Half of Life Has No Name 10
mean the exact reverse). The likely answer will be, aside from robust:
Chapter 1. How to Mishandle a Package, an
Introduction to Antifragility
Antifragility —Please cut my head — How to beat up an economist
(but not too hard, just enough to go to jail) —Magnificent is merely
robust — Where we introduce the idea that we think too much, do
very little— Fail in order to succeed
HALF OF LIFE HAS NO NAME
You are in the Post Office about to send a gift, a package full of champagne
glasses to a remote cousin. As the package can be damaged during
transportation, you would stamp "fragile", "breakable" or "handle with care"
on it (in red). Now what is the exact opposite of such situation, the exact
opposite of “fragile”?
Almost al people answer that the opposite of “fragile” is “robust” or
something of the sort. But the robust is an item that neither breaks nor
improves, so you would not need to write anything on it —I have never seen a
package with “robust” in thick green letters stamped on anything yet.
Logically, the exact opposite of a “fragile” parcel would be a package on
which is written "please mishandle" or "please handle carelessly". The
contents of such package would not just be unbreakable, but would benefit
from shocks and trauma. The fragile is the package that would be at best
unharmed, the robust would be at best and at worst unharmed. The
opposite of fragile is at worst unharmed.
Let us coin the appellation "antifragile" for such a package; a neologism
is necessary for there is no simple, noncompound word in the Oxford
English Dictionary that expresses the point of reverse fragility. For the idea
of antifragility is not part of our consciousness —but, luckily, it is part of our
ancestral behavior, and an ubiquitous property of every system that has
survived.
To see how alien the concept to our minds, repeat my experience and
ask around what's the antonym of fragile (and specify insistently that you
11/4/11 © Copyright 2011 by N. N. Taleb. This draft version cannot be disseminated or quoted.
unbreakable, solid, well-built, resilient, strong, something-proof (say
waterproof, windproof, rustproof), etc — unless they've heard of this book.
Wrong —and it is not just individuals, but branches of knowledge that are
confused by it; this is a mistake made in every dictionary of synonyms and
antonyms I've foundiii.
This error stems from a mental distortion, of the same category of the
mistakes we make without any self-awareness of the reasoning process
involved in them; ask the same person the opposite of cold, they will answer
hot, not room temperature; the opposite of pain is generally considered
pleasure, not absence of pain. Let's get closer to fragility, and ask for the
opposite of destruction, they will answer construction. Clearly, therefore the
opposite of unstable is not stable or sturdy, but something that gains from
instability; likewise the opposite of brittle is not solid —but antibrittle, or
antifragile.
Another way to view it: since the opposite of positive is negative, not
neutral, the opposite of positive fragility should be negative fragility (hence
my appellation antifragility), not neutral which would jut convey robustness,
strength and unbreakability.
This blind spot seems universal. The expression directly designating
antifragility is absent from the vocabulary of Indo-European languages, both
ancient (Latin, Greek) and modern branches: Romance (Italian, French,
Spanish, Portuguese), Slavic (Russian, Polish, Serbian, Croatian), Germanic
(German, Dutch, Africaans), and Indo-Iranian (Hindi, Urdu, Farsi). It is also
absent from non Indo-European families such as Semitic (Arabic, Hebrew,
Aramaic), and Turkic (Turkish)iv. For instance, in French, incassable
(unbreakable) and, sometimes, robuste are held by the learned classes and
dictionaries to be the exact opposite of cassable (breakable) and fragile,
respectively —the very same persons who think that positif is opposite of
negatif. In Italian, I quizzed a scholarly audience at the beginning of one my
lectures in Genoa, formerly known as The Most Serene Republic of Genoa:
the opposite of fragile (or frangibile), they promptly said was infrangibile,
(unbreakable) so they convincingly accepted my new word, minted on the
spot, antifragilita.
Half of life we don’t have a name for.

Between Damocles and Hydra
If we have no common name for antifragility there is some mythological
equivalence, the expression of historical intelligence through potent
metaphors. In a Roman recycled version of a Greek myth, the Sicilian tyrant
Dionysius II has the fawning courtier Damocles enjoy the luxury of a fancy
banquet, but with a sword hanging over his head, tied to the ceiling with a
single hair from a horse's tail. (It is worth mentioning that the original Greek
mythology was more ominous. Tantalus, the titan, who immolated his own
son Pelops and gave him as food to the godsv, was punished by the Gods who
made him attend a banquet, and hung a rock to a string above his head.)
Now Damocles is fragile. The robust is like Phoenix, the bird that keeps
coming back. In another ancient legend, know in the Greek recycling of an
ancient Semitic and Egyptian legend, Phoenix, the bird with splendid colors
is reborn from it own ashes. It always returns. Phoenix happens to be the
ancient symbol of Beirut the city where I grew up. According to legend,
Berytus (Beirut’s historical name) has been destroyed seven times in its
history, and came back seven timesvi. The story seems cogent as I myself saw
the eighth episode; central Beirut (the ancient part of the city) was
completely destroyed for the eighth time during my late childhood, thanks to
the brutal civil war. I also saw its eighth rebuilding.
But Beirut was, in its latest version, rebuilt in even better shape than
the previous version. That’s not Phoenix, but something else beyond the
robust. Which brings the third mythological metaphor: Hydra.
Hydra, in Greek myth, is a serpent-like feature that dwelled in the lake
of Lerna, near Argos, and had numerous heads. Each time one cut a head,
Hydra grows it back plus an additional one. So harm is what it likes.
So, beyond Hydra, antifragility is the property of what improves from
some dose of disorder, volatility, stress, randomness, stress, and chaos.
The sword of Damocles is also quite central to this story. The sword
hanging by a string over someone’s head was meant to illustrate the side-
effect of power and success: you cannot rise and rule without this continuous
danger —someone out there will be actively working to topple you. And like
the sword, the danger will be both silent, inexorable and discontinuous. It
will fall abruptly after long periods of quiet, perhaps at the very moment one
got used to it and forgot about its existence. Black Swans will be out there to
get you as you now have much more to lose, a cost of success, perhaps an
unavoidable penalty of success. I have recently formalized the idea
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Half of Life Has No Name 11
concerning company size: growth, success, and size bring hidden
vulnerabilities. Alas, if success generates growth, hence increase in size, then
companies that grow are doomed as size brings disproportional fragility to
Black Swans (in spite of all the vague, rationalistic, but illusionary and non
empirical theories about the “economies of scale”). At the end, what matters
is the size of the string —not the wealth and power of the dining party. Being
large is like picking up pennies in front of a steamroller —one accident away
from the fall of the sword, so to say. Further, Charles Tapiero and I even
showed how toxic such growth can be to society, as the fall of the dining
guest, in response to the fall of the sword of Damocles, will bring what we
now call collateral damage. Further, sophistication also brings fragility to
Black Swans (as has been brilliantly adumbrated by the archeologist Joseph
Tainter). But, and it does not have to be so: it is only for those unwilling to go
the extra step and understand the matrix of reality. To counter success, you
need offsetting robustness, even doses of antifragility. Otherwise the sword
of Damocles will get you.
On the Necessity of Naming
So it is no accident that there is no word for antifragility in the vocabulary —
the concept is not part of the modern way of thinking. But if our formal
systems of thought denigrate the natural, and don't have a name for
antifragility, and fight the concept whenever we use our brains, it does not
mean that our actions neglect it. Our perceptions and intuitions, as
expressed in deeds can be superior to what we know and tabulate, discuss in
words, and teach in a classroom. We know more, a lot more than we can
articulate. We will have ample discussions of the point particularly with the
potent notion of the apophatic (what cannot be explicitly said, or directly
described, in our current vocabulary); so for now, take this curious
phenomenon.
In Through the Language Glass, the linguist Guy Deutscher reports
that many primitive populations, without being color blind, use only two or
three colors in their communications. But, when given a simple test, they can
successfully match strings to their corresponding color. They are capable of
detecting the differences between the various nuances of the rainbow, but
they do not express these in their vocabularies. These populations are
culturally, though not biologically, color-blind. Just as we are intellectually,
not organically, antifragility-blind.

What is not well known is that many colors we take for granted had no
name for a long time. Ancient Mediterranean texts, both Greek and Semitic,
also had a reduced vocabulary of a small number of colors polarized around
the dark and the light —Homer and his contemporaries were limited to about
three or four main colors in their expression: black, white, and some
indeterminate part of the rainbow, often subsumed as red, or yellow. I
contacted Guy Deutscher. He was extremely generous with his help and
pointed out to me that the ancients even lacked words for something as
elementary as blue. This absence of the word blue in ancient Greek explains
the recurring reference by Homer to the “wine-dark sea” (oinopa ponton)
which has been quite puzzling to readers (including this one).
Interestingly, it was the British Prime Minister William Gladstone who
first made this discovery in the 1850s (and was reviled for it by the usual
fatuous journalists). Gladstone, quite an erudite, wrote in his interregnum
between political positions an impressive 1700 page treatise on Homer*. In
the last section, Gladstone announced this limitation of color vocabulary,
attributing our modern sensitization to the different nuances of color to a
cross-generational training of the eye. But, nevertheless, regardless of the
presence of these variations of color in the culture of the time, people were
shown to be able to identify the nuances —unless physically color blind.
BLACK SWANS
As we saw the description of Black Swan events in the prologue, these large
unpredictable events play a large role in some things —though not others.
Manmade complex systems tend to develop cascade and runaway chains of
reactions that decrease predictability and cause outsized events. So there is a
Black Swan domain in which reigns a combination of both intractable
randomness and severe consequences from exposure to such random
outcomes. I called the Fourth Quadrant this zone of both high vulnerability
and high unpredictability, to avoid at all costs. Risks in the Fourth Quadrant
are both nonmeasurable and deceitful (since they come in lulling and
*Gladstone was impressive in many respects. Aside from his erudition, force of
character, respect for the weak, and high energy, the four qualities I respect the most,
he showed remarkable prescience, as he was also insistent upon balanced fiscal budget
which we has proved to be the prime source of fragility. He also figured out what
nobody in his days did, that Troy where the Iliad took place was a real city.
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Black Swans 12
comforting clam waters followed by mega-storms) so one needs to get out of
the way rather than play scientist. In it what is nonmeasurable and
nonpredictable will remain nonmeasurable and nonpredictable, no matter
how many PhDs with Russian and Indian names you put on it —or perhaps
these contribute to make them even more unpredictable. Even French and
PhDs won’t do (but please don’t start a conversation with one of them about
the subject). There is, in this zone, which we called the Fourth Quadrant, this
limit to knowledge that could never been reached, no matter how
sophisticated statistical and risk management science ever got. This is
obvious to any cab driver with a clear mind: we can put a man, a family, a
village on the Moon, and predict the trajectory of planets, or the most
minute effect in quantum physics —but governments with equally
sophisticated models cannot predict revolutions, crises and budget deficits.
Social, economic, and cultural life lie in the Black Swan domain, physical life
much less so.
An annoying aspect of the Black Swan problem is that the rarer the
event, the less tractable and the less we know about how frequent its
occurrence —yet the rarer the event, the more confident these "scientists"
involved in predicting, modeling, and using PowerPoint in conferences with
equations in multi-color background have a tendency to go about itvii.
My involvement has not been so much in asserting this impossibility to
ever know anything about these matters —this was a problem raised
throughout history by a long tradition of philosophers, including Sextus
Empiricus, Algazel, Hume, and many more skeptics and skeptical
empiricists, which I merely formalized and modernized. My work is about a)
defining the Black Swan effect and determine the boundaries of its domain,
the Fourth Quadrant, the area beyond which your “scientific” skills no longer
work (which means also saying about the area outside of it “this is where
these techniques work just fine, so go hire PhDs with unpronounceable
names”), and b) produce a mechanism for decision-making that would not
suffer from these errors. I called the latter issue “how not to be a turkey”.
In fact if I am a skeptic, my work is the opposite of systematic, radical,
and indiscriminate doubt —rather what I’ve done is reduce the fields of
skepticism, determine areas in which we can (and should) reduce skepticism
since gullibility and beliefs cause no consequential —and dangerous —errors.
For reasons that have to do with the increase of the artificial, the move
away from historical and natural models, and the loss in robustness owing to
complications in the design of everything, the role of Black Swans in

