Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder

by Taleb, Nassim Nicholas

  Starvation, intermittent fasting, and aging: For the neuronal resistance and brain aging, Anson, Guo, et al. (2003), Mattson et al. (2005), Martin, Mattson et al. (2006), Halagappa, Guo, et al. (2007), Stranahan and Mattson (2012).

  Caloric restriction: Harrison (1984), Wiendruch (1996), Pischon (2008).

  Intense exercise: Synthesis of the literature on the effect of episodic energy imbalance, in De Vany (2011), who also, as a bonus, examines powerlaw effects.

  Missing the point that pills are more speculative: Stip (2010) spends time on via positiva methods to extend life with complicated pharma stories.

  Glucose and willpower: Note the effect of glucose making people sharper and helping willpower from experiments by Baumeister, see Kahneman (2011), might only apply to metabolically unfit persons. See Kurzban (2011) for a look at the statistical tools.

  Cluster of ailments from lack of randomness, as presented in prologue: Yaffe and Blackwell (2004), Razay and Wilcock (1994); Alzheimer and hyperinsulenemia, Luchsinger, Tang, et al. (2004), Janson, Laedtke, et al. (2004).

  Starvation and the brain: Stranahan and Mattson (2012). Long-held belief that the brain needed glucose, not ketones, and that the brain does not go through autophagy, progressively corrected.

  Ramadan and effect of fasting: Ramadan is not interesting because people fast for only about 12 hours, depending on the season (someone who fasts from dinner to lunch can get 17 hours without food, which is practiced by this author). Further, they gorge themselves at dawn, and load on carbohydrates with, in my experience, the sweets of Tripoli (Lebanon). Nevertheless, some significance. Trabelsi et al. (2012), Akanji et al. (2012).

  Benefits of stress: For the different effects of the two types of stressors, short and chronic, Dhabar (2009); for the benefits of stress on boosting immunity and cancer resistance, Dhabhar et al. (2010), Dhabhar et al. (2012).

  Iatrogenics of hygiene and systematic elimination of germs: Rook (2011), Garner et al. (2006), Mégraud and Lamouliatte (1992) for Helyobacter.

  The Paleo crowd, De Vany, Gary Taubes, and friends: Taubes (2008, 2011), De Vany (2011); evolutionary anthropology, Carrera-Bastos et al. (2011), Kaplan et al. (2000).

  BOOK VII: The Ethics of Fragility and Antifragility

  Modern philosophical discussions on capitalism: No interest in such a simple heuristic as skin in the game, even in insightful discourses such as Cuillerai (2009).

  Courage in history: Berns et al. (2010).

  Gladiators: Veyne (1999).

  Treadmill: Lucretius, Nimirum quia non bene norat quæ esset habendi / Finis, et omnino quoad crescat vera voluptas.

  Group and collective: Haidt (2012).

  Adam Smith on capitalism: “A word he never uttered”: Simon Schama, private communication.

  Stiglitz et al. dangerous report: Joseph E. Stiglitz, Jonathan M. Orszag, and Peter R. Orszag, “Implications of the New Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac Risk-based Capital Standard,” Fannie Mae Papers, Volume I, Issue 2, March 2002.

  Meyer Lansky: Attributed to Ralph Salerno, retired NYPD mob investigator, in Ferrante (2011).

  Unsavory activities by pharma finding patients rather than treatments: Stories of direct and indirect corruption, particularly in the psychiatric domain. A professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School received $1.6 million from pharma. “Thanks to him, children as young as two years old are now being diagnosed with bipolar disorder …” Marcia Angell, The New York Review of Books. Angell used to be the editor of The New England Journal of Medicine and distrusts a large number of clinical studies. Further, how money is not spent on speculative research, but on “safe” bets with regular drugs, Light and Lexchin (2012).

