Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder

by Taleb, Nassim Nicholas

  I also enjoy writing facing trees, and, if possible, wild untamed gardens with ferns. But white walls with sharp corners and Euclidian angles and crisp shapes strain me. And once they are built, there is no way to get rid of them. Almost everything built since World War II has an unnatural smoothness to it.

  For some, these buildings cause even more than aesthetic harm—many Romanians are bitter about the dictator Nicolae Ceausescu’s destruction of traditional villages replaced by modern high-rises. Neomania and dictatorship are an explosive combination. In France, some blame the modernistic architecture of housing projects for the immigrant riots. As the journalist Christopher Caldwell wrote about the unnatural living conditions: “Le Corbusier called houses ‘machines for living.’ France’s housing projects, as we now know, became machines for alienation.”

  Jane Jacobs, the New York urban activist, took a heroic stance as a political-style resistant against neomania in architecture and urban planning, as the modernistic dream was carried by Robert Moses, who wanted to improve New York by razing tenements and installing large roads and highways, committing a greater crime against natural order than Haussmann, who, as we saw in Chapter 7, removed during the nineteenth century entire neighborhoods of Paris to make room for the “Grand Boulevards.” Jacobs stood against tall buildings as they deform the experience of urban living, which is conducted at street level. Further, her bone with Robert Moses concerns the highway, as these engines for travel suck life out of the city—to her a city should be devoted to pedestrians. Again, we have the machine-organism dichotomy: to her the city is an organism, for Moses it is a machine to be improved upon. Indeed, Moses had plans to raze the West Village; it is thanks to her petitions and unremitting resistance that the neighborhood—the prettiest in Manhattan—has survived nearly intact. One might want to give Moses some credit, for not all his projects turned out to be nefarious—some might have been beneficial, such as the parks and beaches now accessible to the middle class thanks to the highways.

  Recall the discussion of municipal properties—they don’t translate into something larger because problems become more abstract as they scale up, and the abstract is not something human nature can manage properly. The same principle needs to apply to urban life: neighborhoods are villages, and need to remain villages.

  I was recently stuck in a traffic jam in London where, one hears, the speed of traveling is equal to what it was a century and a half ago, if not slower. It took me almost two hours to cross London from one end to the other. As I was depleting the topics of conversation with the (Polish) driver, I wondered whether Haussmann was not right, and whether London would be better off if it had its Haussmann razing neighborhoods and plowing wide arteries to facilitate circulation. Until it hit me that, in fact, if there was so much traffic in London, as compared to other cities, it was because people wanted to be there, and being there for them exceeded the costs. More than a third of the residents in London are foreign-born, and, in addition to immigrants, most high net worth individuals on the planet get their starter pied-à-terre in Central London. It could be that the absence of these large avenues and absence of a dominating state is part of its appeal. Nobody would buy a pied-à-terre in Brasilia, the perfectly top-down city built from scratch on a map.

  I also checked and saw that the most expensive neighborhoods in Paris today (such as the Sixth Arrondissement or Île Saint-Louis) were the ones that had been left alone by the nineteenth-century renovators.

  Finally, the best argument against teleological design is as follows. Even after they are built, buildings keep incurring mutations as if they needed to slowly evolve and be taken over by the dynamical environment: they change colors, shapes, windows—and character. In his book How Buildings Learn, Stewart Brand shows in pictures how buildings change through time, as if they needed to metamorphose into unrecognizable shapes—strangely buildings, when erected, do not account for the optionality of future alterations.

  Wall to Wall Windows

  The skepticism about architectural modernism that I am proposing is not unconditional. While most of it brings unnatural stress, some elements are a certain improvement. For instance, floor-to-ceiling windows in a rural environment expose us to nature—here again technology making itself (literally) invisible. In the past, the size of windows was dictated by thermal considerations, as insulation was not possible—heat escaped rather quickly from windows. Today’s materials allow us to avoid such constraint. Further, much French architecture was a response to the tax on windows and doors installed after the Revolution, so many buildings have a very small number of windows.

  Just as with the unintrusive shoes that allow us to feel the terrain, modern technology allows some of us to reverse that trend, as expressed by Oswald Spengler, which makes civilization go from plants to stone, that is, from the fractal to the Euclidian. We are now moving back from the smooth stone to the rich fractal and natural. Benoît Mandelbrot wrote in front of a window overlooking trees: he craved fractal aesthetics so much that the alternative would have been inconceivable. Now modern technology allows us to merge with nature, and instead of a small window, an entire wall can be transparent and face lush and densely forested areas.

  Metrification

  One example of the neomania of states: the campaign for metrification, that is, the use of the metric system to replace “archaic” ones on grounds of efficiency—it “makes sense.” The logic might be impeccable (until of course one supersedes it with a better, less naive logic, an attempt I will make here). Let us look at the wedge between rationalism and empiricism in this effort.

