Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder

by Taleb, Nassim Nicholas

  I believe in the heuristics of religion and blindly accommodate its rules (as an Orthodox Christian, I can cheat once in a while, as it is part of the game). Among other things the role of religion is to tame the iatrogenics of abundance—fasting makes you lose your sense of entitlement. But there are more subtle aspects.

  Convexity Effects and Random Nutrition

  Recall from the lung ventilator discussion this practical consequence of Jensen’s inequality: irregularity has its benefits in some areas; regularity has its detriments. Where Jensen’s inequality applies, irregularity might be medicine.

  Perhaps what we mostly need to remove is a few meals at random, or at least avoid steadiness in food consumption. The error of missing nonlinearities is found in two places, in the mixture and in the frequency of food intake.

  The problem with the mixture is as follows. We humans are said to be omnivorous, compared to more specialized mammals, such as cows and elephants (who eat salads) and lions (who eat prey, generally salad-eating prey). But such ability to be omnivorous had to come in response to more variegated environments with unplanned, haphazard, and, what is key, serial availability of sources—specialization is the response to a very stable habitat free of abrupt changes, redundancy of pathways the response to a more variegated one. Diversification of function had to come in response to variety. And a variety of a certain structure.

  Note a subtlety in the way we are built: the cow and other herbivores are subjected to much less randomness than the lion in their food intake; they eat steadily but need to work extremely hard in order to metabolize all these nutrients, spending several hours a day just eating. Not to count the boredom of standing there eating salads. The lion, on the other hand, needs to rely on more luck; it succeeds in a small percentage of the kills, less than 20 percent, but when it eats, it gets in a quick and easy way all these nutrients produced thanks to very hard and boring work by the prey. So take the following principles derived from the random structure of the environment: when we are herbivores, we eat steadily; but when we are predators we eat more randomly. Hence our proteins need to be consumed randomly for statistical reasons.

  So if you agree that we need “balanced” nutrition of a certain combination, it is wrong to immediately assume that we need such balance at every meal rather than serially so. Assuming that we need on average certain quantities of the various nutrients that have been identified, say a certain quantity of carbohydrates, proteins, and fats.5 There is a big difference between getting them together, at every meal, with the classical steak, salad, followed by fresh fruits, or having them separately, serially.

  Why? Because deprivation is a stressor—and we know what stressors do when allowed adequate recovery. Convexity effects at work here again: getting three times the daily dose of protein in one day and nothing the next two is certainly not biologically equivalent to “steady” moderate consumption if our metabolic reactions are nonlinear. It should have some benefits—at least this is how we are designed to be.

  I speculate; in fact I more than speculate: I am convinced (an inevitable result of nonlinearity) that we are antifragile to randomness in food delivery and composition—at least over a certain range, or number of days.

  And one blatant denial of convexity bias is the theory about the benefits of the so-called Cretan (or Mediterranean) diet that triggered a change in the eating habits of the U.S. enlightened class, away from steak and potatoes in favor of grilled fish with salad and feta cheese. It happened as follows. Someone looked at the longevity of Cretans, cataloged what they ate, then inferred—naively—that they lived longer because of the types of food they consumed. It could be true, but the second-order effect (the variations in intake) could be dominant, something that went unnoticed by mechanistic researchers. Indeed, it took a while to notice the following: the Greek Orthodox church has, depending on the severity of the local culture, almost two hundred days of fasting per year; and these are harrowing fasts.

  Yes, harrowing fasts, as I am feeling it right now. For I am writing these lines during Orthodox Lent, a forty-day period in which almost no animal product can be consumed, no sweets, and, for some sticklers, no olive oil. As there are several gradations, I try to stick to a semistrict level, and life is not very easy, as is meant to be. I just spent a long weekend in Amioun, my ancestral village in Northern Lebanon, in the Greek Orthodox area called the Koura valley. There traditional “ruse” foods are perfected, with great imagination: Levantine kibbeh made with herbs and beans in place of meat, meatballs made of matzoh-style small brown balls in a lentil soup. Remarkably, while fish is banned, most days, shellfish is allowed, probably as it was not considered a luxury item. The compensation for the absence of some nutrients from my daily diet will take place in lumps. I will make up my deprivation of what researchers (for now) call protein with fish on days when it is allowed, and of course I will ravenously eat lamb on Easter Day, then consume disproportionally high quantities of fatty red meat for a while thereafter. I dream of the red steak served in Fat Tony–patronized restaurants in unapologetically monstrous portions.

  And there is this antifragility to the stressor of the fast, as it makes the wanted food taste better and can produce euphoria in one’s system. Breaking a fast feels like the exact opposite of a hangover.6

  How to Eat Yourself

  I wonder how people can accept that the stressors of exercise are good for you, but do not transfer to the point that food deprivation can have the same effect. But scientists are in the process of discovering the effects of episodic deprivation of some, or all, foods. Somehow, evidence shows, we get sharper and fitter in response to the stress of the constraint.

