Antifragile

Anti-fragile is beyond resilient. The resilient merely resists the shocks and stays the same, the anti-fragile become stronger.

一匹快马在和慢马比赛的时候更容易输掉，反而和更快的马赛跑的时候容易赢。需要公开讲话的时候，声音稍微小点反而更能吸引群众的注意力，但这个度一定要掌握好，高低犹不及。一帆风顺越久，当混乱发生时，伤害越大。关注点放在你不会失去的东西上（获得的能力，快乐，知识，修养等）invest in good actions. Things can take away from us-not good deeds and acts of virtue.好的事情往往会让你无所适从。富人的财富让他们焦虑，因为有失去的可能性驾驭欲望，（我最近比较关注的一个想法）指的是能够将恐惧转化成谨慎，痛苦带来信息。错误中的启发，欲望中的承担I have nothing to lose then I am antifragile. 😃fragile 的伤害不可逆性，没什么事是匆忙并且安全的做完的。（谨记）玩火不一定自焚，可以从伤害中获得将来的安全。Just a little bit injuries远离中间区域。风险越小的工作可替代性越强。（此处和deep work观点一致，多数时候既想做这个又同时做那个，结果显示就是在浪费时间）看你运动的目的是什么，如果是减脂，那么强度大周期短的会比没什么强度长期运动的效果快。不要停留在中间区域不要去问人们想要什么，想要去哪，人们直到你提供给他们后他们才知道要什么。有大房子的人聊天的对象也多数是有大房子的人。（鱼找鱼，虾找虾，乌龟找王八，哈哈）选择，不是责任。主动性，被动性。错误和尝试，从另一个角度讲，是一种排除错误的过程。无知并不会随着年龄增长自动变得有知，除非有意识的去学习。共产主义是不存在的，人性本恶和人性本善都是不对的，but, who cares.大多数都知道的事情并不是很值得了解一知半解更危险。（是因为会犯错误更容易走向错误的方向么？可不犯错误不尝试怎么知道自己到达了什么程度？）抗脆弱，指数性非线性。Almost everything contemporary has winner-take-all effects, which includes sources of harm and benefits.超过需要一个理由要做的事，就别去做了。less is more 另外的理由多是自己找出来说服自己的第一种理由的。闭上眼，想象几年以后的生活，人都会增加一些现在没有的新东西。The more energy you put into trying to control your ideas and what you think about, the more your ideas end up controlling youSometimes you only know about someone's character after you harm them with an error for which you are solely responsibleSome respect for the past, some curiosity about the historical record, a hunger for the wisdom of the elders, and a grasp of the notion of heuristics.对于挑衅行为要给予严厉的打击，不能同意更多😂Dignity is worth noting unless you earn it, unless you are willing to pay a price for it.It's rather a good thing to lose argument.保证安全感的做法在某些时候会拖你的后腿，破釜沉舟自绝后路反而会激发你无穷的力量。Food would not have a taste if it weren't for hunger; results are meaningless without effort, joy without sadness, convictions without uncertainty, and an ethical life isn't so when stripped of personal risks.

It is said that the best horses lose when they compete with slower ones, and win against better rivals. Undercompensation from the absence of a stressor, inverse hormesis, absence of challenge, degrades the best of the best. In Baudelaire’s poem, “The albatross’s giant wings prevent him from walking”—many do better in Calculus 103 than Calculus 101.

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So not only are we made to overcompensate, but we sometimes need the noise. Like many writers, I like to sit in cafés, working, as they say, against resistance. Consider our bedtime predilection for the rustle of tree leaves or the sound of the ocean: there are even electric contraptions that produce “white noise”3 that helps people sleep better. Now these small distractions, like hormetic responses, act up to a point.

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If humans fight the last war, nature fights the next one. Your body is more imaginative about the future than you are. Consider how people train in weightlifting: the body overshoots in response to exposures and overprepares (up to the point of biological limit, of course). This is how bodies get stronger.

