Finally, I’ve finished the Incerto. The Black Swan and Antifragile are the best two titles in the volume (including Skin in The Game). I’d go as far as to say those are the only two that are really worth reading (unless you somehow happen to have loads of free time). Antifragile is a little bit more of a chonker than its brethren, but as usual, NNT keeps his exploration concise, but also broad. He covers very many facets of the same general theme: things that benefit (or detriment, in the case of fragility) from randomness. Antifragile things are in context and usually have a maximum amount of volatility they can take before they break, but the recipe of benefiting from harm is widely applicable. To stay in shape, you want to have days to rest and days of extremely hard exercise. In nutrition, variability in the quantity and types of food that you eat (i.e. fasting or eating a lot of salad for a while, then gorging on meat) can have health benefits [1]. When you are only mildly sick or injured it’s best not to go to the doctor, to let your body fix itself (often better than the doctor would) [2]. In the economic and political landscape, optionality [3] and opportunism often trump long-term planning. “Convex tinkering” (trial and error) tends to be the source of most technological and social improvement, rather than specifically directed research. Recalling our discussion on the types of randomness [4] from The Black Swan, antifragility is the way to live life in extremistan. In extremistan we cannot successfully predict since small errors can butterfly out. Instead, we benefit more from focusing on exposing ourselves to randomness everywhere where it may benefit us, and shielding ourselves from it where it may detriment us. This is to some extent common sense, but easy to forget, and also, NNT is writing partly in an effort to stop a current trend of modernity: a desire to reduce, to model, and to predict (often with disastrous consequences)—a desire that usually falls into the trap of thinking we are in mediocristan when we really are in extremistan. Related to these reductionist tendencies, he explores various antipatterns that are often seen today. Roughly these include variations on lack of skin in the game [5], neomania [6], the need to “do something” when the best thing is to do nothing (which often leads to iatrogenics [7]).
I’ll leave it to you to explore what he has to say and find what is relevant to you, but I did find some things that I want to try (and/or keep in mind) for the future from Antifragile.
Look for fragility and antifragility in things. Catalogue which category different aspects of my experience fall under. When making decisions under imperfect information, keep fragility in mind.
Try out fasting intermittently. Also, importantly, do not eat the same amounts consistently. do not eat the same types of foods consistently. Switch between various different combinations aiming to be what is considered “ideal” on average, but not at any single point.
Do not do the same types of exercise all the time (and maybe try to find some that are more naturalistic). Similarly, do not do the same intensity all the time. Rather than consistently jogging three miles a day, maybe I just do a walk every day, but some days jog eight miles, some days swim two miles, some days lift the heaviest weight you can, some days do hikes, some days do absolutely nothing (above the minimum baseline), some days do calisthenics and kettlebell, some days do sprints, some days play soccer or other sports, etcetera.
Do not work on the same mind-intensive work all the time. Oscillate between programming (of different types), math, writing, reading, hobbies like piano and music production, maybe even puzzles (especially ones I’ve never seen before), games (of the non-dumb variety), maybe origami, etcetera. Harness deep work to batch different tasks, where the batches are not all the same.
Have skin in the game. Whatever your “belief” or “opinion” is, have something to gain AND lose from it. Do not give phony advice. Be with people who have skin in the game and not leeches.
Focus on variability. Someone who has no variability is not living. Look for unlimited upsides with low downsides (i.e. expose yourself to the “serendipity of life” as they would say).
Read some Seneca, but only if you want to do so. Same for all the other philosophers and sources of wisdom in books. These things are only any good if you are able to translate them into reality. Therefore, focus on doing, and your curiosity for reading and “theory” or “thinking” or whatever will emerge naturally. It has in the past and will in the future. (Also, note that the classics are probably better than whatever the newest fad is. Avoid journalistic books and economics.)
Do not be fooled by money, freedom is a state of mind. Be free to say your opinions and do what you want to do, and do not be too shy to do so.
Be willing to try random things and take leaps.
Remember the barbell strategy. In fact, recall the serial barbell, in which (for example) many active persons later became philosophers. This is kind of what I want to do.
Recall green lumber, and recall the traders who were the literal opposite of intellectual, that NNT met (who used words like “ching” and whatnot).
Recall the machine-organism dichotomy. Much of modernity seeks to think of things as machines, but sometimes it is better to think of them as organisms (i.e. the urban planning example, Moses vs. Jacobs).
The main one here, however, is to look for options with high upside and low downside and do NOT eschew optionality. Similarly, to look for variability, not only since it will do me good, but it will make life more exciting. Along these lines, I also have a short list of quotes that I’ve found to neatly encapsulate broader points relevant to me (and hopefully you too). They may overlap a little with the previous points. Here they are:
One of the methods [to make decisions], called sortes virgilianae (fate as decided by the epic poet Virgil), involved opening Virgil’s Aeneid at random and interpreting the line that presented itself as direction for the course of action.
