managed to do so at great expense. Perhaps joining an underground anti-government group motivated me to look into Marxist studies, and I picked up the most about Hegel indirectly, mostly through Alexandre Kojève.

  When I decided to come to the United States, I repeated, around the age of eighteen, the marathon exercise by buying a few hundred books in English (by authors ranging from Trollope to Burke, Macaulay, and Gibbon, with Anaïs Nin and other then fashionable authors de scandale), not showing up to class, and keeping the thirty- to sixty-hour discipline.

  In school, I had figured out that when one could write essays with a rich, literary, but precise vocabulary (though not inadequate to the topic at hand), and maintain some coherence throughout, what one writes about becomes secondary and the examiners get a hint about one’s style and rigor from that. And my father gave me a complete break after I got published as a teenager in the local paper—“just don’t flunk” was his condition. It was a barbell—play it safe at school and read on your own, have zero expectation from school. Later, after I was jailed for assaulting a policeman in a student riot, he acted scared of me and let me do whatever I wanted. When I reached the “f*** you money” stage in my twenties, at the time when it was much, much rarer than today, in spite of a war raging in the home country, my father took credit for it by attributing it to the breadth of the education he allowed me to have and how it differentiated me from others like him with narrow background.

  When, at Wharton, I discovered that I wanted to specialize in a profession linked to probability and rare events, a probability and randomness obsession took control of my mind. I also smelled some flaws with statistical stuff that the professor could not explain, brushing them away—it was what the professor was brushing away that had to be the meat. I realized that there was a fraud somewhere, that “six sigma” events (measures of very rare events) were grossly miscomputed and we had no basis for their computation, but I could not articulate my realization clearly, and was getting humiliated by people who started smoking me with complicated math. I saw the limits of probability in front of me, clear as crystal, but could not find the words to express the point. So I went to the bookstore and ordered (there was no Web at the time) almost every book with “probability” or “stochastic” in its title. I read nothing else for a couple of years, no course material, no newspaper, no literature, nothing. I read them in bed, jumping from one book to the next when stuck with something I did not get immediately or felt ever so slightly bored. And I kept ordering those books. I was hungry to go deeper into the problem of small probabilities. It was effortless. That was my best investment—risk turned out to be the topic I know the best. Five years later I was set for life and now I am making a research career out of various aspects of small probability events. Had I studied the subject by prepackaged means, I would be now brainwashed into thinking that uncertainty was something to be found in a casino, that kind of thing. There is such a thing as nonnerdy applied mathematics: find a problem first, and figure out the math that works for it (just as one acquires language), rather than study in a vacuum through theorems and artificial examples, then change reality to make it look like these examples.

  One day in the 1980s I had dinner with a famous speculator, a hugely successful man. He muttered the hyperbole that hit home: “much of what other people know isn’t worth knowing.”

  To this day I still have the instinct that the treasure, what one needs to know for a profession, is necessarily what lies outside the corpus, as far away from the center as possible. But there is something central in following one’s own direction in the selection of readings: what I was given to study in school I have forgotten; what I decided to read on my own, I still remember.

  CHAPTER 17

  Fat Tony Debates Socrates

  Piety for the impious—Fat Tony does not drink milk—Always ask poets to explain their poetry—Mystagogue philosophaster

  Fat Tony believes that they were totally justified in putting Socrates to death.

  This chapter will allow us to complete the discussion of the difference between narrated, intelligible knowledge, and the more opaque kind that is entirely probed by tinkering—the two columns of Table 4 separating narrative and non-narrative action. There is this error of thinking that things always have a reason that is accessible to us—that we can comprehend easily.

  Indeed, the most severe mistake made in life is to mistake the unintelligible for the unintelligent—something Nietzsche figured out. In a way, it resembles the turkey problem, mistaking what we don’t see for the nonexistent, a sibling to mistaking absence of evidence for evidence of absence.

  We’ve been falling for the green lumber problem since the beginning of the golden age of philosophy—we saw Aristotle mistaking the source of Thales’ success; now we turn to Socrates, the greatest of the great masters.

