Synopsis
This is a book about how to survive and thrive in a volatile and unpredictable world. The author offers principles you can apply in everyday life to ensure you are not detrimentally exposed to negative events.
Key Takeaways
Page 52 – A taxi driver is free to have his own opinions while mid-level manager must conform.
This is true, managers will say things that don’t believe to virtue signal, a taxi driver just has to do his job.
Page 60 – The first step toward antifragility consists in first decreasing downside, rather than
increasing upside; that is, by lowering exposure to negative Black Swans and letting
natural antifragility work by itself.
Life is as much about not making mistakes and removing negative events as it is anything else.
Page 95 – This fragility that comes from path dependence is often ignored by businessmen who,
trained in static thinking, tend to believe that generating profits is their principal mission, with survival and risk control something to perhaps consider—they miss the strong logical precedence of survival over success
Is google a more successful company than Augustiner?
Page 120 – If there is something in nature you don’t understand, odds are it makes sense in a deeper way that is beyond your understanding. So there is a logic to natural things that is much superior to our own. Just as there is a dichotomy in law: ‘innocent until proven guilty’ as opposed to ‘guilty until proven innocent’, let me express my rule as follows: what Mother Nature does is rigorous until proven otherwise; what humans and science do is flawed until proven otherwise.
Trust mother nature before you trust science.
Page 148 – Few understand that procrastination is our natural defense, letting things take care of themselves and exercise their antifragility; it results from some ecological or naturalistic wisdom, and is not always bad — at an existential level, it is my body rebelling against its entrapment. It is my soul fighting the Procrustean bed of modernity
Do what you are passionate about.
Page 154 – If you have more than one reason to do something (choose a doctor or veterinarian, hire a gardener or an employee, marry a person, go on a trip), just don’t do it. It does not mean that one reason is better than two, just that by invoking more than one reason you are trying to convince yourself to do something. Obvious decisions (robust to error) require no more than a single reason.
If it feels right then do it.
Page 164 – Barbell career, French civil servants and poets, editor of books for 10 years and then a speculator. More barbells. Do crazy things once in a while and stay rational in larger decisions. Break some furniture be an affectionate husband.
Build a base then go try something different.
Page 228 – Rubinstein refuses to claim that his knowledge of theoretical matters can be translated—by him—into anything directly practical. To him, economics is like a fable—a fable writer is there to stimulate ideas, indirectly inspire practice perhaps, but certainly not to direct or determine practice. Theory should stay independent from practice and vice versa—and we should not extract academic economists from their campuses and put them in positions of decision making
Like the divine and the non-divine, don’t mix drinks.
Page 232 – Consider the role of heuristic (rule-of-thumb) knowledge embedded in traditions.
Simply, just as evolution operates on individuals, so does it act on these tacit,
unexplainable rules of thumb transmitted through generations—what Karl Popper has
called evolutionary epistemology. But let me change Popper’s idea ever so slightly
(actually quite a bit): my take is that this evolution is not a competition between ideas,
but between humans and systems based on such ideas. An idea does not survive
because it is better than the competition, but rather because the person who holds it has
survived!
There is wisdom in the things that have survived.
Page 245 – The sociologist of science Steve Shapin, who spent time in California observing venture capitalists, reports that investors tend to back entrepreneurs, not ideas. Decisions are
largely a matter of opinion strengthened with “who you know” and “who said what,”
as, to use the venture capitalist’s lingo, you bet on the jockey, not the horse. Why?
Because innovations drift, and one needs flâneur-like abilities to keep capturing the
opportunities that arise, not stay locked up in a bureaucratic mold.
The person matters more than the idea. As you know, ideas are cheap.
Page 248 –Much of what other people know isn’t worth knowing
Just think about that.
