Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder by Nassim Nicholas Taleb Page A
Authors: Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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taking is healthy for the economy—under the condition that not all people take the same risks and that these risks remain small and localized.
Now, by disrupting the model, as we will see, with bailouts, governments typically favor a certain class of firms that are large enough to require being saved in order to avoid contagion to other business. This is the opposite of healthy risk-taking; it is
transferring fragility from the collective to the unfit
. People have difficulty realizing that the solution is building a system in which nobody’s fall can drag others down—forcontinuous failures work to preserve the system. Paradoxically, many government interventions and social policies end up hurting the weak and consolidating the established.
WHAT DOES NOT KILL ME KILLS OTHERS
Time to debunk a myth.
As an advocate of antifragility I need to warn about the illusion of seeing it when it is not really there. We can mistake the antifragility of the system for that of the individual, when in fact it takes place
at the expense
of the individual (the difference between hormesis and selection).
Nietzsche’s famous expression “what does not kill me makes me stronger” can be easily misinterpreted as meaning Mithridatization or hormesis. It may be one of these two phenomena, very possible, but it could as well mean “what did not kill me
did not
make me stronger, but spared me
because
I am stronger than others; but it killed others and the average population is now stronger because the weak are gone.” In other words, I passed an exit exam. I’ve discussed the problem in earlier writings of the false illusion of causality, with a newspaper article saying that the new mafia members, former Soviet exiles, had been “hardened by a visit to the Gulag” (the Soviet concentration camps). Since the sojourn in the Gulag killed the weakest, one had the illusion of strengthening. Sometimes we see people having survived trials and imagine, given that the surviving population is sturdier than the original one, that these trials are good for them. In other words, the trial can just be a ruthless exam that kills those who fail. All we may be witnessing is that transfer of fragility (rather, antifragility) from the individual to the system that I discussed earlier. Let me present it in a different way. The surviving cohort, clearly, is stronger than the initial one—but not quite the individuals, since the weaker ones died.
Someone paid a price for the system to improve.
Me and Us
This visible tension between individual and collective interests is new in history: in the past it was dealt with by the near irrelevance of individuals. Sacrifice for the sake of the group is behind the notion of heroism: it is good for the tribe, bad for those who perish under the fever of war. This instinct for heroism and the fading of individual interests in favorof the communal has become aberrant with suicide bombers. These pre-death terrorists get into a mood similar to an ecstatic trance in which their emotions drive them to become indifferent to their own mortality. It is a fallacy that suicide bombers are driven by the promise of a reward of some Islamic paradise with virgins and other entertainment, for, as the anthropologist Scott Atran has pointed out, the first suicide bombers in the Levant were revolutionaries of Greek Orthodox background—my tribe—not Islamists.
There is something like a switch in us that kills the individual in favor of the collective when people engage in communal dances, mass riots, or war. Your mood is now that of the herd. You are part of what Elias Canetti calls the
rhythmic and throbbing crowd
. You can also feel a different variety of crowd experience during your next street riot, when fear of authorities vanishes completely under group fever.
Let us now generalize the point. Looking at the world from a certain distance, I see a total tension between man and nature—a tension in the trade-off of
Now, by disrupting the model, as we will see, with bailouts, governments typically favor a certain class of firms that are large enough to require being saved in order to avoid contagion to other business. This is the opposite of healthy risk-taking; it is
transferring fragility from the collective to the unfit
. People have difficulty realizing that the solution is building a system in which nobody’s fall can drag others down—forcontinuous failures work to preserve the system. Paradoxically, many government interventions and social policies end up hurting the weak and consolidating the established.
WHAT DOES NOT KILL ME KILLS OTHERS
Time to debunk a myth.
As an advocate of antifragility I need to warn about the illusion of seeing it when it is not really there. We can mistake the antifragility of the system for that of the individual, when in fact it takes place
at the expense
of the individual (the difference between hormesis and selection).
Nietzsche’s famous expression “what does not kill me makes me stronger” can be easily misinterpreted as meaning Mithridatization or hormesis. It may be one of these two phenomena, very possible, but it could as well mean “what did not kill me
did not
make me stronger, but spared me
because
I am stronger than others; but it killed others and the average population is now stronger because the weak are gone.” In other words, I passed an exit exam. I’ve discussed the problem in earlier writings of the false illusion of causality, with a newspaper article saying that the new mafia members, former Soviet exiles, had been “hardened by a visit to the Gulag” (the Soviet concentration camps). Since the sojourn in the Gulag killed the weakest, one had the illusion of strengthening. Sometimes we see people having survived trials and imagine, given that the surviving population is sturdier than the original one, that these trials are good for them. In other words, the trial can just be a ruthless exam that kills those who fail. All we may be witnessing is that transfer of fragility (rather, antifragility) from the individual to the system that I discussed earlier. Let me present it in a different way. The surviving cohort, clearly, is stronger than the initial one—but not quite the individuals, since the weaker ones died.
Someone paid a price for the system to improve.
Me and Us
This visible tension between individual and collective interests is new in history: in the past it was dealt with by the near irrelevance of individuals. Sacrifice for the sake of the group is behind the notion of heroism: it is good for the tribe, bad for those who perish under the fever of war. This instinct for heroism and the fading of individual interests in favorof the communal has become aberrant with suicide bombers. These pre-death terrorists get into a mood similar to an ecstatic trance in which their emotions drive them to become indifferent to their own mortality. It is a fallacy that suicide bombers are driven by the promise of a reward of some Islamic paradise with virgins and other entertainment, for, as the anthropologist Scott Atran has pointed out, the first suicide bombers in the Levant were revolutionaries of Greek Orthodox background—my tribe—not Islamists.
There is something like a switch in us that kills the individual in favor of the collective when people engage in communal dances, mass riots, or war. Your mood is now that of the herd. You are part of what Elias Canetti calls the
rhythmic and throbbing crowd
. You can also feel a different variety of crowd experience during your next street riot, when fear of authorities vanishes completely under group fever.
Let us now generalize the point. Looking at the world from a certain distance, I see a total tension between man and nature—a tension in the trade-off of
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