Suggest edit — Antifragile

Title

Name

Note

---
title: "Antifragile"
visibility: public
---

# Antifragile

Category: [[complex-systems|Complex Systems]]

[Read the original document](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1dHkE5EJXxSNrswlJFKBt6qYZeOI0e6xNQe__vqvU4dc/edit?usp=sharing&sa=D&ust=1596495076386000&usg=AOvVaw0HOYP23f50z4vgUg6qnPMl)

---

This book is extremely important because it exposes naive rationality, gives an alternative to intelligence and a theoretical foundation for important parts of wisdom.

All systems that last and thrive are those that gain from disorder. Time is a form of disorder, it leads to variation. If you want a system to last, either make it extremely robust or find a way for it to actually benefit from variation in its nodes. If the system is fractal, look for ways to create gains from volatility at every level.

So many of my successes have been due to upside from volatility. Life is long gamma. Social exploration is gains from volatility - you only keep the volatile upside and pay a finite cost. Emotional antifragility is the growth that comes out of all extremal emotion. It’s the strong counterargument to stoicism. So many arguments from antifragility just seem like classic wisdom. But with this theoretic foundation you can look at problem solving in a new light consistently.

Dose dependence and non-linearity are most important when we fail to see them. Linear models are useful for simplicity, but the model is often broken. Intensity as a solution for working out will be great to implement. If you’re tired, you should go to the gym for exertion instead of resting. In small doses, exercise energizes us. Dose dependence also creates complexity in thinking - you can’t just establish that a particular effect will continue to improve with additional amounts. That broken assumption can lead to a lot of poor decision.

Innovation requires variation. It’s likely that maximizing for variation is much more important than maximizing for average capacity. In most situations there are many many axes along which variation is important. In education, you can imagine philosophical focus, technical ability, approach to problem solving, level of systemization, etc as being more important than average capacity along a fragile metric. If you want innovation in an organization, giving innovators optionality is extremely important.

Systematic randomness/stress/exploration is an extremely important source of growth.

Humans are great at creating systems that follow power law distributions. I intend to ride these systems to massive payoffs. Opportunistic behavior will be part of the plan. And when I see situations with large variable upside and finite downside, I know what to do and why.

A moment of defense - many criticisms of fragile theorizing should be limited to domains where there is high kurtosis and skedasticity (fat tails and power distributions) as well as complex (interconnected, positive feedback) payoffs. Theorizing in other domains can be extremely helpful, and determinate optimism has empirical backing, a type of wisdom that Antifragile would endorse.

---

*Source: [Original Google Doc](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1dHkE5EJXxSNrswlJFKBt6qYZeOI0e6xNQe__vqvU4dc/edit?usp=sharing&sa=D&ust=1596495076386000&usg=AOvVaw0HOYP23f50z4vgUg6qnPMl)*