increasing. We are victims to a new disease, called neomania, that makes us
build Black Swan vulnerable systems —under the illusion that we are
undergoing “progress” *.
Fragility
But it took about several million copies, a crisis, a dozen of articles in
scientific journals (by this author), several hundred more (by others), several
thousand pieces of hate mail, six smear campaigns (mostly by “quants”), and
a revamped second edition of The Black Swan for the message to go through
without distortion —no, we don't need to spend time predicting Black Swans
with complicated models coming from chaos-complexity-catastrophe-fractal
theory. The answer is simpler: less is more; move the discourse to fragility.
Moving the discourse from Black Swans to fragility implies abandoning the
predictive and focusing on what we know.
I can’t predict if and when an event can take place, but I pretty much
can describe how it would affect me should it take place.
Clearly we still have to figure out which even can take place, but we
don’t have to make detailed forecasts or understand probabilities—we don’t
need the same precision. Given that we know what is fragile to Black Swans,
and to model error, the solution is of course to build a world that is robust to
these, something mother nature has done admirably. And, talking about
mother nature, let us learn her methods, spirits, if we can, and give respect to
what it has produced. The notion of fragility is itself not fragile to error.
The task is to build a map of what is fragile and what is robust,
something very practical. (This is what is called “real world solution”, though
people who use the expression “real world solution” instead of simple
“solution” are clearly academics or non-real world operators.)
* Actually, I had a name for “benefits from volatility (or randomness)” and
“harmed by volatility (or randomness)” and even specialized in these concepts
professionally, intellectually, writing my first book and doing my academic studies on
the subject. But it took me a long, very long time to figure out that “harmed by
volatility” was exactly fragility, no more no less (and, accordingly, antifragility was the
opposite). The story and the consequences of this equality are discussed in Chapter 4
where I dump all the technical discussions.
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The Triad 13
I used the word "robust". Then I realized that, well, mother nature was
not just "safe". It is aggressive in destroying and replacing, in selecting and
reshuffling. When it comes to Black Swan Events, "robust" might not be
enough. In the long run everything with the most minute vulnerability
breaks given the ruthlessness of time —yet our planet has been around for
three billion years and, convincingly, robustness can't just be it: you need
perfect robustness for a crack not to show up and crash the system. Given the
absence of perfect robustness — we need layers of antifragilities, in other
words, a mechanism by which the system regenerates itself continuously by
using, rather than suffering from, Black Swans.
Now , just as simple; the new task is to build a map of what is fragile
and what is robust, and what is antifragile. Again, something very practical.
THE TRIAD
The reader, grappling with a new word, might ask too much from it. The
designation antifragile is sort of vague, but no more, no less than the
designation fragile. Antifragile is relative to a given situation. Consider that
fragile is extremely specific to some attribute. A boxer might be robust, hale
when it comes to his physical condition, but he might be emotionally fragile
and break into tears upon seeing the value of his stock portfolio or when
dumped by his girlfriend. Your grandmother might have or have had
opposite qualities, fragile in built but having a strong personality. I recall the
following vivid image from the Lebanese civil war. A diminutive old lady, a
widow (she was dressed in black), chastising militiamen from the enemy side
for having caused the shattering of the glass in her window during a battle.
They were pointing their guns at her: a single bullet would have terminated
her but they were visibly having a bad moment, intimidated and scared by
her. She was the opposite of the boxer: physically fragile, but not in
character.
I’ve built the entire book around a table showing the triad Fragile-
Robust-Antifragile across domains and human pursuits, such as biology,
socioeconomic life, culture, health, and other matters. Table 1, conveying the
central idea of this book presents the triplet of attributes, but with a warning.
The robust here in the middle column is not equivalent to Aristotle's "golden
middle", such as, say, generosity being the middle between profligacy and
stinginess—it can be, but it is not necessarily so. Robustness is not always
good —you may wish some things to break, and break early. Antifragile is
 The Triad 14

desirable, in general, but not always as there are cases in which antifragility FRAGILE ROBUST ANTI
will be costly, extremely so. Further, it is hard to consider fragility as always FRAGILE
undesirable — as Nietzsche wrote, one can die from being immortal. viii
Economic Systems (functional
The triplet in Table 1 covers many topics –some familiar to the reader, redundancy)
some perhaps less so (or less interesting; for instance most people who have Errors Hates Mistakes are Loves mistakes
seen versions of it tend to be interested —albeit quizzically— in flâneur and mistakes just
information
few in biological redundancy). I suggest only looking at the subject of
Science/Technology Directed Opportunistic Stochastic
interest. I for myself will give a short shrift to those topics that bore me and Research research Tinkering
will dispatch them in a couple of sentences. (convex
bricolage)
So we will navigate the triad in Table 1, straddling a variety of
Human Body Mollification, Hormesis, Hypertrophy,
disciplines and human activities. Of course the reader will gain some help atrophy, Recovery Mithridatism
with insights from the characters Nero Tulip, Fat Tony, and others. The "aging",
reader can find at the end of the chapter a graphical representation that sarcopenia
covers the entire table. Ways of Thinking Modernity Medieval Ancient
Europe Mediterranean

Table 1 The Central Triad Ancient Culture Apollonian Dionysian Mixture of

(Nietzsche) Apollonian
FRAGILE ROBUST ANTI and Dionysian
FRAGILE
Ethics The weak The The strong
Mythology -Greek Sword of Phoenix Hydra magnificent
Damocles, Mathematics Nonlinear- Linear Nonlinear-
Rock of (functional) Concave Convex
Tantalus
Mythology- New Dr John, Nero Tulip Fat Tony, Mathematics Left-Skewed Low volatility Righ-Skewed
York Dr Robert C. Yevgenia (probability) (or negative (or positive
Merton Krasnova* skewed) skewed)
(formerly Option Trading Short Flat Volatility Long
Harvard, now Volatility, Volatility,
MIT) gamma, vega gamma, vega
Black Swan Exposed to Exposed to Knowledge Explicit Tacit Tacit with
negative positive Black convexity
Black Swans Swans
Businesses New York: Silicon Valley: Epistemology True-False Sucker-
Banking “Fail fast”, “Be Nonsucker
system foolish”.
Biological & Efficiency Redundancy Degeneracy Life and Thinking Tourist Flâneur with a
Personal and large private
intellectual library
* Dr John, Nero Tulip, Fat Tony, and Yevgenia Krasnova are characters in The Financial Corporate Niche worker, F** you money
Black Swan. Dr Robert C. Merton is an MIT economics professor (serious, dependence employment minimum wage
earner
mechanistic, boring) singled out for being the main representative of Black Swan
Learning Classroom Real life, Real life and
blindness and his destructive and fragilizing role in the fabric of society.

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 The Triad 15

FRAGILE ROBUST ANTI FRAGILE ROBUST ANTI

FRAGILE FRAGILE

pathemata library Separable Holistic

mathemata
Economic Life Owner operated
Political Systems Nation-State; City-State; Finance Short Option Long Option
Centralized Decentralized
Post- Nomadic and Knowledge Positive Negative Art
agricultural hunter- Science Science
Modern gatherer tribes Stress Chronic Acute stressors
Settlements stressors
Knowledge Academia Expertise Erudition Decision Making Acts of Acts of
Decision Making Model-based Heuristic-based Convex commission omission
probabilistic decision heuristics ("missed
decision making opportunity")
making Literature E-Reader Book Oral Tradition
Thinkers Plato, Menodotus, Nobody comes Business Industry Small Business Artisan
Aristotle, Popper, Hayek, to mind Food Food Restaurants
Averroes Nietzsche, explicitly, Companies
Wittgenstein, perhaps Finance Debt Equity Venture
John Gray Hegel's Capital
sublation Finance Public Debt Private debt Convertible
Economic Life Economists Anthropologists Religion with no bailout
General Large Small but Small but not
Economic Life Bureaucrats Entrepreneurs specialized specialized
General Monomodal Barbell
Reputation Academic, Postal Artist, Writer
(profession) Corporate employee, Legal System Statutory law, Common Law,
executive, Truck driver, Legal Code equity**
Pope, Bishop, train conductor Regulation Code of Heuristic
Politician regulations regulations
Reputation (class) Middle Class Minimum wage Bohemian, Option Trading “Short Flat volatility “Long
persons aristocracy, old volatility, volatility,
money gamma, vega” gamma, vega”
Finance Banks, Hedge Hedge Funds Hedge Funds
Medicine Via Positiva Via Negativa funds (some) (some)
Additive Subtractive managed by
treatment treatment economists.
(give (remove items Business Agency Principal
medication) from Problem Operated
consumption, Noise-Signal Signal only Stochastic
say cigarettes,
carbs, etc.)
Philosophy/Science Rationalism Empiricism Skeptical, ** I thank Alberto Mingardi for making me aware of Bruno Leoni’s works showing
subtractive
empiricism the robustness of judge-based law (owing to its diversity) as compared to top-down
codifications.