  EUTHYPHRO

  Plato expressed himself chiefly through his use of the person who no doubt became the most influential philosopher in history, Socrates the Athenian, the first philosopher in the modern sense. Socrates left no writing of his own, so we get direct representation of him mainly through Plato and Xenophon. And just as Fat Tony has, as his self-appointed biographer, yours truly trying to satisfy his own agenda, leading to distortions
in his character and self-serving representation of some of the said author’s ideas, so I am certain that the Socrates of Plato is a more Platonic character than the true Socrates.1

  In one of Plato’s dialogues, Euthyphro, Socrates was outside the courthouse, awaiting the trial in which he was eventually put to death, when the eponymous Euthyphro, a religious expert and prophet of sorts, struck up a conversation with him. Socrates started explaining that for the “activities” with which he was charged by the court (corrupting the youth and introducing new gods at the expense of the older ones), not only he did not charge a fee, but he was in perfect readiness to pay for people to listen to him.

  It turned out that Euthyphro was on his way to charge his father with manslaughter, not a bad conversation starter. So Socrates started out by wondering how charging his own father with manslaughter was compatible with Euthyphro’s religious duties.

  Socrates’ technique was to make his interlocutor, who started with a thesis, agree to a series of statements, then proceed to show him how the statements he agreed to are inconsistent with the original thesis, thus establishing that he has no clue as to what he was taking about. Socrates used it mostly to show people how lacking in clarity they were in their thoughts, how little they knew about the concepts they used routinely—and the need for philosophy to elucidate these concepts.

  In the beginning of the Euthypro dialogue, he catches his interlocutor using the word “piety,” characterizing the prosecution of his father as a pious act and so giving the impression that he was conducting the prosecution on grounds of piety. But he could not come up with a definition that suited Socrates. Socrates kept pestering the poor fellow as he could not produce a definition of piety. The dialogue continued with more definitions (what is “moral rectitude”?), until Euthyphro found some polite excuse to run away. The dialogue ended abruptly, but the reader is left with the impression that it could have gone on until today, twenty-five centuries later, without it bringing us any closer to anything.

  Let us reopen it.

  FAT TONY VERSUS SOCRATES

  How would Fat Tony have handled the cross-examination by the relentless Athenian? Now that the reader is acquainted with our hefty character, let us examine, as a thought experiment, an equivalent dialogue between Fat Tony and Socrates, properly translated of course.

  Clearly, there are similarities between the two characters. Both had time on their hands and enjoyed unlimited leisure, though, in Tony’s case, free time was the result of productive insights. Both like to argue, and both look at active conversation (instead of TV screen or concert hall passivity) as a main source of entertainment. Both dislike writing: Socrates because he did not like the definitive and immutable character that is associated with the written word when for him answers are never final and should not be fixed. Nothing should be written in stone, even literally: Socrates in the Euthyphro boasts for ancestry the sculptor Daedalus, whose statues came alive as soon as the work was completed. When you talk to one of Daedalus’ statues, it talks back to you, unlike the ones you see in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Tony, for his part, did not like writing for other, no less respectable reasons: he almost flunked out of high school in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn.

  But the similarities stop somewhere, which would be good enough for a dialogue. Of course we can expect a bit of surprise on the part of Fat Tony standing in front of the man described to him by Nero as the greatest philosopher of all time: Socrates, we are told, had looks beyond unprepossessing. Socrates was repeatedly described as having a protruding belly, thin limbs, bulging eyes, a snub nose. He looked haggard. He might even have had body odor, as he was said to bathe much less than his peers. You can imagine Fat Tony sneering while pointing his finger at the fellow: “Look, Neeero, you want me to talk to … dis?” Or perhaps not: Socrates was said to have a presence, a certain personal confidence and a serenity of mind that made some young men find him “beautiful.”

  What Nero was certain of was that Fat Tony would initially get close to Socrates and form his opinion on the fellow after some olfactory investigation—and as we said, Fat Tony doesn’t even realize that this is part of his modus operandi.