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The workout was limited to trying to exceed that mark once or twice, rather than spending time on un-entertaining time-consuming repetitions.

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Like tormenting love, some thoughts are so antifragile that you feed them by trying to get rid of them, turning them into obsessions. Psychologists have shown the irony of the process of thought control: the more energy you put into trying to control your ideas and what you think about, the more your ideas end up controlling you.

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Information is antifragile; it feeds more on attempts to harm it than it does on efforts to promote it. For instance, many wreck their reputations merely by trying to defend it. The wily Venetians knew how to spread information by disguising it as a secret. Try it out with the following experiment in spreading gossip: tell someone a secret and qualify it by insisting that it is a secret, begging your listener “not to tell anyone”; the more you insist that it remain a secret, the more it will spread.

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There is a visible selection bias: why did he attack you instead of someone else, one of the millions of persons deserving but not worthy of attack? It is his energy in attacking or badmouthing that will, antifragile style, put you on the map.

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“My son, I am very disappointed in you,” he said. “I never hear anything wrong said about you. You have proven yourself incapable of generating envy.”

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You do not want to “control” your reputation; you won’t be able to do it by controlling information flow. Instead, focus on altering your exposure, say, by putting yourself in a position impervious to reputational damage. Or even put yourself in a situation to benefit from the antifragility of information. In that sense, a writer is antifragile, but we will see later most modernistic professions are usually not.

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So I end this section with a thought. It is quite perplexing that those from whom we have benefited the most aren’t those who have tried to help us (say with “advice”) but rather those who have actively tried—but eventually failed—to harm us.

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Now the crux of complex systems, those with interacting parts, is that they convey information to these component parts through stressors, or thanks to these stressors: your body gets information about the environment not through your logical apparatus, your intelligence and ability to reason, compute, and calculate, but through stress, via hormones or other messengers we haven’t discovered yet.

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For complex systems are, well, all about information. And there are many more conveyors of information around us than meet the eye. This is what we will call causal opacity: it is hard to see the arrow from cause to consequence, making much of conventional methods of analysis, in addition to standard logic, inapplicable. As I said, the predictability of specific events is low, and it is such opacity that makes it low. Not only that, but because of nonlinearities, one needs higher visibility than with regular systems—instead what we have is opacity.

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Such a stressor would be certainly better than the mild but continuous stress of a boss, mortgage, tax problems, guilt over procrastinating with one’s tax return, exam pressures, chores, emails to answer, forms to complete, daily commutes—things that make you feel trapped in life. In other words, the pressures brought about by civilization. In fact, neurobiologists show that the former type of stressor is necessary, the second harmful, for one’s health.

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And once in a while one hears shouts of “who is governing us?” as if the world needs someone to govern it.

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It is the systematic removal of uncertainty and randomness from things, trying to make matters highly predictable in their smallest details. All that for the sake of comfort, convenience, and efficiency.

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it consists in converting activities, and not just travel, into the equivalent of a script like those followed by actors. We will see how touristification castrates systems and organisms that like uncertainty by sucking randomness out of them to the last drop—while providing them with the illusion of benefit. The guilty parties are the education system, planning the funding of teleological scientific research, the French baccalaureate, gym machines, etc.

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Unlike with hormesis, the unit does not get stronger in response to stress; it dies. But it accomplishes a transfer of benefits; other units survive—and those that survive have attributes that improve the collective of units, leading to modifications commonly assigned the vague term “evolution” in textbooks and in the New York Times Tuesday science section. So the antifragility of concern here is not so much that of the organisms, inherently weak, but rather that of their genetic code, which can survive them. The code doesn’t really care about the welfare of the unit itself—quite the contrary, since it destroys many things around it.

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The more noise and disturbances in the system, up to a point, barring those extreme shocks that lead to extinction of a species, the more the effect of the reproduction of the fittest and that of random mutations will play a role in defining the properties of the next generation.

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Even when there is extinction of an entire species after some extreme event, no big deal, it is part of the game. This is still evolution at work, as those species that survive are fittest and take over from the lost dinosaurs—evolution is not about a species, but at the service of the whole of nature.