Page 252 – Let me stop to issue rules based on the chapter so far. (i) Look for optionality; in fact, rank things according to optionality, (ii) preferably with open-ended, not closed-ended,
payoffs; (iii) Do not invest in business plans but in people, so look for someone
capable of changing six or seven times over his career, or more (an idea that is part of
the modus operandi of the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen); one gets immunity from
the backfit narratives of the business plan by investing in people. It is simply more
robust to do so; (iv) Make sure you are barbelled, whatever that means in your
business.
Again focus on the person and the people you are working with.
Page 255 Perhaps – Socrates should have asked himself – what is not intelligible to me is not necessarily unintelligent. Perhaps there is a realm of wisdom from which the logician is exiled?
You don’t need to understand or explain everything, some things are simply beyond us.
Page 259 – It is the payoff from the True and the false that dominates – and it is almost always asymmetric, with one consequence much bigger than the other
Right or wrong doesn’t matter, how much did you make from being right or wrong?
Page 320 – I have used all my life a wonderfully simple heuristic: charlatans are recognizable in that they will give you positive advice, and only positive advice, exploiting our gullibility and sucker-proneness for recipes that hit you in a flash as just obvious, then evaporate later as you forget them. Just look at the “how to” books with, in their title, “Ten Steps for—” (fill in: enrichment, weight loss, making friends, innovation, getting elected, building muscles, finding a husband, running an orphanage, etc.). Yet in practice it is the negative that’s used by the pros, those selected by evolution: chess grandmasters usually win by not losing; people become rich by not going bust (particularly when others do); religions are mostly about interdicts; the learning of life is about what to avoid. You reduce most of your personal risks of accident thanks to a small number of measures. Further, being fooled by randomness is that in most circumstances fraught with a high degree of randomness, one cannot really tell if a successful person has skills, or if a person with skills will succeed—but we can pretty much predict the negative, that a person totally devoid of skills will eventually fail.
As above, life is as much about what to avoid as it is about what to do.
Page 321 – So the central tenet of the epistemology I advocate is as follows: we know a lot more what is wrong than what is right, or, phrased according to the fragile/robust
classification, negative knowledge (what is wrong, what does not work) is more robust
to error than positive knowledge (what is right, what works).
Focus on avoiding traps, don’t do things that don’t work
Page 335 – For the perishable, every additional day in its life translates into a shorter
additional life expectancy. For the nonperishable, every additional day may imply a
longer life expectancy.
Lindy
Page 380 – A lesson I learned from this ancient culture is the notion of megalopsychon (a term expressed in Aristotle’s ethics), a sense of grandeur that was superseded by the
Christian value of “humility.” There is no word for it in Romance languages; in Arabic
it is called Shhm—best translated as nonsmall. If you take risks and face your fate with
dignity, there is nothing you can do that makes you small; if you don’t take risks, there is
nothing you can do that makes you grand, nothing. And when you take risks, insults by
half-men (small men, those who don’t risk anything) are similar to barks by nonhuman
animals: you can’t feel insulted by a dog.
This, it only matters when you have something on the line.
Page 389 – The psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer has a simple heuristic. Never ask the doctor what you should do. Ask him what he would do if he were in your place. You would be surprised at the difference. Never ask anyone for their opinion, forecast or recommendation. Just ask them what they have – or don’t have – in their portfolio.
This is just solid advice. What would you do in my position?
Page 392 – Behind you is the sea, before you the enemy. You are vastly outnumbered. All you have is sword and courage. Never put your enemys back to the wall.
Don’t force people into doing crazy things.
Page 393 – Finally, a new form of courage was born, that of the Socratic Plato, which is the very definition of the modern man: the courage to stand up for an idea, and enjoy death in a
state of thrill, simply because the privilege of dying for truth, or standing up for one’s
values, had become the highest form of honor. And no one has had more prestige in
history than two thinkers who overtly and defiantly sacrificed their lives for their ideas
—two Eastern Mediterraneans; one Greek and one Semite.
To die for something greater than yourself.
Final Thoughts
Life is as much about what not to do, time is the ultimate evidence, only believe those with skin in the game and true freedom is being able to do what you like when you like.
Stranger in Sydney 