11/4/11 © Copyright 2011 by N. N. Taleb. This draft version cannot be disseminated or quoted.
 The Triad 16

FRAGILE ROBUST ANTI Also, another nuance is necessary —our antifragilities have conditions.
FRAGILE Humans tend to do better with acute than chronic stressors, particularly
when the former is followed by ample time for recovery, which allows the
resonance
Education Soccer mom Barbell: stressor to do its job of messenger. For instance, having the intense
Parental emotional shock from seeing a snake coming out of the keyboard or a
library, street vampire entering my room, followed of course by a period of safety, long
fights enough for me to regain my emotions, would be beneficial for my health,
Physical Activities Organized Street fights
provided of course that I manage to overtake the snake or vampire after an
sports. gym
machines arduous, hopefully heroic fight, and have a picture taken next to the dead
Urbanism Robert Jane Jacobs animal. Such stressor would be certainly better than the mild but continuous
Moses, Le stress of a boss, mortgage, tax problems, feeling of guilt from procrastinating
Corbusier
with one’s tax return, exam pressures, feeling trapped in life, daily
commutes... in other words the pressures brought about by modernity. In
For now, there are three different layers: fact neurobiologists show that the former style is necessary, the second
a) Fragile -can mostly suffer from shocks, disorder, volatility, harmful, for one’s health.
variability, randomness, etc. Indeed the way Heracles managed to control the Hydra and prevent it
b) Robust: in the sense of not fragile, unbreakable (or hard to break), from exercising its antifragility was by cauterizing the wounds on the stumps
can resist shocks. of the heads that he just severed. He thus prevented the re-growth of the
c) Antifragile: I repeat, the opposite of fragile; mostly benefits from heads and the exercise of antifragility. In other words, by disrupting the
uncertainty, volatility, randomness, and disorder; it gains from shocks, some recovery.
(though not all) shocks.
A qualifier is in order. I said some, not all shocks, as an item will not be
The Supremely Robust is not Antifragile
fragile or antifragile with respect to every possible type of disorder, but only
for specific exposures, what is called a local, not global property. The items The essence of perfection is robustness, not antifragility. I’ve received many
in the package on which we wrote "please mishandle" at the beginning of the messages suggesting that the Mosaic God (of Jews, Christians, and Moslems)
chapter, would certainly benefit from being brutalized by humans, but are should be put in the antifragile category. This would a severe mistake
likely to suffer from a nuclear attack. So antifragility here is associated with according to Eastern Mediterranean religions. Antifragility for a deity may
a specific source of disorder and with a specific intensity to its impact. If apply to Babylonian, Greek, Syrian, and Egyptian mythologies. But the
someone puts an object weighting two hundred pounds on my shoulders, it monotheistic theology, from the ancient Semitic El (or Al) to the modern
would benefit me, build skeletal strength, but two tons would abruptly end Allah, from Genesis to the Koran, progressed into a definition of an
the composition of this book. A very small dose of arsenic might benefit me, increasingly abstract God —hence closest to the definition of pure
stimulate my organism thanks to the mechanism of overcompensation, while robustness. The monotheistic God is certainly not fragile; but he is not
a large one would prevent me from finishing this book. antifragile. By definition, thanks to his maximally abstract quality, he is what
Further, the three columns indicate relative, not absolute concepts. cannot be improved, which is the very property of perfection —only
Artisans are more antifragile than small businesses, but a rock star will be imperfect mortals can improve, therefore need antifragility to try to improve.
more antifragile than any artisan. Private debt is more fragile than equity, In the Koran, one of the properties of God is Smd, a word that has no
but government debt brings more fragility than private debt. synonym even in Arabic, hence cannot be translated; its meaning can only be
conveyed through the iteration of partial descriptions. Smd is what that has

11/4/11 © Copyright 2011 by N. N. Taleb. This draft version cannot be disseminated or quoted.

reached such degree of completeness that it does not depend on external
circumstances, anything or anyone; a bulwark against all manner of attacks;
He transcends the notion of time.
The idea is also present in other Levantine theologies. Orthodox
theology, through theosis, seeks merger with God, the aspiration to this level
of completeness, hence independence from anything else.
The Stoics also believe in total robustness, the independence from
anything external, as the condition to aspire to in order for one to attain the
level of a Stoic sage. One enters a state of being after nothing, fearing no
deterioration of one’s condition; seeking no improvement to it, neither
fragile nor antifragile, immune from external circumstances. But for the
more practical brand of stoicism, particularly the Roman version, one
doesn’t reaches such stage through contemplation, but rather by acts and the
exercise of virtue.
The magnificent too does not need the trials of external circumstances
to thrive. While the weak breaks under pressure, the strong improves from
stress, the magnificent is rather independent from the outside world.
On the Irreversibility of Broken Packages
One comment on the Triad of Table 1 before we move to anecdotes and
illustrations, followed by a few deeper discussions.
Decreasing fragility is necessary before increasing antifragility, so we
need to focus on that as an overriding mission. For fragility is very
punishing, like a terminal disease. A package doesn't break under adverse
conditions, then manage to fix itself if proper conditions are restored. There
is a ratchet-like property of fragility (i.e., irreversibility from breaks) that is
at the core of the nonlinearity of life. This makes the analysis much simpler:
as it makes it easier to identify the fragile and put it in the left column —since
the broken will tend to stay permanently broken. What matters is the route
taken, not just the destination — what scientists call a path dependent
property.
The fragility that comes from path dependence is usually missed 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, even logical, precedence of survival
over success, that is, to make profits, it would be a good idea to, first, survive.
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The Triad 17
Reduction or elimination of fragility is not optional, but a requirement.
The implication is that to get anything to destination, one must first remove
the fragility, rather than focus on improving its other aspects. And we need
to think a bit differently. Under path dependency, one can no longer separate
growth in the economy from risks of recession, financial returns from risks
of terminal losses, and speed from danger of accident. Someone driving 200
miles per hour in New York City is quite certain to never get anywhere. In
other words, if something is fragile, its risk of breaking makes anything you
do to improve it or make it “efficient” inconsequential unless you first reduce
such risk of breaking.
Also, if a gambler trader has a risk of terminal blowup the “potential
returns” of his strategy are inconsequential. Just as for a plane that has a
high risk of crashing, the notion of “speed” is irrelevant, since we know it
may not get to destination, economic growth with fragilities is not to be
called growth, something what has not yet been understood by governments
at the time of writing.
So for things to flourish they need to, first, reduce their fragility. In fact
much antifragility principally comes from reduction of such vulnerabilities —
clip your downside, protect yourself from harm, and let the upside, the
positive Black Swans take care of themselves.
A Tread
So this book will link together with a single thread elements so seemingly far
apart, Cato the elder, Nietzsche, Thales of Miletus, the potency of the city
state, Steven Jobs artisan extraordinaire, the process of discovery, financial
derivatives, antibiotic resistance, bottom-up systems, Socrates’ invitation of
over-rationalize, the psychologist Herb Simon, obsessive love, Darwinian
evolution, the mathematical concept of Jensen’s inequality, the option theory
of Louis Bachelier, the idea of ancestral heuristics, the works of Joseph de
Maistre and Edmund Burke, Wittgenstein’s anti-rationalism, the fraudulent
theories of the economics establishment, tinkering and bricolage, terrorism
exacerbated by death of its members, an apology of artisanal societies, the
ethical flaws of the middle class, Paleo-style workouts (and nutrition), the
idea of medical iatrogenics, the glorious notion of the magnificent
(megalopsychon), my obsession with the idea of convexity (and my phobia
with concavity), the late 2000s banking and economic crisis, the

misunderstanding of redundancy, the difference between tourist and flâneur,
etc. All in one single —and I am certain, simple —thread.
Antifragile Love
The great writers —La Rochefoucault, Marcel Proust, Dino Buzzati —have
discussed the antifragility of a certain brand of love; they conveyed the
notion that just as time kills the small passions, a certain brand of obsessive
love (that some people call true love) seem be strengthened by impediments
such as distance and every conscious attempt to kill it.
Also, some obsessions are so antifragile that you feed them by trying to
get rid of them. Many psychologists such as Daniel Wegner have shown the
irony of the process of thought control: the more you try to control your
ideas (and what you think about), the more your ideas end up controlling
you. And anyone who has been stalked knows rather well, stalkers feed on
any attempt to answer them, any form of reply (whether positive or
negative).
Information itself is antifragile, perhaps the mother of all
antifragilities. People wreck their reputation merely by trying to defend it.
The wily Venetians knew how to spread information by disguising it as
a secret. Try it out with the following experiment in spreading gossip: tell
someone a secret and qualify it by insisting that it is a secret; the more you
insist that it remains a secret, the more it will spread. It is as if information
fed on any attempt to repress it.
The Antifragility of Barricades
Revolutions feed on repression. Indeed the crowds, at some point, mutate,
blinded by anger and sense of outrage, fueled by the heroism of a few willing
to sacrifice their lives for their cause, and hungry for the privilege to become
martyrs.
There is an Irish revolutionary song that encapsulates the effect:
The higher you build your barricades, the stronger we become.ix
It is that all political movements and rebellions are highly antifragile —
hydra style — and the sucker game is to try to repress them using brute force
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The Triad 18
rather than manipulate them, give in, or find more astute ruses as Heracles
did with the Lernaean Hydra. Again, those who understand bacterial
resistance in the biological domain completely fail to grasp Seneca’s dictum
in De clemencia about the inverse effect of punishments.
Nor is it a particularly intelligent idea to eliminate terrorism using
violence in place of more artful and manipulative methods —or more solid
solutions by figuring out what they want, or, even, to change the system by
getting everyone into commerce. The Arab Moslems and the Byzantine had
a remarkably quiet border for centuries, quieter than between the others
parts of Christendom and Islam, as the two were trading heavily with one
another — the best evidence is my existence, with my ancestors acting as
hybrid intermediaries having spent at least eight centuries at the exact
intersection of the Byzantine and the Arabs. Trade is better for your sleep
than repression or armed threats.
The point is not well understood in the Middle East with the U.S.
sponsored top-down peace treaties enforced by weapons —weapons are not
strong enough to stabilize something fragile. Yet about two millennia after
wise insights of Seneca to that effect, the story of Massada, and the Jewish
rebellion against the repressive Syrian-Greek rule that people celebrate as
Chanukah, the imposition of peace through repeated punishment seems to
be the mode, lying at the heart of many seemingly intractable conflicts, not
just the Israeli-Palestinian stalemate. Furthermore, dealing with seemingly
reliable high-level officials (approved or designated by superpowers) rather
than the people themselves prevents any peace treaty signed from being
robust (to wit the peace treaties between Israel and Arab potentates). The
Romans were wise enough to know that only a free man under Roman law
could be trusted to engage in a contract; by extension, only a free people can
be trusted to abide by a treaty. Treaties that are negotiated with the consent
of a broad swath of the populations on both sides of a conflict tend to
survive, never weapons imposed ones.
A veteran, seasoned, and realistic Chicago trader once told me as I was
discussing price and currency controls, even before the demise of the Soviet
regime: “no government is big enough to fight the market”. And just as no
central bank is powerful enough to dictate stability, no superpower can be
powerful enough to guarantee solid peace alone —besides the fact that,
according to the logic presented later in this book, no superpower is going to
last much as superpower. And not to worry: it is the charm of human