  Warwick Cairns, a fellow similar to Jane Jacobs, has been fighting in courts to let market farmers in Britain keep selling bananas by the pound, and similar matters as they have resisted the use of the more “rational” kilogram. The idea of metrification was born out of the French Revolution, as part of the utopian mood, which includes changing the names of the winter months to Nivôse, Pluviôse, Ventôse, descriptive of weather, having decimal time, ten-day weeks, and similar naively rational matters. Luckily the project of changing time has failed. However, after repeated failures, the metric system was implemented there—but the old system has remained refractory in the United States and England. The French writer Edmond About, who visited Greece in 1832, a dozen years after its independence, reports how peasants struggled with the metric system as it was completely unnatural to them and stuck to Ottoman standards instead. (Likewise, the “modernization” of the Arabic alphabet from the easy-to-memorize old Semitic sequence made to sound like words, ABJAD, HAWWAZ, to the logical sequence A-B-T-TH has created a generation of Arabic speakers without the ability to recite their alphabet.)

  But few realize that naturally born weights have a logic to them: we use feet, miles, pounds, inches, furlongs, stones (in Britain) because these are remarkably intuitive and we can use them with a minimal expenditure of cognitive effort—and all cultures seem to have similar measurements with some physical correspondence to the everyday. A meter does not match anything; a foot does. I can imagine the meaning of “thirty feet” with minimal effort. A mile, from the Latin milia passum, is a thousand paces. Likewise a stone (14 pounds) corresponds to … well, a stone. An inch (or pouce) corresponds to a thumb. A furlong is the distance one can sprint before running out of breath. A pound, from libra, is what you can imagine holding in your hands. Recall from the story of Thales in Chapter 12 that we used thekel or shekel: these mean “weight” in Canaanite-Semitic languages, something with a physical connotation, similar to the pound. There is a certain nonrandomness to how these units came to be in an ancestral environment—and the digital system itself comes from the correspondence to the ten fingers.

  As I am writing these lines, no doubt, some European Union official of the type who eats 200 grams of well-cooked meat with 200 centiliters’ worth of red wine every day for dinner (the optimal quantity for his health benefits) is concocting plans to promote the “efficiency” of the metric s
ystem deep into the countryside of the member countries.

  TURNING SCIENCE INTO JOURNALISM

  So, we can apply criteria of fragility and robustness to the handling of information—the fragile in that context is, like technology, what does not stand the test of time. The best filtering heuristic, therefore, consists in taking into account the age of books and scientific papers. Books that are one year old are usually not worth reading (a very low probability of having the qualities for “surviving”), no matter the hype and how “earth-shattering” they may seem to be. So I follow the Lindy effect as a guide in selecting what to read: books that have been around for ten years will be around for ten more; books that have been around for two millennia should be around for quite a bit of time, and so forth. Many understand this point but do not apply it to academic work, which is, in much of its modern practice, hardly different from journalism (except for the occasional original production). Academic work, because of its attention-seeking orientation, can be easily subjected to Lindy effects: think of the hundreds of thousands of papers that are just noise, in spite of how hyped they were at the time of publication.

  The problem in deciding whether a scientific result or a new “innovation” is a breakthrough, that is, the opposite of noise, is that one needs to see all aspects of the idea—and there is always some opacity that time, and only time, can dissipate. Like many people watching cancer research like a hawk, I fell for the following. There was at some point a great deal of excitement about the work of Judah Folkman, who, as we saw in Chapter 15, believed that one could cure cancer by choking the blood supply (tumors require nutrition and tend to create new blood vessels, what is called neovascularization). The idea looked impeccable on paper, but, about a decade and a half later, it appears that the only significant result we got was completely outside cancer, in the mitigation of macular degeneration.

  Likewise, seemingly uninteresting results that go unnoticed, can, years later turn out to be breakthroughs.

  So time can act as a cleanser of noise by confining to its dustbins all these overhyped works. Some organizations even turn such scientific production into a cheap spectator sport, with ranking of the “ten hottest papers” in, say, rectal oncology or some such sub-sub-specialty.

  If we replace scientific results with scientists, we often get the same neomaniac hype. There is a disease to grant a prize for a promising scientist “under forty,” a disease that is infecting economics, mathematics, finance, etc. Mathematics is a bit special because the value of its results can be immediately seen—so I skip the criticism. Of the fields I am familiar with, such as literature, finance, and economics, I can pretty much ascertain that the prizes given to those under forty are the best reverse indicator of value (much like the belief—well tested—by traders that companies that get hyped up for their potential and called “best” on the cover of magazines or in books such as Good to Great are about to underperform and one can derive an abnormal profit by shorting their stock). The worst effect of these prizes is penalizing those who don’t get them and debasing the field by turning it into an athletic competition.

  Should we have a prize, it should be for “over a hundred”: it took close to one hundred and forty years to validate the contribution of one Jules Regnault, who discovered optionality and mapped it mathematically—along with what we dubbed the philosopher’s stone. His work stayed obscure all this time.

  Now if you want to be convinced of my point of how noisy science can be, take any elementary textbook you read in high school or college with interest then—in any discipline. Open it to a random chapter, and see if the idea is still relevant. Odds are that it may be boring, but still relevant—or nonboring, and still relevant. It could be the famous 1215 Magna Carta (British history), Caesar’s Gallic wars (Roman history), a historical presentation of the school of Stoics (philosophy), an introduction to quantum mechanics (physics), or the genetic trees of cats and dogs (biology).

