> Antifragile: what doesn't kill you makes you stronger
No, you've missed the point of the book (or haven't read it). It's about that some things become better in the presence of error/noise/damage/volatility. But not all things, some other, fragile things, become worse and worse as damage accumulates. And that there's no word for such a property, so he calls it "Antifragile". And then the book goes in great detail about lots and lots of examples (with the usual rambling).
> become worse and worse as damage accumulates. And that there's no word for such a property
I think the name for that property is "age". :)
Do you have an example of something that gets better in the presence of accumulated damage? Maybe giving something the "weathered" look on purpose? I can really only think of subjective examples.
No, that's only one example. Or rather a simple pattern for how to spot some antifragility in the wild (has it been around for a long time? well then it's likely antifragile).
Consider a portfolio of out of the money options, with some short closer to the money options to "collect premium". This is how Taleb made good amount of his money while trading options back in the day (I personally call such setups "a Taleb trade"). He himself describes it as "trades that make little money on small moves, lose medium amounts on medium moves, win a lot on big moves". But this has absolutely nothing to do with Lindy.
A Lindy "trade" would be something like hoarding gold. It's been around for sooooooo long.
His books are definitely repetitive (and somewhat unorganized), but I find that saying the same thing a hundred times in slightly different ways helps drive home the message.
People may "nod their head yes" when you give the one sentence descriptions, and think they understand it. But then they ACT in a different way, especially when they have "skin in the game".
Taleb actually has a name for that: "domain dependence". That is, you can nod your head in agreement while reading a book, but then when confronted with the exact same situation in real life, you act as if you don't have that knowledge, or you act contrary to it.
I've noticed this in programming vs. computer science. In a test or interview situation, someone might say they'll do things one way. But then their production code they do it a different way, just because that's the common way they've seen it done, in that particular situation.
This can be good or bad -- sometimes the textbook way is actually better; sometimes not. You can also flip it around -- it also applies to the person asking the question. They might expect a certain answer of the interviewee, but when they have skin in the game, they do something else.
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I also don't agree with the one sentence description of the Black Swan. I'd say the most important idea is that outliers are often ignored, but they're precisely what drives history. [1] And also that they're more likely than naive mathematics would suggest, i.e. "fat tails".
To use an example that's HN friendly, every successful company is an outlier. And we always seem to be talking about the biggest outliers of them all (e.g. FAANG, none of which existed when I started using computers.) Making statements about the average new company isn't informative, because the average one fails and doesn't matter.
[1] Thiel has a similar sentiment, something like "every big moment in business happens exactly once. The next Google isn't making a search engine, etc."
I don't think this is a good characterization. Black Swan is more about "Looking just at probability is misleading and dangerous, you need to look at severity too". I haven't read antifragile, but I don't think that statement summarizes it (also it's a completely false statement). My understanding was that it's message is <<resilient systems are those that have "fragile" components but can adapt to/ learn from failure; not those that are designed to be "very strong">>.
While I have a similar impression (that he is overly verbose), my take from Black Swan was “even though you can put any data into the formula for calculating mean and standard deviation of a bell curve, lots of stuff isn’t actually on a bell curve, and if you assume it is when it isn’t you will have a lot more bad days than you planned for”.
Yeah the way I remember it is to compare "casino math" vs. math for real life problems like the stock market. Before reading the book I didn't appreciate how much these are two entirely separate domains, and how much it matters.
And even people who "know" that they're two separate domains fail to ACT like they know it.
If you're trying to predict what happens with 52 cards or a six-sided die, well that's easy. Everything works out nice and cleanly, with no ambiguity.
But if you're trying to predict markets, the math is intractable, for fundamental reasons. An example is that Michael Lewis talks about the "Value At Risk" that Wall St. metric in one of his books, leading to the 2008 crash. That's clearly casino math applied to real life, failing catastrophically.
The charitable interpretation is that people saying "well this only happens once in 100 million years" are genuinely naive. The other interpretation is that they know that their gains will be privatized and their losses will be socialized, so they have no incentive to use math that's not nonsense.
This is basically the "ludic fallacy" [1], although I think "casino math fallacy" is easier to remember. You're applying the math of games to real life, which is wrong exactly where it matters (in the fat tail).
I took one of his twitter polls where he asked a mathematical question. And the little Nasim shouting 'imbecile' worked in perfect symbiosis with the little Kahneman to engage System 2 and think about my answer.
I thought the same for a long time about Antifragile and the oft overlooked Skin in the Game. Both books are now on my yearly reading list. Reading those two along with Fooled by Randomness and to an extent the Black Swan has made me infinitely less foolish and perhaps wiser.
The ideas in Antifragile are to me an good application of the bets to make in life and love. Skin in the game is to evaluate the bets (actions) of others. Doctor prescribing statins...hmmm...what are his incentives around the upsides/downsides of it?
Fooled by Randomness is a prescription of how to evaluate systemic performance (or failure). Black swans is eh...just about black swans or how outlier events in power law distributions can fool us by not showing up for a long time and then ...watch out.
Nassim can appear to be overly verbose but his books defy summarization. I recommend reading them but given my own experience can empathize by the contra opinions.
I'd love to see more antifragile ideas but on more precise terms. I also think it's an idea that's starting to blossom in some fields. Hormesis (controversial) is the same idea at the cellular level. I think I also saw the idea in material science (maybe structural batteries, I forgot).
This is an odd summary of antifragile. I would go with an angle that justifies the word. "When building something you don't want to be fragile, it is not sufficient or even wise to go with established antonyms of fragile."
This was the thinking of some people who didn't want to inconvenience themselves in the face of a respiratory pandemic. Some of them died, but more to the point many of them are still suffering long-term effects even though they've "recovered" from their illness.
And Taleb himself has addressed the pandemic by invoking the "precautionary principle" [0]. We don't know the real risks, so always err on the side of precaution.
Antifragile: what doesn't kill you makes you stronger.
Black Swan: Forecasting is really hard, perfect forecasting is impossible.