civilization —and what has protected us from extinction — that nothing stays
permanent.
Punished by Translation
Another forgotten property of stressors: help with language acquisition —I
don’t know anyone who learned to speak his mother tongue in a textbook,
starting with grammar, and fitting words to the acquired rules. You pick up
a language best thanks to situational difficulty, when you need to
communicate under more or less straining circumstances, particularly to
express urgent needs (say, physical ones, such those arising in the aftermath
of dinner in a tropical location) — in a much easier way than in the nerd-
driven top-down grammar-heavy school system.
You learn new words without making a nerd-effort, but another type of
effort: that to communicate, mostly by being forced to read the mind of the
other person. Success, wealth, and technology, alas, make this mode of
acquisition much more difficult. A few years ago, when I was of no interest to
anyone, upon attending a conference in a foreign country, organizers did not
assign to me the fawning “travel assistant” fluent in English reserved for the
prominent, so I used to be forced to fend for myself and left to my own
devices, hence pick up vocabulary by finger pointing and trial and error (just
as children do) — no handheld devices, no dictionary, nothing. Now I am
punished by comfort — and I can’t resist comfort. The punishment is being
assigned a fluent English speaking person greeting me by displaying my
misspelled name at the airport, no stress, no ambiguity, and no exposure to
Russian, Turkish, Croatian, or Polish outside of ugly (and organized)
textbooks.
Yet the best place to learn a language may be an episode of jail in a
foreign country. My friend Chad Garcia improved his Russian thanks to an
involuntary stay in the quarantine section of a hospital in Moscow for an
imagined disease. It was a cunning brand of medical kidnapping, as during
the mess after the end of the Soviet rule, hospitals were able to extort
travelers with forced hospital stays, unless they pay large sums of money to
have their papers cleared. Chad, then barely fluent in the language, was
forced to read Tolstoy in the original, and picked-up quite a bit of
vocabulary.
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The Triad 19
Touristification
My friend Chad benefited from something that no longer exists, thanks to
the modern disease of touristification. Touristification? The term describes
the systematic removal of uncertainty and randomness from things, trying to
make things highly predictable in their smallest details, with a precise
itinerary to follow —and a known teleology (that is, aims at a visible, known,
and certain goal). All that for the sake of comfort, convenience, and
efficiency. It is like inviting people to a long weekend in luxury, not
informing them that they are in house arrest.
What a tourist is in relation to an adventurer, or a flâneur,
touristification is to life; it consists in transforming anything, not just travel,
into the equivalent of an actor following a script. We will see how systems
and organisms that like uncertainty get castrated by sucking randomness out
of them to the last drop, through the process of touristification —and with
the illusion of benefits. The guilty parties are soccer moms, the education
system, planning, funding teleological scientific research, the French
Baccalaureate, , etc.
And the electronic calendar.
But the worse touristification is the life we moderns have to have in
captivity, during our leisure hours: Friday night opera, scheduled parties,
scheduled laughs. Again, golden jail.
This “goal-driven” attitude hurts deeply into my existential self.
I’ve always wondered if a lion or a carnivore would find the flesh of
free-range humans of better taste –and pay more for it.
Please Ban My Book: Antifragility of Information
We all learn early on in life that books and ideas are antifragile and feed on
attacks like —to borrow Marcus Aurelius’ expression— “fire feeds on
obstacles”. There is the attraction of banned books, their antifragility to
interdicts. The first book I read, during my childhood, of the author Graham
Greene’s was The Power and the Glory, selected for no other reason than it
was put on the Index (i.e., banned) by the Vatican. Likewise, I gorged on the
books of the American expatriate Henry Miller —their success in France,
whatever their literary merit, seem to have been largely owed to the great
advertising of having been banned in the United States. The same with
Madame Bovary or Lady Chatterley’s Lover.

But discussing it from the other side: as an author, it takes some
training and experience to stop reacting and start enjoying negative
criticism. Further, ordinary editors with a heavily risk-averse disposition will
help you flop your book with the fear of criticism —they usually invoke the
example of theatre, in which plays can be hurt by bad reviews, because of the
tenuous financial status of theatre (a play is more fragile than a book).
Criticism for a book is an truthful, un-faked badge of attention, signaling that
it is not boring; and boring is the only very bad thing for a book. Positive
comments are ineffectual and tend to make books appear important-yet-dull
and reeking of homework: nothing hurts as much as a bland endorsements
such as “this is a riveting demonstration of the power of ___” (fill in the
blank) and nothing helps more than an Amazon comment that includes
“arrogant” or “egomaniac” in its title and an emotional outburst of direct
hatred of the author in its text.
If you really want people to read a book, tell them it is “overrated” (and
use the attribute “underrated” for the opposite effect). Or hint that it is
“disorganized” —disorganized is antifragile in more than one sense; all great
books that have survived —and I mean all — would be called disorganized by
a college professor, textbooks that few read outside homework are
“organized” (can a pleasurable dinner conversation be “organized”?). That
the book just like conversation, likes randomness implies antifragility —
touristified education does not like randomness, as it is fragile, which
explains why it is boring.
The same hidden antifragilities affect attacks on our ideas and persons:
we fear them, dislike negative publicity, but it is my experience that smear
campaigns, if you can survive them, help enormously, conditional on the
person appearing to be extremely motivated and adequately angry —just as
when you hear a woman badmouthing another in front of a man (or vice
versa). My rule is that if someone is willing to trade positions (professional,
social, financial) with you, any criticism on his part should be merely
interpreted as envy. A skilled author can actually predict the tone of a book
review without even reading it, with a simple trick, by estimating the envy
factor: does the reviewer write unsuccessful books or articles on the same
topic?
Balzac recounts how actresses paid journalists (often in kind) to write
favorable accounts —but the wiliest got them to write unfavorable
comments. We will examine convexity effects and simple heuristics (rules of
thumb) in Chapter 4 thanks to which we can measure the antifragility of
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Proto Antifragility 20
about anything, so take for now this simple heuristic: your work is antifragile
if, instead of having one hundred percent of the people finding your work
“good” or even “excellent”, you are better off having a high percentage of the
readers hate you (intensely) and a low percentage of total fans.
Our aim as authors is to get people to read our ideas, not hire us to
babysit their twins as they go to the opera.
My great-grandfather Nicolas Ghosn was a wily politician who
managed to stay permanently in power and hold governmental positions in
spite of his numerous enemies ( most notably his archenemy my great-great-
grandfather on the Taleb side of the family). As my grandfather, his eldest
son, was starting his administrative and hopefully political career, his father
summoned him to his deathbed. “My son, I am very disappointed with you”,
he said. “I never hear anything wrong said about you. You have proved
yourself incapable of generating envy”.
Let us now get deeper into the Triad.
PROTO ANTIFRAGILITY
There have been names for two mild aspects of antifragility, with two
precursor concepts that cover some special cases of it. So I will ease the
reader into the idea with these starter-antifragility concepts.
According to legend, Mithridates IV, king of Pontus in Asia Minor,
while hiding after his father’s assassination, got himself protection from
poisoning by ingesting sub-lethal doses of toxic material, in progressively
larger quantities. He later incorporated the process into a complicated
religious ritual. But this immunity got him in trouble later as his attempt to
take his own life by poisoning failed “having fortified himself against the
drugs of others”. So he had to ask for the services of an ally military
commander to kill him with a sword —against which I assume nobody can so
far found a method for us to get “fortified”.
The method named “Antidotum Mithradatium", celebrated by Celsus,
the ancient world’s famous doctor, had to be rather fashionable in Rome
since about a century later, it brought some complication to the emperor
Nero’s attempts at matricidexxi. Nero had been obsessed with the idea of
killing his mother, Agrippina who, to make things even more colorful, was
Caligula’s sister. But a mother tends to know her son rather well and predict
his actions, particularly when he is her only child —and Agrippina knew