  Now try to get the proceedings of a random conference about the subject matter concerned that took place five years ago. Odds are it will feel no different from a five-year-old newspaper, perhaps even less interesting. So attending breakthrough conferences might be, statistically speaking, as much a waste of time as buying a mediocre lottery ticket, one with a small payoff. The odds of the paper’s being relevant—and interesting—in five years is no better than one in ten thousand. The fragility of science!

  Even the conversation of a high school teacher or that of an unsuccessful college professor is likely to be more worthwhile than the latest academic paper, less corrupted with neomania. My best conversations in philosophy have been with French lycée teachers who love the topic but are not interested in pursuing a career writing papers in it (in France they teach philosophy in the last year of high school). Amateurs in any discipline are the best, if you can connect with them. Unlike dilettantes, career professionals are to knowledge what prostitutes are to love.

  Of course you may be lucky enough to hit on a jewel here and there, but in general, at best, conversation with an academic would be like the conversation of plumbers, at the worst that of a concierge bandying the worst brand of gossip: gossip about uninteresting people (other academics), small talk. True, the conversation of top scientists can sometimes be captivating, those people who aggregate knowledge and for whom cruising the subject is effortless as the entire small parts of the field come glued together. But these people are just currently too rare on this planet.

  I complete this section with the following anecdote. One of my students (who was majoring in, of all subjects, economics) asked me for a rule on what to read. “As little as feasible from the last twenty years, except history books that are not about the last fifty years,” I blurted out, with irritation as I hate such questions as “what’s the best book you’ve ever read,” or “what are the ten best books,”—my “ten best books ever” change at the end of every summer. Also, I have been hyping Daniel Kahneman’s recent book, because it is largely an exposition of his research of thirty-five and forty years ago, with filtering and modernization. My recommendation seemed impractical, but, after a while, the student developed a culture in original texts such as Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and Hayek, texts he believes he will cite at the age of eighty. He told me that after his detoxification, he realized that all his peers do is read timely material that becomes instantly obsolete.

  WHAT SHOULD BREAK

  In 2010, The Economist magazine asked me to partake in an exercise imagining the world in 2036. As they were aware of my reticence concerning forecasters, their intention was to bring a critical “balance” and use me as a counter to the numerous imaginative forecasts, hoping for my usual angry, dismissive, and irascible philippic.

  Quite surprised they were when, after a two-hour (slow) walk, I wrote a series of forecasts at one go and sent them the text. They probably thought at first that I was pulling a prank on them, or that someone got the wrong email and was impersonating me. Outlining the reasoning on fragility and asymmetry (concavity to errors), I explained that I would expect the future to be populated with wall-to-wall bookshelves, the device called the telephone, artisans, and such, using the notion that most technologies that are now twenty-five years old should be around in another twenty-five years—once again, most, not all.7 But the fragile should disappear, or be weakened. Now, what is fragile? The large, optimized, overreliant on technology, overreliant on the so-called scientific method instead of age-tested heuristics. Corporations that are large today should be gone, as they have always been weakened by what they think is their strength: size, which is the enemy of corporations as it causes disproportionate fragility to Black Swans. City-states and small corporations are more likely to be around, even thrive. The nation-state, the currency-printing central bank, these things called economics departments, may stay nominally, but they will have their powers severely eroded. In other words, what we saw in the left column of the Triad should be gone—alas to be replaced by other fragil
e items.

  PROPHETS AND THE PRESENT

  By issuing warnings based on vulnerability—that is, subtractive prophecy—we are closer to the original role of the prophet: to warn, not necessarily to predict, and to predict calamities if people don’t listen.

  The classical role of the prophet, at least in the Levantine sense, is not to look into the future but to talk about the present. He tells people what to do, or, rather, in my opinion, the more robust what not to do. In the Near Eastern monotheistic traditions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, the major role of the prophets is the protection of monotheism from its idolatrous and pagan enemies that may bring calamities on the straying population. The prophet is someone who is in communication with the unique God, or at least can read his mind—and, what is key, issues warnings to His subjects. The Semitic nby, expressed as Nevi or nebi (in the original Hebrew), the same with minor differences in pronunciation in Aramaic (nabi’y) and Arabic (nabi), is principally someone connecting with God, expressing what is on God’s mind—the meaning of nab’ in Arabic is “news” (the original Semitic root in Acadian, nabu, meant “to call”). The initial Greek translation, pro-phetes, meant “spokesman,” which is retained in Islam, as a dual role for Mohammed the Prophet is that of the Messenger (rasoul)—there were some small ranking differences between the roles of spokesman (nabi) and messenger (rasoul). The job of mere forecasting is rather limited to seers, or the variety of people involved in divination such as the “astrologers” so dismissed by the Koran and the Old Testament. Again, the Canaanites had been too promiscuous in their theologies and various approaches to handling the future, and the prophet is precisely someone who deals only with the One God, not with the future like a mere Baalite.