Read Online Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder by Nassim Nicholas Taleb - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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It looks like the secret of life is antifragility.
Typically, the natural—the biological—is both antifragile and fragile, depending on the source (and the range) of variation. A human body can benefit from stressors (to get stronger), but only to a point. For instance, your bones will get denser when episodic stress is applied to them, a mechanism formalized under the name Wolff’s Law after an 1892 article by a German surgeon. But a dish, a car, an inanimate object will not—these may be robust but cannot be intrinsically antifragile.
Inanimate—that is, nonliving—material, typically, when subjected to stress, either undergoes material fatigue or breaks. One of the rare exceptions I’ve seen is in the report of a 2011 experiment by Brent Carey, a graduate student, in which he shows that composite material of carbon nanotubes arranged in a certain manner produces a self-strengthening response previously unseen in synthetic materials, “similar to the localized self-strengthening that occurs in biological structures.” This crosses the boundary between the living and the inanimate, as it can lead to the development of adaptable load-bearing material.
We can use the distinction as a marker between living and nonliving. The fact that the artificial needs to be antifragile for us to be able to use it as tissue is quite a telling difference between the biological and the synthetic. Your house, your food processor, and your computer desk eventually wear down and don’t self-repair. They may look better with age (when artisanal), just as your jeans will look more fashionable with use, but eventually time will catch up with them and the hardest material will end up looking like Roman ruins. Your jeans may look improved and more fashionable when worn out, but their material did not get stronger, nor do they self-repair. But think of a material that would make them stronger, self-heal, and improve with time. 1
True, while humans self-repair, they eventually wear out (hopefully leaving their genes, books, or some other information behind—another discussion). But the phenomenon of aging is misunderstood, largely fraught with mental biases and logical flaws. We observe old people and see them age, so we associate aging with their loss of muscle mass, bone weakness, loss of mental function, taste for Frank Sinatra music, and similar degenerative effects. 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”). What we observe in “aging” is a combination of maladjustment and senescence, and it appears that the two are separable—senescence might not be avoidable, and should not be avoided (it would contradict the logic of life, as we will see in the next chapter); maladjustment is avoidable. Much of aging comes from a misunderstanding of the effect of comfort—a disease of civilization: make life longer and longer, while people are more and more sick. In a natural environment, people die without aging—or after a very short period of aging. For instance, some markers, such as blood pressure, that tend to worsen over time for moderns do not change over the life of hunter-gatherers until the very end.
And this artificial aging comes from stifling internal antifragility.
The Complex
This organic-mechanical dichotomy is a good starter distinction to build intuitions about the difference between two kinds of phenomena, but we can do better. Many things such as society, economic activities and markets, and cultural behavior are apparently man-made but grow on their own to reach some kind of self-organization. They may not be strictly biological, but they resemble the biological in that, in a way, they multiply and
Typically, the natural—the biological—is both antifragile and fragile, depending on the source (and the range) of variation. A human body can benefit from stressors (to get stronger), but only to a point. For instance, your bones will get denser when episodic stress is applied to them, a mechanism formalized under the name Wolff’s Law after an 1892 article by a German surgeon. But a dish, a car, an inanimate object will not—these may be robust but cannot be intrinsically antifragile.
Inanimate—that is, nonliving—material, typically, when subjected to stress, either undergoes material fatigue or breaks. One of the rare exceptions I’ve seen is in the report of a 2011 experiment by Brent Carey, a graduate student, in which he shows that composite material of carbon nanotubes arranged in a certain manner produces a self-strengthening response previously unseen in synthetic materials, “similar to the localized self-strengthening that occurs in biological structures.” This crosses the boundary between the living and the inanimate, as it can lead to the development of adaptable load-bearing material.
We can use the distinction as a marker between living and nonliving. The fact that the artificial needs to be antifragile for us to be able to use it as tissue is quite a telling difference between the biological and the synthetic. Your house, your food processor, and your computer desk eventually wear down and don’t self-repair. They may look better with age (when artisanal), just as your jeans will look more fashionable with use, but eventually time will catch up with them and the hardest material will end up looking like Roman ruins. Your jeans may look improved and more fashionable when worn out, but their material did not get stronger, nor do they self-repair. But think of a material that would make them stronger, self-heal, and improve with time. 1
True, while humans self-repair, they eventually wear out (hopefully leaving their genes, books, or some other information behind—another discussion). But the phenomenon of aging is misunderstood, largely fraught with mental biases and logical flaws. We observe old people and see them age, so we associate aging with their loss of muscle mass, bone weakness, loss of mental function, taste for Frank Sinatra music, and similar degenerative effects. 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”). What we observe in “aging” is a combination of maladjustment and senescence, and it appears that the two are separable—senescence might not be avoidable, and should not be avoided (it would contradict the logic of life, as we will see in the next chapter); maladjustment is avoidable. Much of aging comes from a misunderstanding of the effect of comfort—a disease of civilization: make life longer and longer, while people are more and more sick. In a natural environment, people die without aging—or after a very short period of aging. For instance, some markers, such as blood pressure, that tend to worsen over time for moderns do not change over the life of hunter-gatherers until the very end.
And this artificial aging comes from stifling internal antifragility.
The Complex
This organic-mechanical dichotomy is a good starter distinction to build intuitions about the difference between two kinds of phenomena, but we can do better. Many things such as society, economic activities and markets, and cultural behavior are apparently man-made but grow on their own to reach some kind of self-organization. They may not be strictly biological, but they resemble the biological in that, in a way, they multiply and
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