Antifragile

He informed me—in response to the idea of antifragility—of a phenomenon called post-traumatic growth, the opposite of post-traumatic stress syndrome, by which people harmed by past events surpass themselves.

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Naturally, there are classical thoughts on the subject, with a Latin saying that sophistication is born out of hunger (artificia docuit fames). The idea pervades classical literature: in Ovid, difficulty is what wakes up the genius (ingenium mala saepe movent),

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This is a fallacy—note for now the disproportionate contribution of uneducated technicians and entrepreneurs to various technological leaps, from the Industrial Revolution to the emergence of Silicon Valley, and you will see what I mean.

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Many, like the great Roman statesman Cato the Censor, looked at comfort, almost any form of comfort, as a road to waste.1 He did not like it when we had it too easy, as he worried about the weakening of the will.

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The record shows that, for society, the richer we become, the harder it gets to live within our means.

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HOW TO WIN A HORSE RACE It is said that the best horses lose when they compete with slower ones, and win against better rivals.

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Undercompensation from the absence of a stressor, inverse hormesis, absence of challenge, degrades the best of the best.

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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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Most humans manage to squander their free time, as free time makes them dysfunctional, lazy, and unmotivated—the busier they get, the more active they are at other tasks. Overcompensation, here again.

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bit investigated: there is empirical evidence of the effect of “disfluency.” Mental effort moves us into higher gear, activating more vigorous and more analytical brain machinery.

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overcompensation makes us concentrate better in the presence of a modicum of background random noise, as if the act of countering such noise helps us hone our mental focus.

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Layers of redundancy are the central risk management property of natural systems.

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If you ingest, say, fifteen milligrams of a poisonous substance, your body may prepare for twenty or more, and as a side effect will get stronger overall. These extra five milligrams of poison that you can withstand are no different from additional stockpiles of vital or necessary goods, say extra cash in the bank or more food in the basement.

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A system that overcompensates is necessarily in overshooting mode, building extra capacity and strength in anticipation of a worse outcome and in response to information about the possibility of a hazard.

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Lucretius problem, after the Latin poetic philosopher who wrote that the fool believes that the tallest mountain in the world will be equal to the tallest one he has observed. We consider the biggest object of any kind that we have seen in our lives or hear about as the largest item that can possibly exist. And we have been doing this for millennia. In Pharaonic Egypt, which happens to be the first complete top-down nation-state managed by bureaucrats, scribes tracked the high-water mark of the Nile and used it as an estimate for a future worst-case scenario.

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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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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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We all learn early on in life that books and ideas are antifragile and get nourishment from attacks—to borrow from the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius (one of the doer-Stoic authors), “fire feeds on obstacles.”

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It is easier to change jobs than control your reputation or public perception.

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Instead, focus on altering your exposure, say, by putting yourself in a position impervious to reputational damage.

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But these failures to self-repair come largely from maladjustment—either too few stressors or too little time for recovery between them—and maladjustment for this author is the mismatch between one’s design and the structure of the randomness of the environment (what I call more technically its “distributional or statistical properties”).

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Success, wealth, and technology, alas, make this mode of acquisition much more difficult.

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Now I am punished by privilege and comfort—and I can’t resist comfort.

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Yet the best way to learn a language may be an episode of jail in a foreign country.

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My friend Chad benefited from the kind of disorder that is less and less prevalent thanks to the modern disease of touristification

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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.

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Friday night opera, scheduled parties, scheduled laughs. Again, golden jail.

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This “goal-driven” attitude hurts deeply inside my existential self.

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you are alive—something deep in your soul likes a certain measure of randomness and disorder.

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true life. Consider that all the wealth of the world can’t buy a liquid more pleasurable than water after intense thirst. Few objects bring more thrill than a recovered wallet (or laptop) lost on a train. Further, in an ancestral

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habitat we humans were prompted by natural stimuli—fear, hunger, desire—that made us work out and become fit for our environment.

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Ancestral life had no homework, no boss, no civil servants, no academic grades, no conversation with the dean, no consultant with an MBA, no table of procedure, no application form, no trip to New Jersey, no grammatical stickler, no conversation with someone boring you: all life was random stimuli and nothing, good or bad, ever felt like work.3

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Finally, an environment with variability (hence randomness) does not expose us to chronic stress injury, unlike human-designed systems.

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Much of modern life is preventable chronic stress injury.