something about poison as she might have used the method to kill at least
one of her husbands (I said things was quite colorful). So, suspecting that
Nero wanted to kill her, she got herself Mithridatized against the poisons
that would have been available to her son. Like Mithridates, Agrippina
eventually died with more mechanical methods as her son (supposedly) had
assassins kill her, thus providing us with the small but meaningful lesson
that one cannot be robust against everything.
So let us call Mithridatization the result of an exposure to a small dose
of a substance that, over time, makes one immune to additional, larger
quantities of it. It is the sort of approach used in vaccination and allergy
medicine. It is not quite antifragility, still at the level of robustness, but we
are on our way. But we already have a hint that perhaps being deprived of
poison makes us fragile and that the road to robustification starts with a
modicum of harm.
Now consider the case when the poisonous substance, in some dose,
makes you better off, one step up from robustness. Hormesis a word coined
by pharmacologists, is when a small dose of a harmful substance is actually
beneficial for the organism, acting as medicine. In fact, the dose-response is
nonlinear and a little bit of an otherwise offending substance, not too much,
acts to benefit the organism as it triggers some overreaction. It was not
interpreted in the sense of “gains from harm” so much as “harm is dose
dependent”. Alas, it is not part of the discourse on success, economic growth,
or innovation that it may only result from overcompensation against
stressors —even in medicine the concept of hormesis is not so widely spread
and we will have an entire chapter on it (medicine can get the point in one
domain, and miss it in another).
Hormesis, was well known by the ancients (but like “we sort of knew
but did not name” blue). It was first “scientifically” described (though, still,
not given a name) in 1888 by a German toxicologist, Hugo Shulz, who
observed that small doses of poison stimulate the growth of yeast —while
larger doses cause harm. Some scientists hold that the benefits of vegetables
may not be so much in what we call the “vitamins” or some other speculative
rationalistic theories (that is not empirically tested), but in the following.
Plants protect themselves from harm and fend against predators with
poisonous substances that ingested by us in the right quantities may
stimulate our organisms.
Hormesis lost some scientific respect, interest and practice after the
1930s because some people mistakenly associated it with the practice of
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Proto Antifragility 21
homeopathy. The association was unfairly done as the mechanisms are
extremely different. Homeopathy relies on other principles, such as the one
that minute, highly diluted parts of the agents of a disease (so small they can
hardly be perceptible, hence cannot cause hormesis) could help medicate
against the disease itself. It has shown little empirical backing and belongs
today to alternative medicine, while hormesis has shown ample scientific
evidence.
What we can already see from these two entry levels of antifragility is
that their deprivation can be harmful —so it is not the matter of addition, but
substraction. So two parts of the message of the book are worth presenting
here.
The first, about depriving systems of stressors, vital stressors, is not
necessarily a good thing —now this gives us a plan as we need to map in the
rest of the book is which stressors are indispensable.
The second is the theme of domain dependence of our minds, a domain
being an area of activity. Some people can understand an idea in one
domain, say medicine, and fail to recognize it in another, say socioeconomic
life. They somehow fail to connect dots. I had a vivid illustration of domain
dependence once, pulling out of the driveway of a hotel in the pseudocity of
Dubai. A fellow, who looked like a banker (I can tell without even thinking if
someone is a banker as I have physical allergies to them), had a porter carry
his luggage. About fifteen minutes later I saw the banker lifting free weights
at the gym, trying to replicate natural exercises, as if he was swinging a
suitcase. Domain dependence is pervasive.
Like the banker, one can go about life touristified, following a script to
its letter, and most people become trapped inside the script.
Further, if Mithridatization and hormesis are well known in (some)
medical circles, they are missing in both other applications and
socioeconomic life. Never underestimate the reach of domain dependence.
Even within medical circles, some get it here and miss it there.
Overcompensation Everywhere
There are a few names for such a property of vulnerability in reverse, with a
very few popular expressions such as "make lemonade when life gives you a
lemon". But there is no a name for the harm that results from of the absence
of stressors —from absence of overcompensation. If the moderns are poor in

expressions, the classics (while not having a word for antifragility) have quite
a few sayings in defense of the idea (particularly the Stoics) — as the ever
wise Seneca wrote, “we become wiser by adversity, as prosperity destroys our
appreciation of things” —more Seneca through the book.
And by the time of Erasmus the medievals seemed to prize numerous
variants of the ancient expression quae nocent docent “what hurts teaches”
or under its Greek form pathemata mathemata. (The expression can be
misinterpreted as repressive pedagogy and advocating physical punishment
for children; I see it here as the exact opposite of that, rather self-directed
learning through pain and efforts, from health-club injuries to the
detouristified formation of what is called experience.)
How do you innovate? First, try to get in trouble. I mean, serious (but
not terminal) trouble. I hold —it is beyond speculation, rather a conviction —
that innovation and sophistication spark from initial situations of necessity,
in ways far beyond the satisfaction of such necessity (from the unintended
side effects of, say, an initial invention or attempt at invention). Naturally,
there are classical thoughts on the subject, with a Latin saying that seems to
originate from a formulation by the great Seneca: sophistication is born out
of hunger (artificia docuit fames). The idea pervades classical literature: in
Ovid, difficulty is what wakes up the genius (ingenium mala saepe movent).
This message from the ancients is vastly deeper than it seems, as it
contradicts modern methods and ideas of innovation and progress on many
levels, as we tend to think that you get inventions by bureaucratic funding,
by putting people through a Harvard Business School class by one Clayton
something (who never innovated anything), hiring a consultant (who never
innovated anything) and some such methods —again, following a touristy
script. This is an illusion, starkly contradicted by history (Chapter x) —and
the disproportionate contribution of uneducated technicians and
entrepreneurs to the various technological leaps, from the industrial
revolution to the emergence of Silicon Valley. Yet moderns try today to
create inventions from situations of opulence instead of accepting the notion
of “necessity mother of invention”. Further, contrast that with the ancients
going beyond the notion of stressors as engine of improvement, even
scorning the spirit of caviar-intellectualism that has prevailed in the West for
a while —many, like Cato the elder looked at opulence, any form of opulence,
and comfort, almost any form of comfort, as a road to waste.
The antifragile in us —this ability to manage through things, and only
do so thanks to antifragility— has been stifled by modernity whose mission
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Evolution and Unpredictability 22
statement appears to choke the antifragile in human and societies —
something Cato understood and expressed very clearly. Indeed I will show
how right Cato was as it is modernity’s naive search for comfort produced by
technology that fragilizes us (economically, socially, and, above all,
physically as, paradoxically, our physical well-being has been hurt the most).
Further, in his criticism of Socrates Cato detected the ills of naive
rationalism, or what I will call here the rationalism of the sucker.
Further, this mechanism of overcompensation hides in the most
unlikely places. If tired after an intercontinental plane ride, go to the gym for
some exertion. Also, it is a well known trick that if you need something
urgently done, give the task to the busiest (or second busiest) person in the
office. Most humans manage to squander their free time, as free time makes
them disorganized, lazy, and unmotivated —the busier they get, the more
active they are at other tasks. Overcompensation, here again.
This book itself is the result of overcompensation for a setback. In early
2010, I wrote the postscript for the paperback edition of The Black Swan, the
equivalent of six printed pages, longhand, then rewrote on a computer, and
made the mistake of throwing away the messy draft. On a plane flight
between the Emirate of Dubai and the Emirate of Los Angeles, my computer
died, putting me in a state of rage: no hand manuscript and as I had been
traveling, no digital backup (and with all the risk management claims that I
make, I didn’t think of another form of backup). Well, it turned out to be a
great piece of luck, as I had to rewrite the postscript starting from scratch. I
was acting as if I had a revenge to get on fate, with the corresponding
heightened concentration. Well, a hundred pages later, I had a new
postscript for The Black Swan, called On Robustness and Fragility, the
precursor of this book, twenty times the length of the lost original. It even
looked like a standalone book as it was published as a separate essay in a
dozen languages. And the book you have in your hands came from the idea of
adding a column to Table 1, to separate robustness from antifragility.
EVOLUTION AND UNPREDICTABILITY
We saw that Mithridatization and hormesis were just very weak forms of
antifragility, with limited gains from volatility, accident, or harm. To repeat,
so far, they are mostly interesting insofar as their deprivation is harmful,
particularly that these relationships elude our intuitions —our minds cannot
easily understand the complicated responses (we think linearly and these

responses are nonlinear). “Harmful” isn’t an unconditional effect and is dose
dependent but our simplifying and linear brains miss the point, as the mind
doesn’t like nuances and reduces the information to “harmful” or “helpful”.
We saw that antifragility is what likes disorder; hormesis only likes a
little bit of it, or, rather, needs a little bit of it. But there is a different,
stronger variety of antifragility linked to evolution that is beyond hormesis —
actually very different from hormesis; it is even its opposite.
The other variety of antifragility is evolutionary, and operates at the
informational level —genes are information. Unlike with hormesis, the unit
does not get stronger in response to stress, it dies. But other units survive —
and those that survive have attributes that improve the collective of units,
leading to modifications commonly called evolution in textbooks. So the
antifragility of concern here is not that of the organisms, inherently weak,
but their genetic code that can survive them. I doesn’t really care about the
welfare of the unit itself, quite to the contrary since it destroys many things
around is. Robert Trivers, a man of remarkable depth of thinking, figured out
the presence of competition between gene and organism, in his idea of the
“selfish gene”, unfairly misattributed to Richard Dawkins.
In fact, evolution only works because of its antifragility; it loves
stressors, randomness, uncertainty, and disorder —while individual
organisms are relatively fragile, the gene pool takes advantage of shocks to
enhance its fitness.
So, visibly, there is a tension between nature and individual organisms.
Everything alive or organic in nature has a fixed life, and eventually dies —
even Methuselah lived less than a thousand years. But what dies does so
after reproducing offspring with their genetic code in one way or another
different from that of the parent, with their information modified. Nature
does not find its members very helpful after their reproduction abilities are
depleted (except perhaps special situations such as grandmothers in the
human and elephant domain who can help in assisting others in preparing
offspring to take charge). Nature prefers to let the game continue at the
informational level, the genetic code. So organisms need to die for nature to
be antifragile —nature is opportunistic, ruthless, and selfish.
Consider, as a thought experiment, the situation of immortal
organisms. They would need to be completely fit for all possible random
event that can take place in the environment, all future random events. By
some nasty property, a random event is well, random, so it does not
advertise its arrival ahead of time for the organism to prepare itself and
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Evolution and Unpredictability 23
make adjustments to be able to sustain shocks —so pre-adaptation for all
such events would be necessary. When a random event happens, it is already
too late to react so the organism should be able to withstand the shock, or
say goodbye. Post-event adaptation, no matter how fast, would be too late*.
For that immortality, the organisms need to predict the future with
perfection —near perfection is not enough. But by letting the organisms go
one lifespan at a time, with modifications between successive generations,
nature does not need to predict future conditions beyond the extremely
vague idea of which direction things should be heading. Actually even a
vague direction is not necessary. Every random event will bring an antidote
to it in the form of ecological variation. It is as if nature changed itself at
every step and changed strategy every instant.
Consider this in terms of economic and institutional life. Nature does
not continuously bailout companies to make them live forever. Nor does it
have permanent administrations and forecasting departments that make the
mistake of trying to outsmart the future —it lets the United States Office of
Management and Budget make such mistakes of epistemic arrogance (they
never got anything right, quite to the contrary, yet managed to fool
themselves that they can predict: for instance they have predicted that, at the
time of writing, the United States government would have a surplus, yet we
are now facing the problems of a horrendous budget deficit. I have shown
that a predictor with a spreadsheet is vastly more dangerous than a criminal
with a loaded gun).
Nor does nature let a single empire dominate the planet forever —even
if every superpower from the Babylonians to the Egyptians to Persians to the
Romans to modern America has believed in the permanence of its
domination and can manage to produce historians to theorize to that effect.
All Nature does is build a mechanism beyond the robust, to opportunistically
reinvent itself each generation, with a continuous change of population and
species.
*A technical comment on why I believe the adaptability criterion to be completely
ignorant of probability (the intelligent reader should skip the rest of this note). This
point is not trivial at all, and has even confused probabilists such as Stratonovich and
the users of his method who fell into the common mental distortion of thinking that
the future sends some signal. The property in a stochastic process of not seeing at any
time period t what would happen in time period higher that t, hence reacting with a
lag, an incompressible lag, is called nonanticipative strategy, a requirement of
stochastic integration. Organisms can only have nonanticipative strategies.