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We can simplify the relationships between fragility, errors, and antifragility as follows. When you are fragile, you depend on things following the exact planned course, with as little deviation as possible—for deviations are more harmful than helpful. This is why the fragile needs to be very predictive in its approach, and, conversely, predictive systems cause fragility. When you want deviations, and you don’t care about the possible dispersion of outcomes that the future can bring, since most will be helpful, you are antifragile.

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And of course you learn from the errors of others. You may never know what type of person someone is unless they are given opportunities to violate moral or ethical codes.

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Further, my characterization of a loser is someone who, after making a mistake, doesn’t introspect, doesn’t exploit it, feels embarrassed and defensive rather than enriched with a new piece of information, and tries to explain why he made the mistake rather than moving on. These types often consider themselves the “victims” of some large plot, a bad boss, or bad weather.

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Finally, a thought. He who has never sinned is less reliable than he who has only sinned once.

someone who has made plenty of errors—though never the same error more than once—is more reliable than someone who has never made any.

Someone paid a price for the system to improve.

Procrustes was an inn-keeper in Greek mythology who, in order to make the travelers fit in his bed, cut the limbs of those who were too tall and stretched those who were too short. But he had the bed fitting the visitor with total perfection.

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Where simplifications fail, causing the most damage, is when something nonlinear is simplified with the linear as a substitute.

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Thanks to variability, these artisanal careers harbor a bit of antifragility: small variations make them adapt and change continuously by learning from the environment and being, sort of, continuously under pressure to be fit. Remember that stressors are information; these careers face a continuous supply of these stressors that make them adjust opportunistically. In addition, they are open to gifts and positive surprises, free options—the hallmark of antifragility,

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Man-made smoothing of randomness produces the equivalent of John’s income: smooth, steady, but fragile.

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A week with declining earnings for a taxi driver or a prostitute provides information concerning the environment and intimates the need to find a new part of town where clients hang around; a month or so without earnings drives them to revise their skills.

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Nature loves small errors (without which genetic variations are impossible), humans don’t—hence when you rely on human judgment you are at the mercy of a mental bias that disfavors antifragility.

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But this bottom-up form of dictatorship provides protection against the romanticism of utopias, since no big ideas can be generated in such an unintellectual atmosphere—it suffices to spend some time in cafés in the old section of Geneva, particularly on a Sunday afternoon, to understand that the process is highly unintellectual, devoid of any sense of the grandiose, even downright puny (there is a famous quip about how the greatest accomplishment of the Swiss was inventing the cuckoo clock while other nations produced great works—nice story except that the Swiss did not invent the cuckoo clock). But the system produces stability—boring stability—at every possible level.

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On a large scale, others are abstract items; given the lack of social contact with the people concerned, the civil servant’s brain leads rather than his emotions—with numbers, spreadsheets, statistics, more spreadsheets, and theories.

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Mediocristan—plenty of variations that might be scary, but tend to cancel out in the aggregate (over time, or over the collection of municipalities that constitute the larger confederation or entity)—rather than the unruly one called Extremistan, in which you have mostly stability and occasionally large chaos—errors there have large consequences.

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The butcher will keep feeding the turkey until a few days before Thanksgiving. Then comes that day when it is really not a very good idea to be a turkey. So with the butcher surprising it, the turkey will have a revision of belief—right when its confidence in the statement that the butcher loves turkeys is maximal and “it is very quiet” and soothingly predictable in the life of the turkey. This example builds on an adaptation of a metaphor by Bertrand Russell. The key here is that such a surprise will be a Black Swan event; but just for the turkey, not for the butcher.

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Consider the method of annealing in metallurgy, a technique used to make metal stronger and more homogeneous. It involves the heating and controlled cooling of a material, to increase the size of the crystals and reduce their defects. Just as with Buridan’s donkey, the heat causes the atoms to become unstuck from their initial positions and wander randomly through states of higher energy; the cooling gives them more