  Contradicting studies: Kahneman brought to my attention studies such as Malmendier and Tate (2008, 2009) showing managers investing more than needed in their companies, hence excess skin in the game as a result of overconfidence. Myron Scholes and Robert Merton had investments in LTCM. Indeed—but overall the free option dominates (just measure the aggregate payment of managers relative to gains by shareholders). There are “fools of randomness” and “crooks of randomness”; we often observe a combination. (Credit: Nicolas Tabardel.)

  Asymmetries and extractive: Acemoglu and Robinson (2012) discusses an asymmetry with their notion of extractive economic institutions and environment, in which someone gets rich at the expense of someone else, the opposite of the convex collaborative framework in which one’s wealth leads to a compounding pie. Role of institutions, North (1990).

  Caviar socialism and Burnyeat’s problem: Riffard (2004), Burnyeat (1984), Wai-Hung (2002).

  Collective blindness and diffusion of responsibility: In the animal domain (ants), Deneubourg, Goss et al. (1983), Deneubourg, Pasteels et al. (1983).

  Life and socialization in Rome: Veyne (2001).

  Elephant in the room: Things that everyone knows but remain undiscussed. Zerubavel (2006).

  Mortality of large firms: Higher than expected, Greenwood and Suddaby (2006), comment Stubbart and Knight (2006). The best test is to take the S&P 100 or S&P 500 and look at its composition through time. The other one of course is in the literature on mergers.

  Information cascades: The mechanism by which the crowd exacerbates fallacies, illusions, and rumors, Sunstein (2009) for a synthesis.

  Alan Blinder problem: Wall Street Journal article with undisclosed conflict of interest: “Blanket Deposit Insurance Is a Bad Idea,” Oct. 15, 2008, coauthored with R. Glenn Hubbard, dean of Columbia University Business School.

  Comparative performance of family businesses: McConaughy and Fialco (2001), Le Breton–Miller and Miller (2006), Mackie (2001).

  Skin in the game: Taleb and Martin (2012a).

  Data Mining, Big Data, and the Researcher’s Option, etc.

  Misunderstanding in social science literature: Typical mistake, consider the ignorance of the problem by hyperactive promoters of the idea such as Ayres (2007): “Want to hedge a large purchase of Euros? Turns out you should sell a carefully balanced portfolio of twenty-six other stocks and commodities that might include Wal-Mart stock,” p. 11.

  Stan Young’s crusade: Young and Carr (2011). Also Ioannides (2005, 2007).

  Doxastic commitment: Levi (1980).

  Salt: Very convincing Freedman and Petitti (2001), relies on visualization of data rather than metrics. Note “neither author consults for the salt industry,” the kind of thing I read first.

  Graph on Big Data: By Monte Carlo simulation; used >0.1, or beyond what correlations are loved in social science (it is hard to analytically do the analysis because of the need for large matrices to remain positive-definite). The convexity is invariant to the correlation threshold.

  Solution to the researcher’s bias in clinical trials: Goldacre (2009) suggests the establishment of a database of trials, forcing researchers to record their failures. Anything is better than what we got.

  The collective and fragility: The power of the collective rests on benefits from efficiency, hence fragility: people start substituting collective judgment for individual judgment. This works fine—it is faster and cheaper (hence more efficient) than having to reinvent the wheel individually. But like everything that is a shortcut, it ends blowing up in our faces. In the world in which we live the effect is compounded—the scale is larger and larger; the collective is planetary.

  Jobs and artisan ethics: This makes me worry: “Playboy: ‘Are you saying that the people who made PCjr don’t have that kind of pride in the product?’ Jobs: ‘If they did, they wouldn’t have made the PCjr.’ ” Playboy [sic], Feb. 1, 1985.

  Busting the hypothesis of hyperbolic discounting: Read and Airoldi (2012).

  Other discussions of Big Data and researchers gaming the system: Baumeister et al. (2007) about self-reporting in psychology. Kerr (1998) about hypothesis following the results, and post hoc in Yauan and Maxwell; Yarkoni for the large M (dimension) low N (data) problem.

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