So Black Swan management 101: nature likes diversity between
organisms rather than diversity within an immortal organism, unless you
consider nature itself the immortal organism, as in the pantheism of Spinoza
or Asian religions. If you run into a historian of civilizations, economist or
bureaucrat, try to gently explain it to him.
Let us look at how evolution benefits from randomness and volatility
(in some dose, of course). The more noise and disturbances in the system,
up to a point, baring those extreme shocks that lead to extinction of a
species, the more the effect of the reproduction of the fittest and that of
random mutations will play a role in defining the properties of the next
generation. Say an organism produces ten offspring. If the environment is
perfectly stable, all ten will possibly reproduce. But if there is instability,
killing five (likely to be on average weaker than their surviving siblings), then
those that evolution considers (on balance) the better ones will reproduce,
making the gene undergo some fitness. Likewise, if there is variability among
the offspring, thanks to occasional random spontaneous mutation, a sort of
copying-mistake in the genetic code, then the best will reproduce, increasing
the fitness of the species. So evolution benefits from randomness by two
different routes: randomness in the mutations, and randomness in the
environment —both act in a similar way to cause changes in the traits of the
next generations.
Even when there is extinction of an entire species after some extreme
event, no big deal, it is part of the game. This is still evolution at work as
those species that survive are fittest and take over the lost dinosaurs —
evolution is not about a species, but at the service of the whole of nature.
But note that evolution likes randomness, but up to some upper limit*.
If a Black Swan completely kills life on the entire planet, the fittest will not
survive. Likewise, if random mutations occur at too high a rate, then the
fitness gain might not stick, perhaps even reverse thanks to a new mutation:
as I will keep repeating, nature is antifragile up to a point but such point is
quite high —it can take a lot, a lot of Black Swans. Should a nuclear Black
Swan eradicate most of life on earth, but not all life, some rat or bacteria will
emerge out of nowhere, perhaps the bottom of the oceans, and the story will
* Strong antifragility is when the love of volatility knows no bound —the gains
have a remote limit or are truly unlimited —the sky is the limit. These only exist in
artificial, manmade life such as economic contracts and cultural products, not in
natural processes. More in Chapter 4.
11/4/11 © Copyright 2011 by N. N. Taleb. This draft version cannot be disseminated or quoted.
Evolution and Unpredictability 24
start again, without us and without the members of the Office of
Management and Budget, of course.
In a way, hormesis corresponds to situations by which the individual
organism benefits from direct harm to itself. Evolution is when harm makes
the individual organism perish — the benefits are transferred to others, the
surviving ones, and future generations.
For an illustration of how families of organisms like harm in order to
evolve (again, and how they like harm up to a point), though not the
organisms themselves, consider the phenomenon of antibiotic resistance.
The harder you try to harm bacteria, the stronger the survivors will be —
unless you can manage to eradicate them completely. The same with cancer
therapy: quite often cancer cells that manage to survive the toxicity of
chemotherapy and radiation reproduce faster and take over the void made by
the weaker cells.
I have been privileged, even massively lucky to have biologists
elaborate a paper on the ideas of this book as applied to biology, as I was
writing the book. The antifragility of information: there are benefit from
putting drafts of chapters and summaries on the web. (It was another
vindication against the advice of academics and other minor minds to hide
my research, ideas, drafts, manuscripts, even dreams until publication.
Scrooges go nowhere). The physicist-turned-geneticist Antoine Danchin and
his co-authors Philippe Binder and Stanislas Noria published in the journal
Genes a paper on the idea of antifragility in biological system called
“Antifragility and tinkering in biology (and in business): Flexibility
provides an efficient epigenetic way to manage risk”. Remarkably, Danchin
et al. completely ignored hormesis as a characterization of antifragility —
focusing on evolutionary processes. Why? Hormesis may be a nice way to
describe overcompensation, but it makes too specific claims; and,
scientifically it may be an illusion —the effect of strengthening after a
stressor is real, but the true mechanism may be an evolutionary process.
Why? Organisms are themselves composed of suborganisms that compete
with each other, and are hence subjected to evolution: cells within our bodies
compete; within the cells, proteins compete, etc. For instance, if I drink a
poisonous substance in small amounts, the mechanism by which my
organism gets better might be evolutionary within my system, with bad (and
weak) cells replaced by stronger —and younger— ones. This is a purely
evolutionary process that kills for fitness. Danchin’s work made me realize
that using the general term “antifragility” is vastly more rigorous than

“hormesis”, as it means both hormesis and some other process generating
antifragility.
Let me summarize here, for clarity. Hormesis is direct antifragility,
when an organism benefits from harm, evolution is when something larger
than that organism benefits from harm to the organism.
THE NATURAL AND THE ENGINEERED
My bold conjecture in this book is that everything that has life in it is
antifragile; but not the reverse. It looks like the secret of life is antifragility.
Typically, the natural —the biological— presents both antifragility and
fragility, depends on the source of variation (and the range of variation). A
human body can benefit from stressors (to get stronger), as we said, up to a
point of course. For instance, your bones will get stronger when episodic
stress is applied to them, a mechanism formalized under the name Wolf’s
law after an 1892 article by a German surgeonxii. But a dish, a car, an
inanimate object will not —these may be robust but cannot be intrinsically
antifragile.
Also note that these objects do not reproduce —or do not have cells that
reproduce.
Inanimate, that is, nonliving, material, typically, when subjected to
stress, either undergoes material fatigue, or shows outright breakage. The
only exception I’ve seen is in the report of a 2011 experiment by Brent Cary, a
graduate student, in which he shows that composite material of carbon
nanotubes arranged in a certain manner produces a self-strengthening
response previously unseen in synthetic materials, “similar to the localized
self- strengthening that occurs in biological structures”xiii. This crosses the
boundary between the living and the inanimate as it can lead to the
development of adaptable load-bearing material.
A lot of the idea of the book stems from such distinction. The fact that
the artificial needs to be antifragile for us to be able to use it as tissue is quite
telling a difference between the biological and the synthetic. Your house,
your car, your computer desk eventually wear down and don’t self repair.
They can look better with age (when artisanal), but eventually time will catch
up with them and the hardest material will eventually look like Roman ruins
—but think of a material that would make them stronger with time, self-heal
and improve.
11/4/11 © Copyright 2011 by N. N. Taleb. This draft version cannot be disseminated or quoted.
The Natural and the Engineered 25
So the artificial —the engineered— does not self heal. Not only that, but
the more modern—hence complex— the artificial object, the more fragile it
becomes and harder and harder to repair. This is the exact opposite of the
human body and natural complexity that, as we saw, tend to self-repair, and
even get stronger in response to a large spate of challengesxiv.
True, while humans self-repair, they eventually wear out (as we said,
hopefully leaving their genes, books, or some other information behind). But
the phenomena of aging is misunderstood, largely fraught with mental biases
and logical flaws. We observe old people and see them age, so we associate
aging with their loss of muscle mass, bone weakness, loss of mental function,
and similar effects. But these failures to self-repair come largely from
maladjustment. What we observe in “aging” is a combination of
maladjustment and senescence, and it looks like the two are separable —
senescence might not be avoidable, and should not be avoided (it would
contradict the logic of nature explained earlier); maladjustment is avoidable.
Much of aging is the production of modernity and the misunderstanding of
the effect of comfort — a disease of civilization: make life longer and longer,
while people are somewhat more and more sick. In a natural environment,
people die without aging —or with a very short period of aging. For instance,
some markers such as blood pressure do not change over the life of hunter
gatherers, until the very end.
And this artificial aging comes from stifling internal antifragility.
...Or Rather the Linear and the Complex
This organic-engineered dichotomy is a good starter distinction, to build
intuitions about the difference, but we can do better. Many things such as
society , economic activities and markets, are manmade but grow on their on
to reach self-organization. They also, in a way, multiply and replicate —think
of rumors, ideas, or companies. Consequently, I’d rather generalize into the
linear-complex distinction. So, more generally, instead of the discussion of
antifragility along the biological-nonbiological classification, I find the
distinction linear system-complex system more enlightening*.
* Another interesting distinction, central enough to deserve a footnote. Machines
are harmed by low-level stressors (material fatigue), organisms are harmed by the
absence of low level stressors (hormesis).

The human body, the economy, and nature are what are called complex
systems, full or visible and invisible feedback loops and cascading responses.
Responses are rarely linear, in the sense that for someone with a preference
for sweetness, ten teaspoons of sugar in a cup of coffee aren’t ten times as
pleasant to the taste as a single one.
Everything alive is a complex system of sorts. Artificial engineering
contraptions, with simple responses are complicated, but not “complex”, as
they don’t have interdependencies. You push a button, say a light switch,
and get an exact response, with no possible ambiguity in the consequences.
But, with complex systems, you need to think in terms of ecology: if you
remove a specific animal you disrupt a food chain: its predators will starve
and its victims (say what it eats) will grow unchecked, causing complications
and series of cascading side effects. Lions are exterminated by the
Canaanites, Phoenicians, Romans, and later inhabitants of Mount Lebanon,
leading to the proliferation of goats who crave roots of trees, contributing to
the deforestation of mountain areas, consequences that were hard to see
ahead of time. Likewise you shut down a bank in New York, it causes ripple
effects from Iceland to Mongolia.
Note that complex systems, or, to be specific, those with
interdependencies between their elements, tend, under some conditions, to
deliver extreme events, while simpler systems, usually, are quite unable to do
so. Not just that, but in the long run complex systems are dominated by
these large Black Swan events. And human intervention, by disrupting their
self-regulation, causes these extreme events to become even more extreme.
Stressors are Information
Now the crux of complex systems, those with interacting parts, is that they
convey information to these component parts through stressors, or thanks to
these stressors: my body gets information about the environment not
through my logical apparatus an my intelligence and my ability to reason,
compute and calculate, but through stress, via hormonal or other
messengers. As we saw, my bones will get stronger when subjected to
gravity, say, after my (short) employment with a piano moving company.
They will become weaker after I spend the next Christmas vacation in a space
station with zero gravity or (as few people realize) if I spend a lot of time
swimming. The skin on the back of my hands will get callous if I spend a
11/4/11 © Copyright 2011 by N. N. Taleb. This draft version cannot be disseminated or quoted.
The Natural and the Engineered 26
summer on a Soviet cooperative farm. My skin lightens in the winter and
tans in the summer.
Further, errors and their consequences are information —for small
children, pain is the only risk-management information, as their logical
faculties are not very developed.
But complex systems are, well, complex. There are many more
conveyors of information around us than meets the eye. This is what we will
call causal opacity: it is hard to see the arrow cause-consequence, making
much of conventional methods of analysis, in addition to standard logic,
inapplicable. As I said, predictability of specific events is low, and it is such
opacity that makes it low. Not only that, but because of nonlinearities, one
needs higher visibility than with regular systems —and what we got is
opacity.
One way to bust the one-sided simplified mindset that fails us with
complex systems lies in the following example, and one that also illustrates
the role of antifragility. Let us consider bones again (I have a thing for bones,
and the idea I will discuss next turned me into a weightlifter, a few years
ago). The tradition has been to think that aging causes bone weakness (they
lose density, become more brittle), as if there was one way relationship
possibly brought by hormones (females start experiencing osteoporosis after
menopause). Well, it turns out, as was shown by Gerard Karsenty and his
colleagues, that the reverse is largely true: loss of bone density and
degradation of the health of the bones also causes aging, diabetes, and, for
males, loss of fertility and sexual function. We just cannot isolate any causal
relationship in a complex system which is, as we said, laden with a great deal
of interdependencies. And the story of the bones and the misunderstanding
of interconnectedness also illustrates, as we will see at length in Chapter 3,
by showing how lack of stress (here bones under weight-bearing load) can
cause aging, and how depriving stress hungry antifragile systems of stressors
brings a great deal of fragility.
Martin Harvey / Digital Vision via Getty Images
 The Natural and the Engineered 27