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Further, we mentioned “sacrifice” a few paragraphs ago. Sadly, the benefits of errors are often conferred on others, the collective—as if individuals were designed to make errors for the greater good, not their own. Alas, we tend to discuss mistakes without taking into consideration this layering and transfer of fragility.

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Variability causes mistakes and adaptations; it also allows you to know who your friends are.

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Both your failures and your successes will give you information.

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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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I’ve discussed the problem in earlier writings of the false illusion of causality, with a newspaper article saying that the new mafia members, former Soviet exiles, had been “hardened by a visit to the Gulag” (the Soviet concentration camps). Since the sojourn in the Gulag killed the weakest, one had the illusion of strengthening.

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Someone paid a price for the system to improve.

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Psychologists label “overconfidence” a disease, blinding people to the odds of success when engaging in ventures. But there is a difference between the benign, heroic type of risk taking that is beneficial to others, in the antifragile case, and the nastier modern type related to negative Black Swans, such as the overconfidence of “scientists” computing the risks of harm from the Fukushima reactor. In the case of the former, what they call overconfidence is a good thing, not something to medicate.

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And compare entrepreneurs to the beancounting managers of companies who climb the ladder of hierarchy with hardly ever any real downside. Their cohort is rarely at risk.

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This is the central illusion in life: that randomness is risky, that it is a bad thing—and that eliminating randomness is done by eliminating randomness.

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Their risks are visible. Not so with employees, who have no volatility, but can be surprised to see their income going to zero after a phone call from the personnel department. Employees’ risks are hidden.

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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.

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Likewise, a prostitute faces the small probability of seeing a severely infatuated rich client give her a very expensive diamond, or even an offer of matrimony, in what can be expected to be a short transitional period before her widowhood.

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a month or so without earnings drives them to revise their skills.

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Further, for a self-employed person, a small (nonterminal) mistake is information, valuable information, one that directs him in his adaptive approach; for someone employed like John, a mistake is something that goes into his permanent record, filed in the personnel department.

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“We made the wrong mistake”—and for John all mistakes are wrong mistakes.

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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 the system produces stability—boring stability—at every possible level.

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As with a crumbling sand pile, it would be unintelligent to attribute the collapse of a fragile bridge to the last truck that crossed it, and even more foolish to try to predict in advance which truck might bring it down. Yet it is done all too often.

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Obama’s mistake illustrates the illusion of local causal chains—that is, confusing catalysts for causes and assuming

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which advanced a certain indifference to fate.

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Seneca was into practical decision making,

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My point is that wisdom in decision making is vastly more important—not just practically, but philosophically—than knowledge.

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To become a successful philosopher king, it is much better to start as a king than as a philosopher,

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As I said concerning the psychologists who in Chapter 2 ignore post-traumatic growth but focus on post-traumatic harm, intellectuals have this thing against antifragility—for them the world tends to stop at robustness.

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Success brings an asymmetry: you now have a lot more to lose than to gain.

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You are hence fragile.

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When you become rich, the pain of losing your fortune exceeds the emotional gain of getting additional wealth, so you start living

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under continuous emotional threat.

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ancients—I found an earlier exposition in Livy: “Men feel the good less intensely than the bad” (segnius homines bona quam mala sentiunt),

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Seneca’s practical method to counter such fragility was to go through mental exercises to write off possessions, so when losses occurred he would not feel the sting—a

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I have always hated employment and the associated dependence on someone else’s arbitrary opinion, particularly when much of what’s done inside large corporations violates my sense of ethics.

resignation idea

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I would go through the mental exercise of assuming every morning that the worst possible thing had actually happened—the rest of the day would be a bonus.

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Actually the method of mentally adjusting “to the worst” had advantages way beyond the therapeutic, as it made me take a certain class of risks for which the worst case is clear and unambiguous, with limited and known downside.

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It is hard to stick to a good discipline of mental write-off when things are going well, yet that’s when one needs the discipline the most.

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An intelligent life is all about such emotional positioning to eliminate the sting of harm, which as we saw is done by mentally writing off belongings so one does not feel any pain from losses.

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My idea of the modern Stoic sage is someone who transforms fear into prudence, pain into information, mistakes into initiation, and desire into undertaking.

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Things can be taken away from us—not good deeds and acts of virtue.

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Since most were poor, they might have fit a narrative to the circumstances

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To make profits and buy a BMW, it would be a good idea to, first, survive.

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In other words, if something is fragile, its risk of breaking makes anything you do to improve it or make it “efficient” inconsequential unless you first reduce that risk of breaking.

