Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder

by Taleb, Nassim Nicholas

  Mistaking the Unintelligible for the Unintelligent

  Fat Tony, of course, had many precursors. Many we will not hear about, because of the primacy of philosophy and the way it got integrated into daily practices by Christianity and Islam. By “philosophy,” I mean theoretical and conceptual knowledge, all knowledge, things we can write down. For, until recently, the term largely referred to what we call today science—natural philosophy, this attempt to rationalize Nature, penetrate her logic.

  A vivid modern attack on the point came from the young Friedrich Nietzsche, though dressed up in literary flights on optimism and pessimism mixed with a hallucination on what “West,” a “typical Hellene,” and “the German soul” mean. The young Nietzsche wrote his first book, The Birth of Tragedy, while in his early twenties. He went after Socrates, whom he called the “mystagogue of science,” for “making existence appear comprehensible.” This brilliant passage exposes what I call the sucker-rationalistic fallacy:

  Perhaps—thus he [Socrates] should have asked himself—what is not intelligible to me is not necessarily unintelligent? Perhaps there is a realm of wisdom from which the logician is exiled?

  “What is not intelligible to me is not necessarily unintelligent” is perhaps the most potent sentence in all of Nietzsche’s century—and we used a version of it in the prologue, in the very definition of the fragilista who mistakes what he does not understand for nonsense.

  Nietzsche is also allergic to Socrates’ version of truth, largely motivated by the agenda of the promotion of understanding, since according to Socrates, one does not knowingly do evil—an argument that seems to have pervaded the Enlightenment as such thinkers as Condorcet made truth the only and sufficient source for the good.

  This argument is precisely what Nietzsche vituperated against: knowledge is the panacea; error is evil; hence science is an optimistic enterprise. The mandate of scientific optimism irritated Nietzsche: this use of reasoning and knowledge at the service of utopia. Forget the optimism/pessimism business that is addressed when people discuss Nietzsche, as the so-called Nietzschean pessimism distracts from the point: it is the very goodness of knowledge that he questioned.

  It took me a long time to figure out the central problem that Nietzsche addressed in The Birth of Tragedy. He sees two forces, the Apollonian and the Dionysian. One is measured, balanced, rational, imbued with reason and self-restraint; the other is dark, visceral, wild, untamed, hard to understand, emerging from the inner layers of our selves. Ancient Greek culture represented a balance of the two, until the influence of Socrates on Euripides gave a larger share to the Apollonian and disrupted the Dionysian, causing this excessive rise of rationalism. It is equivalent to disrupting the natural chemistry of your body by the injection of hormones. The Apollonian without the Dionysian is, as the Chinese would say, yang without yin.

  Nietzsche’s potency as a thinker continues to surprise me: he figured out antifragility. While many attribute (mistakenly) the notion of “creative destruction” to the economist Joseph Schumpeter (not wondering how something insightful and deep can come out of an economist),2 while, as we saw, the more erudite source it to Karl Marx, it is indeed Nietzsche who was first to coin the term with reference to Dionysus, whom he called “creatively destructive” and “destructively creative.” Nietzsche indeed figured out—in his own way—antifragility.

  I read Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy twice, first as a child when I was very green. The second time, after a life thinking of randomness, it hit me that Nietzsche understood something that I did not find explicitly stated in his work: that growth in knowledge—or in anything—cannot proceed without the Dionysian. It reveals matters that we can select at some point, given that we have optionality. In other words, it can be the source of stochastic tinkering, and the Apollonian can be part of the rationality in the selection process.

  Let me bring the big boss, Seneca, into the picture. He, too, referred to Dionysian and Apollonian attributes. He appeared to present, in one of his writings a richer version of our human tendencies. Talking about a God (whom he also calls “destiny,” equating him with the interaction of causes), he gives him three manifestations. First, the “Liber Pater,” the Bacchic force (that is, the Dionysos to whom Nietzsche referred) that gives seminal power to the continuation of life; second, Hercules, who embodies strength; and third, Mercury, who represented (for Seneca’s contemporaries) craft, science, and reason (what for Nietzsche appeared to be the Apollonian). Richer than Nietzsche, he included strength as an additional dimension.

  As I said, earlier attacks on “philosophy” in the sense of rationalistic knowledge from the Plato and Aristotle traditions came from a variety of people, not necessarily visible in the corpus, mostly in forgotten or rarely mentioned texts. Why forgotten? Because structured learning likes the impoverishment and simplification of naive rationalism, easy to teach, not the rich texture of empiricism, and, as I said, those who attacked academic thinking had little representation (something that we will see is starkly apparent in the history of medicine).

  An even more accomplished, and far more open-minded, classical scholar than Nietzsche, the nineteenth-century French thinker Ernest Renan, knew, in addition to the usual Greek and Latin, Hebrew, Aramaic (Syriac), and Arabic. In his attack on Averroes, he expressed the famous idea that logic excludes—by definition—nuances, and since truth resides exclusively in the nuances, it is “a useless instrument for finding Truth in the moral and political sciences.”