Since procrastination is a message from our natural willpower via low motivation, the cure is changing the environment, or one’s profession, by selecting one in which one does not have to fight one’s impulses.
The sea gets deeper as you go further into it.
For my last job, I wrote my resignation letter before starting the new position, locked it up in a drawer, and felt free while I was there.
I would go through the mental exercise in the morning of assuming the worst possible thing had actually happened.
Most interesting options are free, or at worst, cheap.
What is picked up in the classroom stays largely in the classroom.
Soccer moms try to eliminate the trial and error, the antifragility from children’s lives, move them away from the ecological and transform them into nerds working on preexisting (soccer-mom-compatible) maps of reality. Good students, but nerd–that is, are like computers, except slower. Further, we are now totally untrained to handle ambiguity… studious people were not good hanging around… they needed to have a clear task.
Only autodidacts are free—and not just in school matters—those who decommodify, detouristify their lives… Trial and error is freedom.
Neighborhoods are villages, and need to remain villages.
Happiness is best dealt with as a negative concept [via negativa]... they should be lecturing us about unhappiness.
Speculative risk taking is not just permissible, it is mandatory.
In traditional societies even those who fail—but have taken risks—have a higher status than those who are not exposed.
You cannot sit and moan about the world. You need to come out on top. So Tony was right that Nero take a ritual look at the physical embodiment of the spoils… Julius Caesar needed to incur the cost of having Vercingetorix brought to Rome and paraded. An intangible victory has no value. [Emphasis mine.]
Do not be fooled by money, these are just numbers. Being self-owned is a state of mind.
[1] The fasting has been verified by scientific studies, while I’m not sure if the same holds for the other forms of variability. However, due to our generally antifragile nature, and mother nature’s ability to weed out detrimental behaviors, it makes sense to give it a shot. You don’t need “scientific proof” to try it though. (return)
[2] Of course, kids should also be exposed to pathogens early on, and be overly protected. This would weaken them later in life. (return)
[3] This roughly means having the option of doing something with little to no cost, keeping your options open without a cost, etcetera. In finance, option contracts allow you to do something along these lines for stocks, but the idea is more broadly applicable. Someone stuck to a plan is fragile, in that if something goes wrong they are kind of screwed, but someone who keeps their options open can take advantage of whatever random event occurs that may benefit them. (return)
[4] There are roughly two types of randomness: mediocristan and extremistan. In mediocristan the bell curve works and in extremistan it does not. Extremistan has distributions where single outlier events tend to be so large as to outdo the sum of the rest of the events, while in mediocristan the number of events needed to see such an outlier are so big, that no single event can change more than the sum of the rest of the events. In extremistan outliers (extremes) make or break the course of history, while in mediocristan it’s the average (mediocre) than defines it. Extremistan includes anything with popularity (virality), modern finance, social networks, startups (especially software), modern history, wealth distributions, and other situations with snowball, winner-take-all, or non-linear effects (feedback loops too). Mediocristan includes the distribution of human height, physical phenomena (thermodynamics, for example), the earnings of a dentist, casino probability, and things that are linear and straightforward. (return)
[5] Bailouts for example screw taxpayers by helping fragilistas in positions of power siphon away the shekels from them. They are not held accountable since they have nothing to lose from this. Same goes for interventionist (and militaristic) makers of foreign-policy. NNT believes that if we left the middle east alone it would probably be ok by now, and that many issues stem from going in and messing things up because we don’t know how they work and are overconfident. Sadly, it is these people (as well as cheap “tawkers” in the media) that receive the most recognition and status in our society, leading to a massive agency problem. (return)
[6] We desire new things all the time, but often the time-tested things are the ones that are most suitable and will probably outlive their successors. In information-based objects (i.e. DNA, books, religions, ideas, technologies) it is often the case that what has existed for the longest time, will exist for the longest time in the future. The wheel, weightlifting, cars, capitalism, and the literary classics are not going to go away any time soon. Meanwhile, flying cars, expensive new gym machines meant to be more “efficient” than free weights, and utopian economic ideals are less likely to work. Part of the reason is that the older ones have been tested by time. (return)
[7] Hurting without meaning to (usually by experts, often medical experts, at least historically). The idea here is, say, doctors, who insist on doing surgery when it might not really be necessary, exposing the patients to further risk. This can be related to neomania, in which experts start deploying new technologies that may be harmful since they haven’t been tested for long enough (i.e. blasting acne with radioactivity in the fifties, leading to cancer way down the line). (return)