Via Negativa
Originally Written in August 2018
Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s via negativa is improvement not through addition of new exposures but removal of risk, either by stripping out existing sources or avoiding new ones.
The Latin phrase has etymological roots in Christian theology, where it refers to an approach to capturing the perfection of God by only stating what He is not.
Examples
The principle of via negativa can improve decision-making and system quality for people and organizations in many contexts.
Success
Ray Dalio and others attribute much of their success to aggressive attack of their own arguments, relentlessly eliminating ideas until only the best remain.
Via negativa also provides an answer to the perpetual concern of ambitious people — how to best use their time:
People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I’m actually as proud of the things I haven’t done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things.
— Steve Jobs
Finance & Investment
Like Jobs, Warren Buffett also keeps an avoid-at-all-costs list of interesting initiatives that did not make his top tier of priorities, a principle related to Berkshire Hathaway’s policy of “getting the opportunity cost as high as possible.”
Via negativa also suggests that avoiding poor financial decisions is just as important as making intelligent ones. Even with a 4% interest rate and 20% down payment on a 30 year mortgage loan, an individual will pay almost 60% of the original home value in interest.
Mathematics
Sometimes the best way to gain clarity about a problem is to address it backwards. German mathematician Carl Jacobi had a maxim on how to approach difficult math problems: “invert. Always invert.”
The proof-by-contradiction approach is a favorite of undergraduates everywhere. The method proves a mathematical relationship by showing if it was any other way, a contraction would result. It is a powerful way to demonstrate the superiority of a given solution.
Via Negativa also arises in machine learning, where statistical models are fit by optimizing of tradeoff between flexibility (more parameters) and interpretability (less). The best model is almost never the most complex — it actually improves its predictive power by eliminating variables.
Others
- Human health can improve significantly through elimination of junk foods, excess caloric consumption, and other unhealthy behavior patterns rather than drastic additions to diet or lifestyle
- Chess grandmasters win by not making fatal mistakes
- People become rich by not going bankrupt
- “Primum non nocere” (Latin: “First, do no harm”) is a common phrase in medicine
- “A wise man once said nothing” — Drake
Further Reading
From this series:
- Antifragility [June 2019]
- Occam’s Razor [August 2018] [upcoming]
- Winner’s Games and Loser’s Games [December 2018]
Elsewhere:
- The effects of Via Negativa can be hard to see because our minds are biased towards positive results — we notice outcomes that did occur much more readily than those that did not. This is survivorship bias [Wikipedia]