  We can look at biological studies not to generalize or use in the rationalistic sense, but to verify the existence of a human response to hunger: that biological mechanisms are activated by food deprivation. And we have experiments on cohorts showing the positive effect of hunger—or deprivation of a food group—on the human body. Researchers rationalize now with the mechanism of autophagy (eating oneself): when deprived of external sources, the theories are that your cells start eating themselves, or breaking down proteins and recombining amino acids to provide material for building other cells. It is assumed by some researchers (for now) that the “vacuum cleaner” effect of autophagy is the key to longevity—though my ideas of the natural are impervious to their theories: as I will show further down, occasional starvation produces some health benefits and that’s that.

  The response to hunger, our antifragility, has been underestimated. We’ve been telling people to eat a good meal for breakfast so they can face the travails of the day. And it is not a new theory by empirically blind modern-day nutritionists—for instance I was struck by a dialogue in Stendhal’s monumental novel Le rouge et le noir in which the protagonist, Julien Sorel, is told “the work for the day will be long and rough, so let us fortify ourselves with a breakfast” (which in the French of the period was called “the first lunch”). Indeed, the idea of breakfast as a main meal with cereals and other such materials has been progressively shown to be harming humans—I wonder why it took so long before anyone realized that such an unnatural idea needs to be tested; further, the tests show that harm, or, at least, no benefits are derived from breakfast unless one has worked for it beforehand.

  Let us remember that 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. Giving people food before they expend energy would certainly confuse their signaling process. And we have ample evidence that intermittently (and only intermittently) depriving organisms of food has been shown to engender beneficial effects on many functions—Valter Longo, for instance, noted that prisoners in concentration camps got less sick in the first phase of food restriction, then broke down later. He tried the result experimentally and found out that mice, in the initial phases of starvation, can withstand high doses of chem
otherapy without visible side effects. Scientists use the narrative that starvation causes the expression of a gene coding a protein called SIRT, SIRT1, or sirtuin, which brings longevity and other effects. The antifragility of humans manifests itself in the response with up-regulation of some genes in response to hunger.

  So once again, religions with ritual fasts have more answers than assumed by those who look at them too literally. In fact what these ritual fasts do is try to bring nonlinearities in consumption to match biological properties. The Appendix shows graphically the standard dose responses in biology: a little bit of anything seems to harbor positive convexity effects (whether beneficial or harmful); add to it and the effect weakens. Clearly at the upper end, the dose has no additional effect since one reaches saturation.

  Walk-Deprived

  Another source of harm from naive rationalism. Just as for a long time people tried to shorten their sleep, as it seemed useless to our earthling logic, many people think that walking is useless, so they use mechanical transportation (car, bicycle, etc.) and get their exercise working out at the gym. And when they walk, they do this ignominious “power walk,” sometimes with weights on their arms. They do not realize that for reasons still opaque to them, walking effortlessly, at a pace below the stress level, can have some benefits—or, as I speculate, is necessary for humans, perhaps as necessary as sleep, which at some point modernity could not rationalize and tried to reduce. Now it may or may not be true that walking effortlessly is as necessary as sleep, but since all my ancestors until the advent of the automobile spent much of their time walking around (and sleeping), I try to just follow the logic, even before some medical journal catches up to the idea and produces what referees of medical journals call “evidence.”

  I Want to Live Forever

  All I hear is how to live longer, richer, and, of course, more laden with electronic gadgets. We are not the first generation to believe that the worst possible thing to befall us is death. But for the ancients, the worst possible outcome was not death, but a dishonorable death, or even just a regular one. For a classical hero, dying in a retirement home with a rude nurse and a network of tubes coming into and out of your nose would not be the attractive telos for a life.

  And, of course, we have this modern illusion that we should live as long as we can. As if we were each the end product. This idea of the “me” as a unit can be traced to the Enlightenment. And, with it, fragility.

  Before that, we were part of the present collective and future progeny. Both present and the future tribes exploited the fragility of individuals to strengthen themselves. People engaged in sacrifices, sought martyrdom, died for the group, and derived pride from doing so; they worked hard for future generations.

  Sadly, as I am writing these lines, the economic system is loading future generations with public governmental debt, causing depletion of resources, and environmental blight to satisfy the requirements of the security analysts and the banking establishment (once again, we cannot separate fragility from ethics).

  As I wrote in Chapter 4, while the gene is antifragile, since it is information, the carrier of the gene is fragile, and needs to be so for the gene to get stronger. We live to produce information, or improve on it. Nietzsche had the Latin pun aut liberi, aut libri—either children or books, both information that carries through the centuries.