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them live under continuous anxiety, pressures, and indeed, severe bastardization of the soul.

steal this

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The barbell businessman-scholar situation was ideal;

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And professions can be serial: something very safe, then something speculative.

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Many of the “doers” turned “thinkers” like Montaigne have done a serial barbell: pure action, then pure reflection.

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Or, if I have to work, I find it preferable (and less painful) to work intensely for very short hours, then do nothing for the

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rest of the time (assuming doing nothing is really doing nothing), until I recover completely and look forward to a repetition, rather than being subjected to the tedium of Japanese style low-intensity interminable office hours with sleep deprivation. Main course and dessert are

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am personally completely paranoid about certain risks, then very aggressive with others. The rules are: no smoking, no sugar (particularly fructose),

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But the optimal policy is to avoid alcohol three times a week (hence give the liver a lengthy vacation) then drink liberally the remaining four.

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So let us call here the teleological fallacy the illusion that you know exactly where you are going, and that you knew exactly where you were going in the past, and that others have succeeded in the past by knowing where they were going.

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The flâneur is not a prisoner of a plan.

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it assumes completeness of vision and gets one locked into a hard-to-revise program, while the flâneur continuously—and, what is crucial, rationally—modifies his targets as he acquires information.

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Now a warning: the opportunism of the flâneur is great in life and business—but not in personal life and matters that involve others. The opposite of opportunism in human relations is loyalty, a noble sentiment—but one that needs to be invested in the right places, that is, in human relations and moral commitments.

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The error of thinking you know exactly where you are going and assuming that you know today what your preferences will be tomorrow has an associated one.

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It is the illusion of thinking that others, too, know where they are going, and that they would tell you what they want if you just asked them.

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Never ask people what they want, or where they want to go, or where they think they should go, or, worse, what they think they will desire tomorrow.

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strength of the computer entrepreneur Steve Jobs was precisely in distrusting market research and focus groups—those based on asking people what they want—and following his own imagination.

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His modus was that people don’t know what they want until you provide them with it.

steal this

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Optionality will take us many places, but at the core, an option is what makes you antifragile and allows you to benefit from the positive side of uncertainty, without a corresponding serious harm from the negative side.

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This kind of sum I’ve called in my vernacular “f*** you money”—a sum large enough to get most, if not all, of the advantages of wealth (the most important one being independence and the ability to only occupy your mind with matters that interest you) but not its side effects, such as having to attend a black-tie charity event and being forced to listen to a polite exposition of the details of a marble-rich house renovation.

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side effect of wealth is the social associations it forces on its victims, as people with big houses tend to end up socializing with other people with big houses. Beyond a certain level of opulence and independence, gents tend to be less and less personable and their conversation less and less interesting.

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Thales put himself in a position to take advantage of his lack of knowledge—and the secret property of the asymmetry. The key to our message about this upside-downside asymmetry is that he did not need to understand too much the messages from the stars.

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Centrally, we just don’t need to know what’s going on when we buy cheaply—when we have the asymmetry working for us.

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But this property goes beyond buying cheaply: we do not need to understand things when we have some edge. And the edge from optionality is in the larger payoff when you are right, which makes it unnecessary to be right too often.

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There are other hidden options in our story of Thales. Financial independence, when used intelligently, can make you robust; it gives you options and allows you to make the right choices. Freedom is the ultimate option.

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you need to know whether you do not like the pursuit of money and wealth because you genuinely do not like it, or because you are rationalizing your inability to be successful at it with the argument that wealth is not a good thing because it is bad for one’s digestive system or disturbing for one’s sleep or

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other such arguments. So the episode enlightened Thales about his own choices in life—how genuine his pursuit of philosophy was. He had other options. And, it is worth repeating, options, any options, by allowing you more upside than downside, are vectors of antifragility.1

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Thales, by funding his own philosophy, became his own Maecenas, perhaps the highest rank one can attain: being both independent and intellectually productive.

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I am fond of the brand of the unexpected one finds at parties (going to parties has optionality, perhaps the best advice for someone who wants to benefit from uncertainty with low downside).

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Further, it helps when supporters are both enthusiastic

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No one at present dares to state the obvious: growth in society may not come from raising the average the Asian way, but from increasing the number of people in the “tails,” that small, very small number of risk takers crazy enough to have ideas of their own, those endowed with that very rare ability called imagination, that rarer quality called courage, and who make things happen.