tear)
Undercompensates from Overcompensates from
shocks shocks
All time brings is Time brings aging and
senescence senescence

The difference is not extremely stark may be intermediate steps

between engineered and organic , though much closer to the engineered
(Maxwell’s stabilizer)
Not only we don’t like stress, but we are at the time of writing
committing crimes against nature, science, wisdom, for the sake of
eliminating volatility and variation.
I feel anger and frustration writing the following lines. Currently, one
in ten Americans over the age of high school is on some kind of
antidepressant, such as Prozac. Indeed when you go through mood swings,
Figure 1- This an illustration of why I have a thing for bones. [get better you have to justify why you are not on some medication. There may be a few
picture]
good reasons to be on medication, in severely pathological cases, a
minuscule portion of the total, but for others this is an illustration of the
denial of antifragility —that we should experience variations for hormesis
and other functions. My mood, sadness, bouts of anxiety, are a second
THE ENGINEERED, THE ORGANIC,
source of intelligence—perhaps even first —intelligence. I get mellow and
NONCOMPLEX COMPLEX
lose physical energy when it rains, become more meditative, and tend to
Needs continuous repair Self healing
write more and more slowly then, with the raindrops hitting the window,
and maintenance what Verlaine called “sobs” (sanglots). Some days I enter poetic melancholic
Hates randomness Loves randomness (small states, what the Portuguese call saudade or the Turks hüzün (from the
variations) Arabic word for sadness). Other days I am more aggressive, have more
No need for recovery Needs recovery between energy— and will write less, walk more, do other things, argue with
stressors researchers, answer emails, draw graphs on blackboards. Should I shoot for
zero variability in my moods?
No interdependence High degree of
interdependence Can you imagine that had Prozac been systematized last century the
entire literary corpus would have been amputated? Baudelaire’s “spleen”,
Stressors cause material Absence of stressors cause
Edgar Allen Poe’s moods, the poetry of Sylvia Plath, the lamentations of so
fatigue atrophy
many other poets, everything with a soul would have been gone...
Age with use (wear and Age with disuse*
For if Big Pharma, that is large pharmaceutical companies, were able to
eliminate the seasons, they would probably do so —for a profit, of course.
* Frano Barović reading this chapter wrote to me: “Machines: use it and lose it;
The problem is a combination of nerd-misunderstanding of nature and
organisms: use it or lose it.” breach of ethics. Big Pharma (like as we will see, the Federal Reserve Banks

11/4/11 © Copyright 2011 by N. N. Taleb. This draft version cannot be disseminated or quoted.
 Thank You, Errors 28

and, more generally, anyone put in position of “expertise”) is playing into our Learning from the mistakes of others
fear of fluctuation. The problem is larger than it is with governments in the
It is often the mistakes of others that benefit the rest of us —and, sadly not
sense that corporations, when Alarge, can manipulate us into submitting to
them. We saw that stressors are information, in the right context. For the
their harm —they control governments and use the media. I will cover the
antifragile, harm from errors should be lesser than the benefits. Some, not all
point in three places: the section on the denial of antifragility (Chapter 3),
errors, of course, those that do not destroy a system help prevent larger ones.
the one on medicine (Chapter x), and in the section on ethics (Chapter x).
The historian of engineering Henry Petroski presents a very elegant point.
And of course we will see how pharma can invent diseases (such as ADD)
Had the Titanic not had that accident, as fatal as it was, we would have built
meant to assist soccer moms in child-touristification, that is the
larger and larger liners and the next accident would have been even more
transformation of curious children into tourists.
tragic. So the people who perished in it were sacrificed for the greater good.
In fact about anything sold to us by large corporations has an alienating
The same with Fukushima: one can safely say that it made us aware of
aspect to it.
the problem with the nuclear (and small probabilities) and prevented large
catastrophes. The Titanic, further, illustrates the difference between the
THANK YOU, ERRORS gains from the system and the harm for the individual part.
This is how nature is built: my mistakes lifting stones, when I am well
Ironically, aversion to (small) errors and uncertainty —rather than loving it,
calibrated, translate into small injuries that guide me the next time.
stochatophilia — creates risk. Absence of stressors, microbes create
He who never sinned is less reliable than he who only sinned once. And
vulnerabilities. An by refusing to accept randomness, you are vulnerable to
someone who made errors —once per error— is more reliable than someone
illusions of certainties.
who made none.
It will take about half the book to explain and illustrate the following.
Antifragile systems have the perfect antiacademic attribute: they love small
nonterminal mistakes and learn how to control such volatility. They love TABLE OF EQUIVALENCE
absence of knowledge. They love disorder. They love doing, not thinking.
They don't care about being right or wrong, looking bad in front of Just as your bones gain from stress, and evolution benefits from disruption,
colleagues. So the reason we are here today is precisely because most of what some situations gain from uncertainty in an identical way. It is important to
has survived has had this antifragile property (the rest did not make it). It note that uncertainty, disorder, and the unknown have the same functional
explains why humankind has managed to get to where we are now not just in properties, even if you have to find them in separate buildings of the
spite of mistakes, but because of them. university campuses. So the next list presents the equivalence between a set
of terms that, in real life appear to be categorically different; they may be
We can simplify the link between fragility, errors, and antifragility as
philosophically distinct but in practice, and for the purpose of antifragility,
follows. When you are fragile, you depend on things following the exact
they are completely equivalent in effect: antifragile systems benefit (to some
planned course, with as little deviation as possible —for deviations are
degree) and the fragile is penalized from all of them.
harmful. When you want deviations, since most will be helpful, you are
antifragile.
I will restate the motto, owing to both its importance and our lack of Table of Equivalence: i) uncertainty, ii) variability, iii) imperfect,
awareness of it: thinking fragilizes and, furthermore, makes us blind to incomplete knowledge, iv) chance, v) chaos, vi) volatility, vii) disorder,
antifragility. This is not really bad news —for those aware of it. Such viii) entropy, ix) time, x) the unknown, xi) randomness, xii) turmoil,
blindness is called "suckerdom" by Fat Tony, our antinerd (if overweight) xiii) stressor.
character whom we will meet in Chapter x.

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I rephrase. Pick a random item from the tableau, say ii), variability, or
xi, randomness. The antifragile should benefits from it (to some extent, at
least not experience harm), the fragile will suffer. Although there may be
some theoretical differences, these vanish upon contact with reality. So I
treat, in practice what is unknown as equivalent to what is random or volatile
—they have an identical effect for a decision-maker. Just as organisms
benefit from variability, stressors, and volatility the activity of trial-and-error
benefits from uncertainty and incomplete knowledgexv.
AGE LIKE WINE
A bit more on ethics.
I am spending a few minutes looking around the study where I am
writing these lines, looking for antifragility and robustness in subtle forms. I
spot a gift I just received, this good bottle of 1995 Bordeaux wine, standing
on a table not too far away from my desk; waiting to find a new home as it
may be too sophisticated for my taste buds. Good wine improves with age,
under the right conditions; it benefits from the disorder, the chemical
disturbances caused by time (for a physicist, time is increase in disorder,
linked to a wonderful concept called entropy). But this is a very weak form
of antifragility: wine only benefits up to some limit: it is not globally
antifragile, just very locally so. Putting the bottle inside the crater of a
volcano would not improve its quality too much. Breaking the bottle with a
hammer would not help the drinking experience neither.
Let me look around me some more. Here is something robust in things
artisanal, at least less fragile than common goods made by large industry. I
am wearing this leather shoe made in the town of Limoges, in France, that
the makers boast can last decades. Like most things artisanal, they do. These
shoes do indeed benefit from use, up to a point, so long as you do not spent
too much time wading in sulfuric acid.
But if the pair of artisanal leather shoes was, in a limited way,
antifragile; but this is not in its fabric, only in the way it evolves with use:
the tissue never improves. The leather breaks down with wear and tear,
which is beneficial in the early stages as the shoes will look more elegant and
feel more comfortable but the material will not get stronger at all —this is
more of a functional than organic antifragility. So on the spectrum fragile-
antifragile, artisanal goods tend to stand closer to the middle, in the robust
category.
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Age Like Wine 29
An idea just hit me emotionally, enough to change my mood. It is as
follows: the difference between my robust, and in a limited way antifragile
artisanal shoes hints at the central disease we are facing, the fragility of the
modern version of stock-market capitalism —hence my allergy for almost
everything heavily industrialized. Goods made in more ancient ways, mostly
in days preceding the abnormality known as the MBA security analyst,
tended to be not fragile, usually robust, on the occasion, slightly antifragile
(they get better with wear and tear). I am not just talking about the Acropolis
in Athens or the temple of Bacchus in Eastern Lebanon. Anything non-
consumable, such as books printed several hundred years ago, classical
furniture, saddles for your horse or camel, country house near Pompeii.
All this connects us to ethics. What is central in my message, these
items ranging between artisanal and artistic have the identity of the maker
invested in them, which confers a measure of robustness and makes them
escape the lower grade of modern-day commercialism you encounter at the
shopping mall, that is, these goods that are made to fool you with their looks
and tend to age without patinaxvi.
Consider counterfeit currencies, which a trained eye can immediately
recognize; more and more products (food, clothes, objects, banking, news,
education) made by corporations are becoming the analog of counterfeit
banknotes. They try to look like the real thing without being the real thing.
Even the ethics of the current system (as it can be gamed by corporations
with good lawyers) looks like counterfeit ethics —with the legal, while highly
formulaic and mechanistic, getting more and more divorced from the ethical.
Note that Pharma, the devil firms trying to make you sick, did not get to
where they are now with the same methods. They were probably small
artisanal or entrepreneur-driven firms that got larger and hired managers,
then tried to be liked by MBA-analysts. I’ve attended Business School and
was part of the faculty of one: it is a kind of environments in which people
who know very little, as the students have little experience, are taught by
people who know nothing, as the professors have no experience. So no
wonder we have problems.
An artisanal environment, in addition, is largely free from the main
generators or modern fragilities, what is called the “moral hazard”, or
“agency problem”: the interests of the manager (the “agent”) are divorced
from those of his shareholders (the “principal”) —and society –one party gets
the benefits, the other one gets the harm. So, just as the “agent” will cut the
maximum amount of corners, he will game the system by hiding risks that

