How to Gain From Uncertainty | Antifragility
Something more than robust and resilient
The world is flooded with uncertainty. Very few things are truly guaranteed. Despite the apparent chaos of the world, life has found a way to thrive. Author Nassim Nicholas Taleb describes a property of life that allows it to not only survive disorder but to gain from it. This is what Taleb calls Antifragility.
The Story of Antifragility
What is the opposite of fragile? Common responses are something like robust, resilient, tough, tenacious, etc. However, there is something missing in these responses. In the book Antifragile, author Nassim Nicholas Taleb (NNT) shares an illustrative example. The story goes like this.
Suppose you are shipping some fine China to Siberia. You securely pack it up and ensure the box is clearly labeled “FRAGILE” and “Handle with care”.
From this notion of “Handle with care” we can get a definition of fragile as something that is harmed by disorder, variability, or errors. The fine China would like nothing more than to be locked in glass cabinet to never be touched or moved. It is fragile.
With this view of fragility we can ask the question again. What is the opposite of fragile? Robust et al. do not quite capture it. If fragile things don’t like disorder, it’s opposite should love it.
Something that is robust is apathetic. There could be order or disorder, it wouldn’t mind it either way. A boulder is robust. It wouldn’t mind a calm summer evening or a monsoon.
Nassim calls the opposite fragile, antifragile and defines it as something that benefits from disorder, variability, or errors. So if you were shipping something antifragile to Siberia you would label it “ANTIFRAGILE” and “Please mishandle”.
Examples
Many artificial (engineered) systems are fragile, while many organic systems are antifragile. Although this is good rule of thumb, these concepts go far beyond this dichotomy. Nassim breaks things down into a trinity consisting of fragile, robust, and antifragile. Some examples are given in the table below.
Properties
Up until this point I’ve shared a story about antifragility and given some examples across different contexts. Although they may give you some sense of the concept, they don’t entirely help you identify antifragility. To help with this, NNT gives a mathematical basis to the concepts of fragility and antifragility. What this mathematical treatment provides is a way to diagnose things as fragile or antifragile. For those who can’t bare the sight of equations and graphs, feel free to skip this section.
The core mathematical concept underpinning antifragility is convexity. Convexity is a characteristic of a curve. A curve opening upward (like a U) is said to be convex, while a curve opening downward (like a ∩) is called concave. Things that are antifragile tend to have a convex dose-response curve, while things that are fragile tend to have a concave curve.
Dose and response are used as general terms here. A dose could be a sword to the neck (like for a Hydra) or bicep curl at the gym (like for Hercules). For the same examples, the response would be the number of newly grown heads for Hydra and gain in muscle mass for Hercules. Dose-response curves characteristic of fragile and antifragile things are given below.
The key point here is the fragile (concave) have slowing gains, while the antifragile (convex) have toward accelerating gains.
We can also consider these curves from another angle, a negative response. In the figure below, we see the opposite behavior as before. The fragile have accelerating harm, while for the antifragile harm decelerates.
A caveat here is real-world systems typically don’t have smooth curves such as the above figures. Furthermore, things may have dose-response curves that are both concave (fragile) and convex (antifragile) depending on the dosage!
How to be Antifragile
With (hopefully) a better idea of what antifragility is, a natural question is: how can I be antifragile?
The way I see it there are two paths to this end. One, avoid things that make you fragile. And two, move toward things that make you antifragile. Below are lists of how you can do both.
Toward Fragility
- Limited gain, but unbounded losses
- Detailed plans
- Top-down rules
- Success
- Being big
- One income, one hobby, one of everything! (i.e. specialization)
- Dependence on others
Toward Antifragility
- Limited losses, but unbounded gains
- Have options
- Bottom-up traditions
- Failure (mistakes)
- Staying small
- Be “barbelled” (80–20 rule) (i.e. diversification)
- Independence from others
Each of these points deserves a dedicated discussion, so for the sake of brevity I will save further comments on these points for a series of future posts. If you think that is a mistake, I would refer you to point 4 toward antifragility. 😛
Note on Learning
Most plans and goals do not benefit from disorder. However, there is one goal impervious to uncertainty, learning. When your goal is to learn, you benefit from uncertainty because (by definition) there’s something you don’t know, thus there is something to learn. In other words, when your goal is to learn, you are antifragile.
This focus on learning as a path to antifragility connects to the work of psychologist Carol Dweck, who defined the growth mindset. The core idea here is that skills are something that can be developed, i.e. they are not fixed traits. In a future post, I will discuss the growth mindset and highlight how it can make an impact.
Conclusion
The antifragile benefit from disorder. Thus, in an unpredictable world, moving toward antifragility sounds like a good idea. There are clear signals that can help us identify the antifragile. By studying these things and moving toward them, we set ourselves up to also benefit from life’s uncertainty.
Future posts will dive deeper into the question: how can I be antifragile? Making this the first post in a (potentially never-ending) series. In the spirit of antifragility, there is no detailed plan here. However, what you can count on is when posts are released, they will be linked in this article and published in The Data Entrepreneurs publication with the tag #Antifragile.
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More on Antifragility: 7 Ways to be More Antifragile
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[1] Antifragile by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