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If you “have optionality,” you don’t have much need for what is commonly called intelligence, knowledge, insight, skills, and these complicated things that take place in our brain cells.

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Let us call trial and error tinkering when it presents small errors and large gains.

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The graph in Figure 7 best illustrates the idea present in California, and voiced by Steve Jobs at a famous speech: “Stay hungry, stay foolish.” He probably meant “Be crazy but retain the rationality of choosing the upper bound when you see it.”

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Any trial and error can be seen as the expression of an option, so long as one is capable of identifying a favorable result and exploiting it, as we see next.

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Low-cost mistakes, with known maximum losses, and large potential payoff (unbounded).

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I will repeat that options benefit from variability, but also from situations in which errors carry small costs.

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“have not reached it by any process of reasoning [emphasis mine], but by the discipline of many struggles and troubles, and always choosing the best by the light of

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upside if one likes, but without the downside. An option is the weapon of antifragility.

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Everyone talks about luck and about trial and error, but it has led to so little difference. Why? Because it is not about luck, but about optionality. By definition luck cannot be exploited; trial and error can lead to errors. Optionality is about getting the upper half of luck.

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The key is that the significant can only be revealed through practice.

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How many of these simple, trivially simple heuristics are currently looking and laughing at us?

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In many pursuits, every trial, every failure provides additional information, each more valuable than the previous one—if you know what does not work, or where the wallet is not located. With every trial one gets closer to something, assuming an environment in which one knows exactly what one is looking for. We can, from the trial that fails to deliver, figure out progressively where to go.

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his investors (like mine at the time, as I was still involved in that business) were for the most part not programmed to understand that for a treasure hunter, a “bad” quarter (meaning expenses of searching but no finds) was not indicative of distress, as it would be with a steady cash flow business like that of a dentist or prostitute. By some mental

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every search has incrementally a higher probability of yielding a result, but only if you can be certain that the area you have searched does not hold the treasure.

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There were two main sources of technical knowledge and innovation in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: the hobbyist and the English rector, both of whom were generally in barbell situations.

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The Industrial Revolution, for a refresher, came from “technologists building technology,” or what he calls “hobby science.” Take again the steam engine, the one artifact that more than anything else embodies the Industrial Revolution. As we saw, we had a blueprint of how to build it from Hero of Alexandria. Yet the theory didn’t interest anyone for about two millennia. So practice and rediscovery had to be the cause of the interest

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Now, one can argue that we depleted the low-hanging fruits, but I go further, with more cues from other parts (such as the payoff from the Human Genome Project or the stalling of medical cures of the past two decades in the face of the growing research expenditures)—knowledge, or what is called “knowledge,” in complex domains inhibits research.

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There is an obvious drift in that business, as a drug can be invented for something and find new applications, what the economist John Kay calls obliquity—aspirin, for instance, changed many times in uses; or the ideas of Judah Folkman about restricting the blood supply of tumors (angiogenesis inhibitors) have led to the treatment of macular degeneration (bevacizumab, known as Avastin), an effect that is more effective than the original intent.

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It is not well advertised that there is no evidence that abilities in chess lead to better reasoning off the chessboard—even those who play blind chess games with an entire cohort can’t remember things outside the board better than a regular person.

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We accept the domain-specificity of games, the fact that they do not really train you for life, that there are severe losses in translation. But we find it hard to apply this lesson to technical skills acquired in schools, that is, to accept the crucial fact that what is picked up in the classroom stays largely in the classroom.

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As a child of civil war, I disbelieve in structured learning—actually I believe that one can be an intellectual without being a nerd, provided one has a private library instead of a classroom, and spends time as an aimless (but rational) flâneur benefiting from what randomness can give us inside and outside the library.

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Provided we have the right type of rigor, we need randomness, mess, adventures, uncertainty, self-discovery, near-traumatic episodes, all these things that make life worth living, compared to the structured, fake, and ineffective life of an empty-suit CEO with a preset schedule and an alarm clock.

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Only the autodidacts are free.

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“We do not study for life, but only for the lecture room,”

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For I am a pure autodidact, in spite of acquiring degrees.

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You select people on their ability to hang around, as a filter, and studious people were not good at hanging around: they needed to have a clear task.

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He had a total fascination with erudites and businessmen, people whose position did not depend on credentials.

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This made me focus on what an intelligent antistudent needed to be: an autodidact—or a person of knowledge compared to the students called “swallowers” in Lebanese dialect, those who “swallow school material” and whose knowledge is only derived from the curriculum.

