Read Online Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder by Nassim Nicholas Taleb - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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replicate—think of rumors, ideas, technologies, and businesses. They are closer to the cat than to the washing machine but tend to be mistaken for washing machines. Accordingly we can generalize our distinction beyond the biological-nonbiological. More effective is the distinction between noncomplex and complex systems.
Artificial, man-made mechanical and engineering contraptions with simple responses are complicated, but not “complex,” as they don’t have interdependencies. You push a button, say, a light switch, and get an exact response, with no possible ambiguity in the consequences, even in Russia. But with complex systems, interdependencies are severe. You need to think in terms of ecology: if you remove a specific animal you disrupt a food chain: its predators will starve and its prey will grow unchecked, causing complications and series of cascading side effects. Lions are exterminated by the Canaanites, Phoenicians, Romans, and later inhabitants of Mount Lebanon, leading to the proliferation of goats who crave tree roots, contributing to the deforestation of mountain areas, consequences that were hard to see ahead of time. Likewise, if you shut down a bank in New York, it will cause ripple effects from Iceland to Mongolia.
In the complex world, the notion of “cause” itself is suspect; it is either nearly impossible to detect or not really defined—another reason to ignore newspapers, with their constant supply of causes for things.
STRESSORS ARE INFORMATION
Now the crux of complex systems, those with interacting parts, is that they convey information to these component parts through stressors, or thanks to these stressors: your body gets information about the environment not through your logical apparatus, your intelligence and ability to reason, compute, and calculate, but through stress, via hormones or other messengers we haven’t discovered yet. As we saw, your bones willget stronger when subjected to gravity, say, after your (short) employment with a piano moving company. They will become weaker after you spend the next Christmas vacation in a space station with zero gravity or (as few people realize) if you spend a lot of time riding a bicycle. The skin on the palms of your hands will get calloused if you spend a summer on a Soviet-style cooperative farm. Your skin lightens in the winter and tans in the summer (especially if you have Mediterranean origins, less so if you are of Irish or African descent or from other places with more uniform weather throughout the year).
Further, errors and their consequences are information; for small children, pain is the only risk management information, as their logical faculties are not very developed. For complex systems are, well, all about information. And there are many more conveyors of information around us than meet the eye. This is what we will call
causal opacity:
it is hard to see the arrow from cause to consequence, making much of conventional methods of analysis, in addition to standard logic, inapplicable. As I said, the predictability of specific events is low, and it is such opacity that makes it low. Not only that, but because of nonlinearities, one needs higher visibility than with regular systems—instead what we have is opacity.
FIGURE 2 . This illustrates why I have a thing for bones. You see identical situations of head-loading water or grain in traditional societies in India, Africa, and the Americas. There is even a Levantine love song about an attractive woman with an amphora on her head. The health benefits could beat bone density medication—but such forms of therapy would not benefit pharma’s bottom line. Credit: Creative Commons
Let us consider bones again. I have a thing for bones, and the idea I will discuss next made me focus on lifting heavy objects rather than using gym machines. This obsession with the skeleton got started when I found a paper published in the journal
Nature
in 2003 by Gerard Karsenty
Artificial, man-made mechanical and engineering contraptions with simple responses are complicated, but not “complex,” as they don’t have interdependencies. You push a button, say, a light switch, and get an exact response, with no possible ambiguity in the consequences, even in Russia. But with complex systems, interdependencies are severe. You need to think in terms of ecology: if you remove a specific animal you disrupt a food chain: its predators will starve and its prey will grow unchecked, causing complications and series of cascading side effects. Lions are exterminated by the Canaanites, Phoenicians, Romans, and later inhabitants of Mount Lebanon, leading to the proliferation of goats who crave tree roots, contributing to the deforestation of mountain areas, consequences that were hard to see ahead of time. Likewise, if you shut down a bank in New York, it will cause ripple effects from Iceland to Mongolia.
In the complex world, the notion of “cause” itself is suspect; it is either nearly impossible to detect or not really defined—another reason to ignore newspapers, with their constant supply of causes for things.
STRESSORS ARE INFORMATION
Now the crux of complex systems, those with interacting parts, is that they convey information to these component parts through stressors, or thanks to these stressors: your body gets information about the environment not through your logical apparatus, your intelligence and ability to reason, compute, and calculate, but through stress, via hormones or other messengers we haven’t discovered yet. As we saw, your bones willget stronger when subjected to gravity, say, after your (short) employment with a piano moving company. They will become weaker after you spend the next Christmas vacation in a space station with zero gravity or (as few people realize) if you spend a lot of time riding a bicycle. The skin on the palms of your hands will get calloused if you spend a summer on a Soviet-style cooperative farm. Your skin lightens in the winter and tans in the summer (especially if you have Mediterranean origins, less so if you are of Irish or African descent or from other places with more uniform weather throughout the year).
Further, errors and their consequences are information; for small children, pain is the only risk management information, as their logical faculties are not very developed. For complex systems are, well, all about information. And there are many more conveyors of information around us than meet the eye. This is what we will call
causal opacity:
it is hard to see the arrow from cause to consequence, making much of conventional methods of analysis, in addition to standard logic, inapplicable. As I said, the predictability of specific events is low, and it is such opacity that makes it low. Not only that, but because of nonlinearities, one needs higher visibility than with regular systems—instead what we have is opacity.
FIGURE 2 . This illustrates why I have a thing for bones. You see identical situations of head-loading water or grain in traditional societies in India, Africa, and the Americas. There is even a Levantine love song about an attractive woman with an amphora on her head. The health benefits could beat bone density medication—but such forms of therapy would not benefit pharma’s bottom line. Credit: Creative Commons
Let us consider bones again. I have a thing for bones, and the idea I will discuss next made me focus on lifting heavy objects rather than using gym machines. This obsession with the skeleton got started when I found a paper published in the journal
Nature
in 2003 by Gerard Karsenty
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