  I was just reading in John Gray’s wonderful The Immortalization Commission about attempts to use science, in a postreligious world, to achieve immortality. I felt some deep disgust—as would any ancient—at the efforts of the “singularity” thinkers (such as Ray Kurzweil) who believe in humans’ potential to live forever. Note that if I had to find the anti-me, the person with diametrically opposite ideas and lifestyle on the planet, it would be that Ray Kurzweil fellow. It is not just neomania. While I propose removing offensive elements from people’s diets (and lives), he works by adding, popping close to two hundred pills daily. Beyond that, these attempts at immortality leave me with deep moral revulsion.

  It is the same kind of deep internal disgust that takes hold of me when I see a rich eighty-two-year-old man surrounded with “babes,” twentysomething mistresses (often Russian or Ukrainian). I am not here to live forever, as a sick animal. Recall that the antifragility of a system comes from the mortality of its components—and I am part of that larger population called humans. I am here to die a heroic death for the sake of the collective, to produce offspring (and prepare them for life and provide for them), or eventually, books—my information, that is, my genes, the antifragile in me, should be the ones seeking immortality, not me.

  Then say goodbye, have a nice funeral in St. Sergius (Mar Sarkis) in Amioun, and, as the French say, place aux autres—make room for others.

  1 While there are some controversies concerning conditional life expectancy, the numbers are quite revealing. For instance, on one extreme, Richard Lewontin estimates, “in the last 50 years, only four months have been added to the expected life span of a person who is already 60 years old.” Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) show a few more years (but we are still unsure how much of it came from medicine as compared to improvements in life conditions and social mores). Still, the CDC shows that life expectancy at age 20 only increased from 42.79 (additional years) in 1900–1902 to 51.2 in 1949–1951 and to 58.2 in 2002.

  2 A technical comment: in the so-called Bayesian (or conditional probability) analysis, it would be equivalent to looking at A conditional on B rather than B conditional on A.

  3 One example of lack of empirical wisdom in the use of “evidence”: in a New York Times Magazine article, a doctor who claimed that he stopped eating sugar because of its potential harm was apologetic for doing so “without full evidence.” The best test of empirical wisdom in someone is in where he puts the burden of evidence.

  4 I am trying to avoid discussing the placebo effect; I am in the business of nonlinearities and it does not relate to the nonlinearities argument.

  5 Some people claim that we need more fat than carbohydrates; others offer the opposite (they all tend to agree on protein, though few realize we need to randomize protein intake). Both sides still advocate nonrandomness in the mixing and ignore the nonlinearities from sequence and composition.

  6 The principal disease of abundance can be seen in habituation and jadedness (what biologists currently call dulling of receptors); Seneca: “To a sick person, honey tastes better.”

  BOOK VII

  The Ethics of Fragility and Antifragility

  Now, ethics. Under opacity and in the newfound complexity of the world, people can hide risks and hurt others, with the law incapable of catching them. Iatrogenics has both delayed and invisible consequences. It is hard to see causal links, to fully understand what’s going on.

  Under such epistemic limitations, skin in the game is the only true mitigator of fragility. Hammurabi’s code provided a simple solution—close to thirty-seven hundred years ago. This solution has been increasingly abandoned in modern times, as we have developed a fondness for neomanic complication over archaic simplicity. We need to understand the everlasting solidity of such a solution.

  CHAPTER 23

  Skin in the Game: Antifragility and Optionality at the Expense of Others

  Making talk less cheap—Looking at the spoils—Corporations with random acts of pity?—Predict and inverse predict

  This chapter will look at what we are getting ourselves into when someone gets the upside, and a different person gets the downside.

  The worst problem of modernity lies in the malignant transfer of fragility and antifragility from one party to the other, with one getting the benefits, the other one (unwittingly) getting the harm, with such transfer facilitated by the growing wedge between the ethical and the legal. This state of affairs has existed before, but is acute today—modernity hides it especially well.

  It is, of course, an agency problem.

  And the agency problem, is of course, an
asymmetry.

  We are witnessing a fundamental change. Consider older societies—those societies that have survived. The main difference between us and them is the disappearance of a sense of heroism; a shift away from a certain respect—and power—to those who take downside risks for others. For heroism is the exact inverse of the agency problem: someone elects to bear the disadvantage (risks his own life, or harm to himself, or, in milder forms, accepts to deprive himself of some benefits) for the sake of others. What we have currently is the opposite: power seems to go to those, like bankers, corporate executives (nonentrepreneurs), and politicians, who steal a free option from society.

  And heroism is not just about riots and wars. An example of an inverse agency problem: as a child I was most impressed with the story of a nanny who died in order to save a child from being hit by a car. I find nothing more honorable than accepting death in someone else’s place.