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People who build their strength using these modern expensive gym machines can lift extremely large weights, show great numbers and develop impressive-looking muscles, but fail to lift a stone; they get completely hammered in a street fight by someone trained in more disorderly settings.

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Their strength is extremely domain-specific and their domain doesn’t exist outside of ludic—extremely organized—constructs.

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And I could take advantage of what people later pathologized as Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder (ADHD) by using natural stimulation as a main driver to scholarship.

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The trick is to be bored with a specific book, rather than with the act of reading.

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And you find gold, so to speak, effortlessly, just as in rational but undirected trial-and-error-based research.

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It is exactly like options, trial and error, not getting stuck, bifurcating when necessary but keeping a sense of broad freedom and opportunism. Trial and error is freedom.

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(I confess I still use that method at the time of this writing. Avoidance of boredom is the only worthy mode of action. Life otherwise is not worth living.)

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and I picked up the most about Hegel indirectly, mostly through Alexandre Kojève.

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When I decided to come to the United States, I repeated, around the age of eighteen, the marathon exercise by buying a few hundred books in English (by authors ranging from Trollope to Burke, Macaulay, and Gibbon, with Anaïs Nin and other then fashionable authors de scandale), not showing up to class, and keeping the thirty- to sixty-hour discipline.

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So I went to the bookstore and ordered (there was no Web at the time) almost every book with “probability” or “stochastic” in its title.

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I read nothing else for a couple of years, no course material, no newspaper, no literature, nothing. I read them in bed, jumping from one book to the next when stuck with something I did not get immediately or felt ever so slightly bored.

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And I kept ordering those books. I was hungry to go deeper into the problem of small probabilities. It was effortless. That was my best investment—risk turned

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out to be the topic I know the best. Five years later I was set for life and now I am making a research career out of various aspects of small probability events.

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There is such a thing as nonnerdy applied mathematics: find a problem first, and figure out the math that works for it (just as one acquires language), rather than study in a vacuum through theorems and artificial examples, then change reality to make it look like these examples.

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“much of what other people know isn’t worth knowing.”

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To this day I still have the instinct that the treasure, what one needs to know for a profession, is necessarily what lies outside the corpus, as far away from the center as possible.

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But there is something central in following one’s own direction in the selection of readings: what I was given to study in school I have forgotten; what I decided to read on my own, I still remember.

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After the crisis of the late 2000s, I went through an episode of hell owing to contact with the press. I was suddenly deintellectualized, corrupted, extracted from my habitat, propelled into being a public commodity. I had not realized that it is hard for members of the media and the

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public to accept that the job of a scholar is to ignore insignificant current affairs, to write books, not emails, and not to give lectures dancing on a stage; that he has other things to do, like read in bed in the morning, write at a desk in front of a window, take long walks (slowly), drink espressos (mornings), chamomile tea (afternoons), Lebanese wine (evenings), and Muscat wines (after dinner), take more long walks (slowly), argue with friends and family members (but never in the morning), and read (again) in bed before sleeping, not keep rewriting one’s book and ideas for the benefit of strangers and members of the local chapter of Networking International who haven’t read it.

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Once again, “nonlinear” means that the response is not straightforward and not a straight line, so if you double, say, the dose, you get a lot more or a lot less than double the effect—

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if I throw at someone’s head a ten-pound stone, it will cause more than twice the harm of a five-pound stone,

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There are a lot more ordinary events than extreme events.

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Recall that the interventionista focuses on positive action—doing

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commission are respected

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more naive government interventions. Acts of omission, not doing something, are not considered acts and do not appear to be part of one’s mission.

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simple heuristic: charlatans are recognizable in that they will give you positive advice, and only positive advice, exploiting our gullibility and sucker-proneness for recipes that hit you in a flash as just obvious, then evaporate later as you forget them.

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Yet in practice it is the negative that’s used by the pros, those selected by evolution: chess grandmasters usually win by not losing; people become rich by not going bust (particularly when others do); religions are mostly about interdicts; the learning of life is about what to avoid. You reduce most of your personal risks of accident thanks to a small number of measures.

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become rich by not going bust (particularly when others do); religions are mostly about interdicts; the learning of life is about what to avoid.

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You reduce most of your personal risks of accident thanks to a small number of measures.

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randomness, one cannot really tell if a successful person has skills, or if a person with skills will succeed—but we can pretty much predict the negative, that a person totally devoid of skills will eventually fail.

