Some lessons learned reading Taleb's book Antifragile.

1. Antifragile
Lessons Learned
by @andrefaria

2. Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Arabic: !"#$
%&'( %")$ *+,"$, alternatively Nessim
or Nissim, born 1960) is a Lebanese
American essayist and scholar whose
work focuses on problems of
randomness, probability and uncertainty.
His 2007 book The Black Swan was
described in a review by Sunday Times as
one of the twelve most influential books
since World War II.
The Author
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nassim_Nicholas_Taleb

3. newbooksinbrief.com

4. The Black Swan

5. Absence of evidence is not
evidence of absence

6. The Turkey
Problem

7. Fragile

8. What’s the opposite
of fragile?

9. Robust?
Wrong!

10. Antifragile gets
benefits from
random events and
gain from disorder

11. Fragile Robust Anti-Fragile

12. Fragilista
Hates disorder and seek
stability by trying to
stabilize the environment

13. AntiFragilista
Seeks Stability by
embrace chalenge and
randomness

14. We didn’t have a word
for it, but many thing
has this property

15. The body is antifragile
it benefits from stressors (to a point)

16. Bones gets denser when episodic stress is
applied to them and too much stress it will
break them

17. Muscles grow strongest when
they are taxed with the
highest amount of weight
beneath their breaking point
work with very heavy weights
and few reps, as opposed to
lesser weights with more reps

18. Mithridatization
An organism can gain a
tolerance to a poison by way
of being exposed to the poison
in small doses

19. Hormesis
Some toxins when taken
in small doses, not only
induce a tolerance in the
recipient but even act as
a kind of medicine

20. caloric restriction
and fasting
it is also a stressor to be kept
from the things that the body
needs (water, food and sleep)
Your body may be toughened
up by way of being kept from
these things longer than usual
occasionally

21. Not only do bodies get
stronger when they are met
with periodic stress, but,
conversely, the lack of this
periodic stress tends to lead
to degeneration and atrophy.

22. Nature prepares for
what has not
happened before,
assuming worse harm
is possible

23. The single most
significant way that
we fragilize the body,
is by stepping in with
medical intervention
far more o!en, and far
sooner than is truly
necessary or
beneficial

24. Unless the body is
very sick we should
let time, and the body
itself, do the healing

25. Iatrogenics
is an inadvertent
adverse effect or
complication
resulting from
medical treatment
or advice

26. Iatrogenics
Historically has been a
significant problem in the
medical industry. “Until
penicillin, medicine had a
largely negative balance
sheet—going to the
doctor increased your
chance of death”.

27. Doctors are paid to treat
patients (not send them
home without it), and the
more expensive and
involved the treatment is,
the more the doctor gets
paid

28. Barbelling
“The strategy of not
interfering (or not taking
any risks) when there is
little to gain, but possibly
much to lose, while taking
big risks (or many small
risks) in cases where there
is potentially much to gain,
but very little to lose.”

29. if you put 90 percent of your funds in
boring cash (assuming you are
protected from inflation) and 10
percent in very risky, maximally risky,
securities, you cannot possibly lose
more than 10 percent, while you are
exposed to massive upside.
Someone with 100
percent in ‘medium’
securities has a risk of
total ruin from the
miscomputations of risks

30. Diet
“sticking to those
things that were to be
found in the
environment in which
we evolved (vegetables,
fruit, meat, water), as
well as those things
that have been around
for a very long time
(cheese, wine, coffee)“

31. Diet
Mix up one’s food
choices as much as
possible, periodically
abstaining from
particular options for
stretches at a time

32. Expend Energy
“let us not forget that we
are not designed to be
receiving foods from the
delivery person. In nature,
we had to expend some
energy to eat”

33. Antifragile systems not only
benefit from periodic
stressors, but they also tend
to benefit more when these
stressors are distributed
randomly, as opposed to
more regularly

34. Antifragile systems are
necessarily complex, and a
certain amount of
randomness is a natural
(and necessary) part of
complex systems.

35. Evolution
Each new generation represents an
improvement over the last, for only the fittest
are successful in passing on their genes.

36. Collective Antifragile
Species are more antifragile
than individual organisms and
on a still higher plane, life
itself is more antifragile than
any given species.

37. The Noncomplex
is not Antifragile
Inanimate objects are
decidedly fragile, or robust at
best. “A human body can
benefit from stressors, but a
dish, a car, an inanimate
object will not—these may be
robust but not
intrinsically antifragile

38. Complex System
one multiple interdependent
variables and an ability to
self-organize in some way
Think in terms of Ecology

39. Complex systems gain their
antifragility by way of being
allowed to unfold organically
(which includes some
measure of randomness)

40. Complex systems resist top-
down design, and o!entimes
even top-down interference.
This is because these systems
are simply too complex to be
controlled from the outside.

41. The only way that we can
effectively work with complex
systems is by working from
the inside—by gearing our
decisions and actions to act
as minor tweaks (trial and
error) on the system (just as
evolution does)

42. Complex systems are
weakened, even killed when
deprived of stressors

43. Technology

44. Pratice is the Source
When it comes to technology and innovation
there is a widespread belief that it flows
directly from scientific discovery.
For Taleb this model (Baconian Linear) is
almost entirely backwards.

45. The vast majority of technological innovation, now as
ever, has come from practitioners and engineers
tinkering with objects, improving on them, and coming
up with ideas to solve their practical difficulties.

46. Economics
and Politics

47. Limit the size of businesses
Ensure that mistakes and failures are
kept local, and are prevented from have
cascading effects.

48. “good systems are set up to have small
errors, independent from each other or,
negatively correlated to each other, since
mistakes lower the odds of future mistakes”

49. Debt makes You Fragile
Another mistake in the
economic realm is taking on
debt.
Debt puts in you a vulnerable
position, because you must live
on the creditor’s terms, and are
le! with nothing to hold you up
in case of an emergency.

50. Absence of Skin in
the Game
Specialization separates
decision makers from the
effects of their decisions

51. Absence of Skin in the Game
Arrange things such that
decision-makers are put in a
position that they feel the
consequences of their decisions
and actions, and only trust
those where this is the case.
In the case of economists, for
instance, only those should be
trusted who have stock
portfolios that match up with
their opinions.

52. Absence of Skin in the Game
Rulers once went to war with their
armies, many led their armies into war
and they were first to go in and the
last to come out: Caesar, Alexander,
and Hannibal were on the battlefield

53. Today rulers play video games while
threatening the lives of others

54. Ralph Nader Rule
“people voting for
war need to have at
least one descendant
exposed to combat”

55. Keep it Local
Taleb maintains that
political decision-
making should be
kept as local as
possible; as opposed
to decisions being
imposed from some
centralized body.

56. The trick is not to spend our
time trying to get better at
predicting this world, or
making it more predictable,
for both of these strategies
are bound to fail.

57. Thanks!
@andrefaria
http://blog.andrefaria.com/en
http://blog.andrefaria.com
http://blog.blueso!.com.br