Skeleton

  1. The Anti-fragile: an introduction
  2. Modernity and the denial of anti-fragility
  3. A non-predictive view of the world
  4. Optionality, technology and the intelligence of antifragility
  5. The non liinear and the nonlinear
  6. Via Negativa
  7. The Ethics of fragility and antifragility

Notes

  1. Fragility is quite measurable, risk not so at all, particularly risk associated with rare events.
  2. Instead of a discussion of risk (which is both predictive and sissy), I advocate the notion of fragility, which is not predictive.
  3. The noise produced by the person is inverse to the pecking order.
  4. Those who are in debt need to predict much. (Is it a consequence of capitalism?)
  5. Randomness in the Black Swan domain is intractable.
  6. Our sophistication continuously puts us ahead of ourselves, creating things we are less and less capable of understanding.A
  7. My idea of the modern Stoic sage is someone who transforms fear into prudence, pain into information.
  8. People don’t know what they want until you provide them with it.
  9. The option is an agent of antifragility.
  10. What gains from dispersion is antifragile.
  11. Let us call trail and error tinkering when it presents small errors and large gains.
  12. My sadness is that we are moving further and further away from grandmothers.
  13. Never respond with a straight answer to a question that makes no sense to you.
  14. Incremental progress (with small and bounded downside but unbounded upside) rather than revolutions.
  15. You decide principally based on fragility, not so much on True/False.
  16. The fragility that comes from linearity is immediately visible, so we rule it out because the object would be already broken.
  17. What is fragile is something that is both unbroken and subjected to nonlinear and extreme (rare) effects.
  18. It is completely wrong to use the calculus of benefits without including the probability of failure.
  19. Bottlenecks are the mothers of all squeezes.
  20. Economics largely a charlatanic profession.
  21. In political systems, a good mechanism is one that helps remove the bad guy.
  22. Almost everything contemporary has winner-take-all effects, which includes sources of harm and benefits.
  23. Obvious decisions require no more than a single reason.
  24. Antifragility implies that the old is superior to the new.
  25. In a complex domain, only time is evidence.
  26. In medicine, there is a marked bias in favor of treatment, even when it brings more harm, because the legal system favors intervention.
  27. Our record of understanding risks in complex systems has been pitiful.
  28. When the present inhabitants of Mother Earth want to do something counter to nature, they are the ones that need to produce evidence.
  29. Never ask the doctor what you should do. Ask him what he would do if he were in your place.
  30. Suckers try to wind arguments, nonsuckers try to win.
  31. Banks have lost more than they ever made in their history.
  32. In a large data set, large deviations are vaslty more attributable to noise than to information.
  33. A central argument is never a summary, it is more like a generator.
  34. A world whose charm comes from our inability to truly understand it.

Leads

  1. Ariel Rubinstein
  2. Jon Elster
  3. Craig Venter
  4. Ray Kurzwaii
  5. Thales
  6. Aristotle
  7. Socrates
  8. Ralph Nader
  9. Shaiy Pilpel