Antifragile: things that gain from disorder

By Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Antifragile comes after the success of his book Black Swan, but he mentions that this book is the real apogee of his work. I was intrigued by his investigation into how we deal with randomness and turn it to our advantage, instead of trying to plan everything and create an aura of security and safety.

The centre of his argument is understanding that there is no current word for the opposite of ‘fragile’. He puts forward that anything ‘antifragile’ is able to deal with random events more effectively, and antifragile is a word that incorporates an acceptance and moving toward random events. Almost as if the things that really work are better able to deal with the events that you can’t plan for, and that this often involves a moving towards what is difficult and/or random.

Central to understanding this concept are two terms: hormesis and mithridatization. The latter comes from the Pontic King Mithridates, who was obsessed with poisons. Adrienne Mayor has done a superb biography on him if you’re interested. He learnt to take small dosages of poison to build immunity to larger (potentially fatal) doses of them. In fact, when he died, he had trouble committing suicide because he was so resilient.

Hormesis is similar, but the pharmacological definition is when a substance is taken in which taking in a poison actually makes the host itself stronger – similar to a vaccine (see page 37 for these terms). But Taleb points out that although these move us towards understanding antifragile we are not quite there yet. They point us towards the necessity of having some of the ‘bad thing’ to become more resilient as with Mithradates or to become stronger (hormesis). Systems need some agitation to make them tougher.

Much of Taleb’s argument is that modernity has become self-serving, antithetical to this idea of antifragility, and scared of randomness, or at least not acknowledging that the potential gain might outweigh the potential cost in random events, and that therefore it should not be seen as a bad thing. Indeed in chapter 9 he mentions the Stoics, and uses Seneca as the main example of this – that emotions aren’t to be discarded, but instead to keep the ones one wants – keep the good, ditch the bad and continue. He shows a good understanding of Stoicism that is often easily misunderstood, making the point that most people want Stoics to be like those who study Stoicism – a common mistake I’ve seen in commentary on it.

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 affaire has existed before, but is acute today – modernity hides it especially well. (pp.375)

A multi-disciplinary phenomenon

Taleb leaves no stone unturned in his analysis of where we are antifragile, fragile or somewhere in the middle. One table (page 115) looks at the fragile costs of interventionism, since interventionism often comes in to account for some structure or random event and to force a more linear path. Yet Taleb points out that often this leads to worse, knock-on effects, than if we had just let the random event occur. In Ethics, the people who are the most anti-fragile are those who take on the most risk:

So Table 7 represents another Triad: there are those with no skin in the game but who benefit from others, those who neither benefit from nor harm others, and, finally, the grand category of those sacrificial ones who take the harm for the sake of others. (pp.376)

Examples of this are saints and warriors who take on difficulty for everyone. Citizens take on their own risk so sit in the middle category, or bureaucrats who only serve themselves – and so are fragile, the undesirable category. So the former are the closest to antifragile in an ethical sense because of the sacrifice element. They take on the difficulty, are willing to confront the randomness and face sacrifice for the benefit of everyone.

Structures will even go so far as to misattribute things to find cause and effect. Not everything has to be linear, assured, safe and known. It’s instead the viewpoint of Seneca, to discard what you don’t need or what doesn’t help you, to roll with the punches and accept that things may not turn out as you wish. Trying to constrain and control things which are random is futile, but in a sense it is empowering. Taleb clearly feels there is a societal shift in the wrong direction, that should be redressed, and uses numerous examples to illustrate this, some of which I’m not sure I always agree with and sometimes feels like a stretch to fit his system. But the overarching theme, concept and its links to various disciplines is useful and interesting. I’m always skeptical of books that come up with a concept and try to link it to everything, but in this instance I can definitely see the point. It may be difficult to get your head around and is often tricky (particularly in the very technical appendices) but Taleb makes his argument convincingly and adroitly.

Final Score

A lot of this book is just understanding it, and in writing this review a lot of the assessment is whether the concept of antifragile is a worthwhile one. I happen to believe it is. The book is heavy going, jumping around to different aspects of antifragile. But for the curious, for the open, dare-I-say the antifragile who are open to learning how we might be heading in the wrong direction in many disciplines, there are rewards to be reaped here. Just don’t expect a simple read that you can blast through in a couple of hours to get there.

8/10