Antifragility

Soon after I wrote my last post, Dr. Edward Kelly posted a précis and critique of Nassim Taleb’s latest book ‘Antifragility’ on the London Integral Circle’s list. With Ed’s permission I have reproduced this below, because it describes an attitude well suited to an understanding of life as an adventure and a chance to learn and understand more, rather than as a search for predictability, stability and comfort, (or fame, power and/or wealth).  I think Taleb himself might be surprised to see I've linked his concept with certain aspects of kabbalistic thinking. However, having accepted that Providence and our individual souls can be quite ruthless in what they will put us through to achieve God's purpose, Ed's raising and considering this concept seemed quite timely.

Ed writes:

“I have reviewed and briefly summarised Nassim Taleb’s book ‘Antifragile’ from three different perspectives; ‘what is antifragility, what can we learn from it and what do I think about it’? I have made these distinctions in order to not confuse ‘what is antifragile’ as he describes it with ‘what I think it is’ as well as providing space for ‘us’ to consider what we can learn about it.

            What is it? Antifragile is a state of mind that prepares us to deal with randomness, uncertainty, disorder, risk, shocks, the volatility asymmetry and non-linearity of life. This is the central argument in the book. Someone is antifragile when there is more upside than downside in a situation where volatility, randomness, errors, uncertainty, stressors and time arise. Time is here considered the same as disorder. Taleb says however that antifragile is more than just the opposite of being fragile, i.e., being able to withstand the shock of uncertainty, disorder and ‘black swan’ events, rather antifragile is about being able to thrive in a world of randomness, uncertainty, disorder, risk, shocks and the volatility of life.

 Being in an antifragile state however will not help improve your ability to predict uncertainty but it will help prepare you for when uncertainty happens. The challenge becomes then, ‘can we just accept that there are things that we can’t understand and therefore can’t predict’? Most of us fail in this because we reduce what we don’t know to what we do know which in turn makes us fragile when things go wrong. He adds that probability is primarily a qualitative rather than quantitative construct. Our tendency however is to quantify the unquantifiable which he equates with naïve rationalism, i.e., the modernist scientific tendency to believe that everything is knowable. His recommendation for thriving in a world of uncertainty is not however to become ‘more robust or resilient’ but to become more antifragile. [I asked Ed what the difference was. He confirmed that whereas a person's robustness or resilience is important when reacting to something,  antifragility seems to be more about preparing for things which haven't happened yet and cannot be seen coming. To be antifragile is to be strengthened by life's knocks]

            What can we learn from antifragile? Another way of asking this question is what are the consequences of Taleb’s insights that might be relevant to the rest of us? Perhaps the principle thing we are reminded of is the limits of linearity and how much of our experience of life is ‘non-linear’ and unpredictable, i.e., there is much more chaos, disorder, uncertainty and change in our world than our scientific rational mindset might have us believe. For instance a good example of non-linear effects exists, “when you double the dose of say a medication or when you double the number of employees in a factory, you don’t get twice the initial effect, but rather a lot more or a lot less”.

In our desire to be more rational, itself a noble objective, we may forget what Pascal said, ‘that the end goal of rationality was to show the limits of rationality’. We moderns suffer from the illusion of control, which Taleb says is making us more fragile and susceptible to unpredictable black swan events. Taleb goes on to talk about responsibility and the skin in the game/captain of the ship rule. One of the big problems he mentions is that our bureaucrats and bankers (and indeed our academics which he reserves some choice comments for) tend to share in the upside from their words and actions but none of the downside. This should be addressed with a, “no opinion without risk” approach, particularly when dealing with the public.

He also mentions how doing something is often not better than doing nothing. We are very familiar with this concept where in the build up to the recent financial crisis the bankers took all the risks and where now after the crisis the public have taken all the responsibility. Taleb call this a tendency to Iatrogenics, the harm done by the healer as when the doctor’s interventions do more harm than good. Stopping to think about the potential harm from an intervention helps us to think in reverse, to reason backwards or as Charlie Munger encourages us to do with all arguments; to invert, always invert.

There are a number of other interesting terms that Taleb introduces such as Neomania, a love of change for its own sake which can result in forecasting the future by adding, not subtracting. He says that predicting the future by removing what is fragile from it is better than naïvely adding to it. He also speaks about Opacity and how things remain opaque to us, leading us to suffer form illusions of understanding. Technically he speaks about looking for convexity effects rather than concave effects; convex is good [J], concave is bad  [L]. Convexity affects emerge from nonlinearity and are generally considered good. The more nonlinear, the more the function of something divorces itself from the something (p.298). More generally, he also makes interesting references to the lack of correlation between educational spending and GDP growth. Money spent on education may be good for society but is not correlated with GDP growth.

            What did I think about it? I liked the book and while I found parts of it difficult to read and understand and therefore need to return too, I nonetheless found it stimulating, thought provoking and informative. Perhaps most of all though, I thought it was courageous. Taleb pokes his stick at many of the sacred cows of modern economic and social thought and reminds us (drawing from the ancients such as Seneca whom he greatly admires) of some common sense ‘home truths’ of human behaviour that we have perhaps forgotten.

He particularly mentions the Robert Rubin violation, the Alan Blinder problem, and the Joseph Stiglitz problem, as examples of people who had options for the upside with no exposure to the downside – i.e. they had no skin in the game and no consequences to their actions.

There are however some things I think that he misses. For instance, the attachment to order management and linear thinking and it’s corresponding lack of preparation for randomness and non-linearity, is addressed in Ian McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary; the divided brain and the making of the Western World which Taleb doesn’t refer too. As McGilchrist outlines, the left-hemisphere has a narrow focus and seeks order and certainty. It lives in the world of the known and in ‘how things work’. The right-hemisphere’ on the other hand has a much broader focus. It is more comfortable with uncertainty and the world of the unknown. It wants to understand ‘what things mean’ in context. While both are needed, the naïve rationalist and scientific worldview is associated with the former whereas the broader more embodied worldview is associated with the latter. The naïve rationalist is perhaps the ‘half-knowledge’ that Taleb talks about (p.257) which itself can be integrated through development which is something else he doesn’t talk about. As outlined in Kegan’s The Evolving Self and In Over our Heads or in Torbert’s Development Action Inquiry, as individuals break through the conventional ceiling of naïve rationalism and begin to see the ‘subjectivity behind objectivity’ and the constructed nature of reality, including their own, they can also see that it is not a case of either or but ‘both and’. Both hemispheres working together are required to function in a complex, changing and uncertain world. Taleb doesn’t necessarily express it like this, but giving him the last word that he perhaps deserves, this maybe the kind of integration he is hoping we can achieve in becoming more antifragile.

Finally, this book has caused me to reflect on how antifragile I am and how in following the ‘barbell’ strategy he recommends  I may become better prepared for the kind of second-order effects that inevitably arise from randomness, uncertainty and change.”

One more thing to add. This post and the last has dealt with the 'severity' pole of existence. The other pole is 'mercy', and running between them, holding the balance, we have 'grace' and 'compassion'. I shall return to mercy, grace and compassion in my next post.