  Tradition

  As Fat Tony said, Socrates was put to death because he disrupted something that, in the eyes of the Athenian establishment, was working just fine. Things are too complicated to be expressed in words; by doing so, you kill humans. Or people—as with the green lumber—may be focusing on the right things but we are not good enough to figure it out intellectually.

  Death and martyrdom make good marketing, particularly when one faces destiny while unwavering in his opinions. A hero is someone imbued with intellectual confidence and ego, and death is something too small for him. While most of the accounts we hear of Socrates make him heroic, thanks to his death and his resignation to die in a philosophical way, he had some classical critics who believed that Socrates was destroying the foundations of society—the heuristics that are transmitted by the elders and that we may not be mature enough to question.

  Cato the Elder, whom we met in Chapter 2, was highly allergic to Socrates. Cato had the bottom-line mind of Fat Tony, but with a much higher civic sense, sense of mission, respect for tradition, and commitment to moral rectitude. He was also allergic to things Greek, as exhibited in his allergy to philosophers and doctors—an allergy which, as we will see in later chapters, had remarkably modern justifications. Cato’s commitment to democracy led him to believe in both freedom and the rules of custom, in combination with fear of tyranny. Plutarch quotes him as saying: “Socrates was a mighty babbler who tried to make himself tyrant of his country in order to destroy its customs and entice its citizens into holding views contrary to law and order.”

  So the reader can see how the ancients saw naive rationalism: by impoverishing—rather than enhancing—thought, it introduces fragility. They knew that incompleteness—half-knowledge—is always dangerous.

  Many other people than the ancients have been involved in defending—and inviting us to respect—this different type of knowledge. First, Edmund Burke, the Irish statesman and political philosopher, who also countered the French Revolution for disrupting the “collected reasons of the ages.” He believed that large social variations can expose us to unseen effects and thus advocated the notion of small trial-and-error experiments (in effect, convex tinkering) in social systems, coupled with respect for the complex heuristics of tradition. Also Michael Oakeshot, the twentieth-century conservative political philosopher and philosopher of history who believed that traditions provide an aggregation of filtered collective knowledge. Another one in that league would be Joseph de Maistre,
who as we saw thought in “second steps.” He was a French-language royalist and counter-Enlightenment thinker who was vocal against the ills of the Revolution and believed in the fundamental depravity of men unless checked by some dictatorship.

  Clearly, Wittgenstein would be at the top of the list of modern antifragile thinkers, with his remarkable insight into the inexpressible with words. And of all thinkers he best understands the green lumber issue—he may be the first ever to express a version of it when he doubted the ability of language to express the literal. In addition, the fellow was a saint—he sacrificed his life, his friendships, his fortune, his reputation, everything, for the sake of philosophy.

  We may be drawn to think that Friedrich Hayek would be in that antifragile, antirationalist category. He is the twentieth-century philosopher and economist who opposed social planning on the grounds that the pricing system reveals through transactions the knowledge embedded in society, knowledge not accessible to a social planner. But Hayek missed the notion of optionality as a substitute for the social planner. In a way, he believed in intelligence, but as a distributed or collective intelligence—not in optionality as a replacement for intelligence.3

  The anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss showed that nonliterate peoples had their own “science of the concrete,” a holistic way of thinking about their environment in terms of objects and their “secondary,” sensuous qualities which was not necessarily less coherent than many of our scientific approaches and, in many respects, can be as rich as and even richer than ours. Again, green lumber.

  Finally, John Gray, the contemporary political philosopher and essayist who stands against human hubris and has been fighting the prevailing ideas that the Enlightenment is a panacea—treating a certain category of thinkers as Enlightenment fundamentalists. Gray showed repeatedly how what we call scientific progress can be just a mirage. When he, myself, and the essayist Bryan Appleyard got together for lunch I was mentally prepared to discuss ideas, and advocate my own. I was pleasantly surprised by what turned out to be the best lunch I ever had in my entire life. There was this smoothness of knowing that the three of us tacitly understood the same point and, instead, went to the second step of discussing applications—something as mundane as replacing our currency holdings with precious metals, as these are not owned by governments. Gray worked in an office next to Hayek and told me that Hayek was quite a dull fellow, lacking playfulness—hence optionality.

  THE SUCKER-NONSUCKER DISTINCTION

  Let us introduce the philosopher’s stone back into this conversation. Socrates is about knowledge. Not Fat Tony, who has no idea what it is.

  For Tony, the distinction in life isn’t True or False, but rather sucker or nonsucker. Things are always simpler with him. In real life, as we saw with the ideas of Seneca and the bets of Thales, exposure is more important than knowledge; decision effects supersede logic. Textbook “knowledge” misses a dimension, the hidden asymmetry of benefits—just like the notion of average. The need to focus on the payoff from your actions instead of studying the structure of the world (or understanding the “True” and the “False”) has been largely missed in intellectual history. Horribly missed. The payoff, what happens to you (the benefits or harm from it), is always the most important thing, not the event itself.