  Now assume Fat Tony was asked by Socrates how he defined piety. Fat Tony’s answer would have been most certainly to get lost—Fat Tony, aware of Socrates’ statement that not only would he debate for free, but he would be ready to pay for conversation, would have claimed one doesn’t argue with someone who is ready to pay you to argue with him.

  But Fat Tony’s power in life is that he never lets the other person frame the question. He taught Nero that an answer is planted in every question; never respond with a straight answer to a question that makes no sense to you.

  FAT TONY: “You are asking me to define what characteristic makes a difference between pious and nonpious. Do I really need to be able to tell you what it is to be able to conduct a pious action?”

  SOCRATES: “How can you use a word like ‘piety’ without knowing what it means, while pretending to know what it means?”

  FAT TONY: “Do I actually have to be able to tell you in plain barbarian non-Greek English, or in pure Greek, what it means to prove that I know and understand what it means? I don’t know it in words but I know what it is.”

  No doubt Fat Tony would have taken Socrates of Athens further down his own road and be the one doing the framing of the question:

  FAT TONY: “Tell me, old man. Does a child need to define mother’s milk to understand the need to drink it?”

  SOCRATES: “No, he does not need to.”

  FAT TONY (using the same repetitive pattern of Socrates in the Plato dialogues): “And my dear Socrates, does a dog need to define what an owner is to be loyal to him?”

  SOCRATES (puzzled to have someone ask him questions): “A dog has … instinct. It does not reflect on its life. He doesn’t examine his life. We are not dogs.”

  FAT TONY: “I agree, my dear Socrates, that a dog has instinct and that we are not dogs. But are we humans so fundamentally different as to be completely stripped of instinct leading us to do things we have no clue about? Do we have to limit life to what we can answer in proto-Brooklyn English?”

  Without waiting for Socrates’ answer (only suckers wait for answers; questions are not made for answers):

  FAT TONY: “Then, my good Socrates, why do you think that we need to fix the meaning of things?”

  SOCRATES: “My dear Mega-Tony, we need to know what we are talking about when we talk about things. The entire idea of philosophy is to be able to reflect and understand what we are doing, examine our lives. An unexamined life is not worth living.”

  FAT TONY: “The problem, my poor old Greek, is that you are killing the things we can know but not express. And if I asked someone riding a bicycle just fine to give me the theory behind his bicycle riding, he would fall from it. By bullying and questioning people you confuse them and hurt them.”

  Then, looking at him patronizingly, with a smirk, very calmly:

  FAT TONY: “My dear Socrates … you know why they are putting you to death? It is because you make people feel stupid for blindly following habits, instincts, and traditions. You may be occasionally right. But you may confuse them about things they’ve been doing just fine without getting in trouble. You are destroying people’s illusions about themselves. You are taking the joy of ignorance out of the things we don’t understand. And you have no answer; you have no answer to offer them.”

  PRIMACY OF DEFINITIONAL KNOWLEDGE

  You can see that what Fat Tony is hitting here is the very core of philosophy: it is indeed with Socrates that the main questions that became philosophy today were first raised, questions such as “what is existence?,” “what are morals?,” “what is a proof?,” “what is science?,” “what is this?” and “what is that?”

  The question we saw in Euthyphro pervades the various dialogues written by Plato. What Socrates is seeking relentlessly are definitions of the essential natur
e of the thing concerned rather than descriptions of the properties by means of which we can recognize them.

  Socrates went even as far as questioning the poets and reported that they had no more clue than the public about their own works. In Plato’s account of his trial in the Apology, Socrates recounted how he cross-examined the poets in vain: “I took them some of the most elaborate passages in their own writings, and asked what was the meaning of them. I am almost ashamed to speak of this, but still I must say that there is hardly a person present who wouldn’t have talked better about their poetry than they did themselves.”

  And this priority of definitional knowledge led to Plato’s thesis that you cannot know anything unless you know the Forms, which are what definitions specify. If we cannot define piety from working with particulars, then let us start with the universals from which these particulars should flow. In other words, if you cannot get a map from a territory, build a territory out of the map.

  In defense of Socrates, his questions lead to a major result: if they could not allow him to define what something was, at least they allowed him to be certain about what a thing was not.