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really tell if a successful person has skills, or if a person with skills will succeed

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we can pretty much predict the negative, that a person totally devoid of skills will eventually fail.

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Subtractive Knowledge

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Now when it comes to knowledge, the same applies. The greatest—and most robust—contribution to knowledge consists in removing what we think is wrong—subtractive epistemology.

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The greatest—and most robust—contribution to knowledge consists in removing what we think is wrong—subtractive epistemology.

Ref. 1997-M

asymmetries in knowledge. I have

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I advocate is as follows: we know a lot more what is wrong than what is right, or, phrased according to the fragile/robust classification, negative knowledge (what is wrong, what does not work) is more robust to error than positive knowledge (what is right, what works).

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we know a lot more what is wrong than what is right,

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(what is wrong, what does not work)

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(what is right, what works).

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So knowledge grows by subtraction much more than by addition—given that what we know today might turn out to be wrong but what we know to be wrong cannot turn out to be right, at least not easily.

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Let us say that, in general, failure (and disconfirmation) are more informative than success and confirmation, which is why I claim that negative knowledge is just “more robust.”

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In political systems, a good mechanism is one that helps remove the bad guy; it’s not about what to do or who to put in. For the bad guy can cause more harm than the collective actions of good ones.

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Bentham’s idea that “the art of the legislator is limited to the prevention of everything that might prevent the development of their [members of the assembly] liberty and their intelligence.”

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And, as expected, via negativa is part of classical wisdom. For the Arab scholar and religious leader Ali Bin Abi-Taleb (no relation), keeping one’s distance from an ignorant person is equivalent to keeping company with a wise man.

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keeping one’s distance from an ignorant person is equivalent to keeping company with a wise man.

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Finally, consider this modernized version in a saying from Steve Jobs: “People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying

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“People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I’m actually as proud of the things we haven’t done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things.”

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no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I’m actually as proud of the things we haven’t done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things.”

Ref. CE0F-A

there are domains in which the rare event (I repeat, good or bad) plays a disproportionate share and we tend to be blind to it, so focusing on the exploitation of such a rare event, or protection against it, changes a lot, a lot of the risky exposure.

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Few realize that we are moving into the far more uneven distribution of 99/1 across many things that used to be 80/20: 99 percent of Internet traffic is attributable to less than 1 percent of sites, 99 percent of book sales come from less than 1 percent of authors … and I need to stop because numbers are emotionally stirring.

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Almost everything contemporary has winner-take-all effects, which includes sources of harm and benefits. Accordingly, as I will show, 1 percent modification of systems can lower fragility (or increase antifragility) by about 99 percent—and all it takes is a few steps, very few steps, often at low cost, to make things better and safer.

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When it comes to health care, Ezekiel Emanuel showed that half the population accounts for less than 3 percent of the costs, with the sickest 10 percent consuming 64 percent of the total pie.

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As they say in the mafia, just work on removing the pebble in your shoe.

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The people involved were blind to the paradox that we have never had more data than we have now, yet have less predictability than ever.

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What survives must be good at serving some (mostly hidden) purpose that time can see but our eyes and logical faculties can’t capture.

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“Time has sharp teeth that destroy everything,” declaimed the sixth-century (B.C.) poet Simonides of Ceos, perhaps starting a tradition in Western literature about the inexorable effect of time.

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Otherwise, in situations in which the benefits of a particular medicine, procedure, or nutritional or lifestyle modification appear small—say, those aiming for comfort—we have a large potential sucker problem (hence putting us on the wrong side of convexity

Ref. 2D63-J

Take smoking, which was, at some stage, viewed as bringing small gains in pleasure and even health (truly, people thought it was a good thing). It took decades

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for its harm to become visible. Yet had someone questioned it, he would have faced the canned-naive-academized and faux-expert response “do you have evidence that this is harmful?” (the same type of response as “is there evidence that polluting is harmful?”).

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The researchers Paul Meehl and Robin Dawes pioneered a tradition to catalog the tension between “clinical” and actuarial (that is, statistical) knowledge, and examine how many things believed to be true by professionals and clinicians aren’t so and don’t match empirical evidence.

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why eating breakfast before engaging in activity is healthy (there is no evidence), or why bleeding patients is the best alternative (they’ve stopped doing so).

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Second principle of iatrogenics: it is not linear. We should not take risks with near-healthy people; but we should take a lot, a lot more risks with those deemed in danger.

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Like many people who have lost weight, the fellow was eager to talk about it—it is easier to talk about weight loss theories than to stick to them.

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