  Philosophers talk about truth and falsehood. People in life talk about payoff, exposure, and consequences (risks and rewards), hence fragility and antifragility. And sometimes philosophers and thinkers and those who study conflate Truth with risks and rewards.

  My point taken further is that True and False (hence what we call “belief”) play a poor, secondary role in human decisions; it is the payoff from the True and the False that dominates—and it is almost always asymmetric, with one consequence much bigger than the other, i.e., harboring positive and negative asymmetries (fragile or antifragile). Let me explain.

  Fragility, Not Probability

  We check people for weapons before they board the plane. Do we believe that they are terrorists: True or False? False, as they are not likely to be terrorists (a tiny probability). But we check them nevertheless because we are fragile to terrorism. There is an asymmetry. We are interested in the payoff, and the consequence, or payoff, of the True (that they turn out to be terrorists) is too large and the costs of checking are too low. Do you think the nuclear reactor is likely to explode in the next year? False. Yet you want to behave as if it were True and spend millions on additional safety, because we are fragile to nuclear events. A third example: Do you think that this random medicine will harm you? False. Do you ingest these pills? No, no, no.

  If you sat with a pencil and jotted down all the decisions you’ve taken in the past week, or, if you could, over your lifetime, you would realize that almost all of them have had asymmetric payoff, with one side carrying a larger consequence than the other. You decide principally based on fragility, not probability. Or to rephrase, You decide principally based on fragility, not so much on True/False.

  Let us discuss the idea of the insufficiency of True/False in decision making in the real world, particularly when probabilities are involved. True or False are interpretations corresponding to high or low probabilities. Scientists have something called “confidence level”; a result obtained with a 95 percent confidence level means that there is no more than a 5 percent probability of the result being wrong. The idea of course is inapplicable as it ignores the size of the effects, which of course, makes things worse with extreme events. If I tell you that some result is true with 95 percent confidence level, you would be quite satisfied. But what if I told you that the plane was safe with 95 percent confidence level? Even 99 percent confidence level would not do, as a 1 percent probability of a crash would be quite a bit alarming (today commercial planes operate with less than one in several hundred thousand probabilities of crashing, and the ratio is improving, as we saw that every error leads to the improvement of overall safety). So, to repeat, the probability (hence True/False) does not work in the real world; it is the payoff that matters.

  You have taken probably a billion decisions in your life. How many times have you computed probabilities? Of course, you may do so in casinos, but not elsewhere.

  Conflation of Events and Exposure

  This brings us again to the green lumber fallacy. A Black Swan event and how it affects you—its impact on your finances, emotions, the destruction it will cause—are not the same “ting.” And the problem is deeply ingrained in standard reactions; the predictors’ reply when we point out their failures has typically been “we need better computation” in order to predict the event better and figure out the probabilities, instead of the vastly more effective “modify your exposure” and learn to get out of trouble, something religions and traditional heuristics have been better at enforcing than naive and cosmetic science.

  CONCLUSION TO BOOK IV

  In addition to the medical empirics, this section has attempted to vindicate the unreasonable mavericks, engineers, freelance entrepreneurs, innovative artists, and anti-academic thinkers who have been reviled by history. Some of them had great courage—not just the courage to put forth their ideas, but the courage to accept to live in a world they knew they did not understand. And they enjoyed it.

  To conclude this section, note that doing is wiser than you are prone to believe—and more rational. What I did here is just debunk the Lecturing-Birds-How-to-Fly epiphenomenon and the “linear model,” using among other things the simple mathematical properties of optionality, which does not require knowledge or intelligence, merely rationality in choice.

  Remember that there is no empirical evidence to support the statement that organized research in the sense it is currently marketed leads to the great things promised by universities. And the promoters of the Soviet-Harvard idea do not use optionality, or second-order effects—this absence of optionality in their accounts invalidates their views about the role of teleological science. They need to rewrite the history of technology.
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  What Will Happen Next?

  When I last met Alison Wolf we discussed this dire problem with education and illusions of academic contribution, with Ivy League universities becoming in the eyes of the new Asian and U.S. upper class a status luxury good. Harvard is like a Vuitton bag or a Cartier watch. It is a huge drag on the middle-class parents who have been plowing an increased share of their savings into these institutions, transferring their money to administrators, real estate developers, professors, and other agents. In the United States, we have a buildup of student loans that automatically transfer to these rent extractors. In a way it is no different from racketeering: one needs a decent university “name” to get ahead in life; but we know that collectively society doesn’t appear to advance with organized education.

  She requested that I write to her my thoughts about the future of education—as I told her that I was optimistic on the subject. My answer: b**t is fragile. Which scam in history has lasted forever? I have an enormous faith in Time and History as eventual debunkers of fragility. Education is an institution that has been growing without external stressors; eventually the thing will collapse.

  The next two books, V and VI, will deal with the notion that fragile things break—predictably. Book V will show how to detect fragility (in a more technical manner) and will present the mechanics behind the philosopher’s stone. Book VI is based on the idea that Time is an eraser rather than a builder, and a good one at breaking the fragile—whether buildings or ideas.4