MBA and other naive security analysts cannot detect. The complexity (and
nonlinearity) of the environment makes it very easy to do so. These will end
up blowing up the modern free-market system.
But there is another ethical problem: the inherent fragility of the
middle class.
Reputation and Ethics
So we can illustrate both reputational fragility and ethics of the middle class
with an example that is stretched to extreme —and linking both seemingly
independent concepts. Each person understands the point in his own
profession or domain, but not in other areas, which is why it benefits to
multiply examples around the central idea. I was in Milan trying to explain
antifragility to Luca Fromenton, my Italian publisher (with great aid from
body language and hand gestures). I was there partly for the Moscato desert
wines, partly for a convention in which the other main speaker was a famous
economist. I believe that he is a fragilista, as his models (and ideas), like
many of those propagated by the Black-Swan blind economics
establishment, cause fragility, given that they build systems vulnerable to
large shocks and are never penalized by the harm they do to others.
Fragilistas sound intelligent, which is the problem, a severe problem, as they
make the sucker public think that they know what they’re doing. So I
presented Luca with the following thought experiment: if I beat up the
economist publicly, what would happen to me (other than an ethnological
experience in a Milanese jail and a publicized trial causing great interest in
the new notions of fragilista and antifragilita). He thought for a second
...well, it’s not like he would like me to do it, but, you know, it would be great
for book sales. Nothing I can do as an author that makes it to the front page
of Il Corriere della Sera would hurt my book, to the opposite. No scandal,
not a single one (outside of disputes of authenticity, even then) would hurt
an artist or writer*.
Further, such spontaneous action would give my thinking the stamp of
heroic authenticity: doing what I believe. And the physical workout regimen
I follow (based on my thing with bones, and the ideas of naked antifragility
* The French have a long series of authors who owe part of their status to their
criminal record —which includes the poet Ronsard, the writer Jean Genet and many
others.
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Age Like Wine 30
of the human body discussed in Chapter x) would be also validated. It would
be even better if I were put to death by the members of the economics
establishment. Socrates, by proudly seeking death, enhanced his ideas
because they were antifragile —information is.
Now let's say I were a middle executive employee of some corporation
listed on the London Stock Exchange, of the kind to never take changes by
dressing down, always wearing a suit and tie (even on the beach). What
would happen to me after my immediate termination? My firing and arrest
record would plague me forever. My downside is greater than my upside,
forcing me to play by certain rules. Someone earning close to minimum
wage, say a construction worker or a taxi driver, does not overly depend on
his reputation and is free to have his own opinions. But he would be merely
robust compared to the artist who is antifragile. A midlevel bank employee
with a mortgage would be fragile to the extreme. In fact he would be
completely prisoner of the value-system, inviting him to be corrupt to the
core — because of his dependence on the annual vacation in the Barbados.
The same with a bureaucrat in Washington.
In the U.K. and France, someone from an aristocratic background is
generally less of a prisoner, particularly when he is secure in his social status.
They are socially antifragile and can be somewhat trusted with some matters
—provided of course that no intellectual demands are made upon them. In
Proust’s long novel, A La Recherche, the Duchess of Guermantes spoke with
the rural accent, with the vocabulary of a peasant, passing for one, which the
narrator compares to the more precious one used by the rising, timorous,
unconfident —and fragile —class of social climbers. The comparison hit
home because, in my family, we can tell “new money” from “old money”
among cousins and uncles using the rule that it is inversely related to how
hard someone tries to look socially sophisticated.
Again, as we saw earlier, the agency problem is when someone has
personal interests that are divorced from those who are using his services:
the stockbroker and medical doctor whose interest are their own checking
account, not your financial and medical health, respectively, and give you
advice that is geared to help them out themselves.
So I will show —what the Greeks knew but collected in observations
here and here from Xenophon to Aristotle without any repository for this
central ethical claim —that the middle class because of its insecurity can be
corrupt and subjected to the agency problem, that is ethically fragile or
nonrobust; it is not free with its opinions (and its time). Such fragility is the

sneakiest form of bondage. Things have gotten much worse since then, as
more complexity brings the divorce of the ethical and the legal. This
dependence on systems plagues academia; for instance I met so many
academics who agree that their publication system is wrong, their methods
nonsensical, but they need to publish within the system because of the
requirements for their careers (and corner office). They are trapped and
cannot be trusted as contributors to knowledge. They get pretty angry when
I call it prostitution (though prostitutes are relatively the most robust
persons in this planet and free in their opinion as they face no reputational
downside).
The other problem with social science academics and journalists is that,
in addition to their dependence on both a paycheck and the opinion of others
that is, reputational and financial insecurity, they don’t have true skin in the
right game, which is a great source of fragility for society. They transfer their
own fragility to others. There is no penalty for the consequences of their
writing. They focus on their own reputation, and are protected from the
effect of their ideas and writings on others. When they are collectively wrong,
as they were with the events that led to the crisis that started in 2008, they
are not penalized at all. Those journalists and economists who were
punishing (indeed) people like me for my warnings about the fragility of the
banking system, when these ideas were unpopular (before 2008), are now
acting as if they were not guilty at all, most even act as if they had predicted
the events. So their game (Chapter x) is not to be right, but sound right, and
to follow the collective. They prefer to be wrong along with others rather
than right alone. Had they had skin in the game they would be feeling the
sting —and may even be bankrupt by now. They would certainly remember
that they failed to understand events.
As a result of the absence of skin of the game, their understanding of
events (and risks) is so retrospective that they would put the security checks
after the plane ride.
No guts, no glory. My ethical rule in this book is as follows. I only eat
my own cooking. I have only written, in every line I have written in my
professional life, about things I have done and recommended to others risks
I have been taking myself. I will be the first to be hurt if I am wrong. I had
warned about the fragility of the banking system in The Black Swan and was
exposed to substantial losses had I been wrong. It felt good as I would not
feel guilty being wrong since I would have been the first victim. That applies
to every domain, including medicine and technical innovation. Such is the
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Why The Aggregate Hates The Individual 31
only personal discipline I consider worth following. I do not believe that
one’s personal experiences are sufficient sample to derive a conclusion about
an idea, I just believe that they give the stamp of authenticity and sincerity of
opinion.
Further, in writing, I feel corrupt and unethical if I have to look-up a
subject in a library as part of the writing itself. This acts as a filter —it is the
only filter. If the subject is not interesting for me to look up independently,
and have done so before, then I should not be writing about it at all, period.
It does not mean that libraries (physical and virtual) are not acceptable; it
means that they should not be the source of any idea. Students pay to write
essays on topics for which they have to derive knowledge from a library as a
self-enhancement exercise; a professional who is compensated to write and
taken seriously by others should use a more potent filter. Only distilled
ideas, ones that sit in us for a long time, are acceptable.
It is time to revive the not well known philosophical notion of doxastic
commitment, in which one only holds beliefs for which he is committed.
WHY THE AGGREGATE HATES THE INDIVIDUAL
From the logic of the section on evolution, we saw a bit of a conflict between
the whole and the parts, the gene and the organisms, so let us examine the
point when it comes to society and business and economic life, as it is more
acute there.
We saw that antifragility in biology works by layers. The cell has a
population of intercellular molecules; in turn the organism has a population
of cells; and the species has a population of organisms.xvii A strengthening
mechanism for the species comes at the expense of some organisms; in turn
the organisms strengthens at the expense of some cells, all the way down and
all the way up as well.
The business ecology, that is the economy, is antifragile when left on its
own. But, for that, a single individual business has to necessarily be fragile,
exposed to breaking —evolution needs organisms (or their gene) to die when
supplanted by others, in order to achieve improvement, or to avoid
reproduction when not as fit as someone else.
Also, consider traditional societies. Here too we have the same layering:
individuals, immediate families, extended families, tribes, people using the

same dialects, ethnicities, groups. And the economy has equivalent layering,
with individuals, artisans, a variegated layer composed of small firms using
the services of artisans or departments within corporations, or corporations,
industries, the regional economy, and the general economy —one can even
have thinner slicing with more layers.
The antifragility of the higher level may require the fragility —and
sacrifice— of the lower one. Tonight I expect to have a great meal in New
York thanks to the fragility of the weak restaurant that went bust.
While sacrifice as a modus is obvious in the case of ant colonies I am
certain that individual businessmen are not overly interested in hara-kiri
suicide for the greater good of the economy; they are therefore necessarily
concerned in seeking antifragility or, at least, some level of robustness for
themselves. That’s not necessarily compatible with the interest of the
collective, that is the economy.
So there is a problem in which the property of the sum (the aggregate)
varies from that of each one of the parts. It is called a problem of
aggregation.
It is painful to think about ruthlessness as an engine of improvement.
Now what is the solution? There is none, alas, that can please everyone
—but there are ways to mitigate. People often come to me for advice that is
local to them, that is their own career; they go to business school to learn
how to survive while taking minimal risks for that purpose —but what the
economy, as a collective, wants them to do is take a lot, a lot of foolish risks
themselves and be blinded by the odds. Their industry improves from failure
to failure. Natural systems want some overconfidence on the part of
individual economic agents, the overestimation of their chances of success
and underestimation of risks of failure in their businesses, provided their
failure does not impact others.
We saw that the restaurant business is wonderfully efficient precisely
because restaurants, being vulnerable, go bankrupt every minute, and
entrepreneurs ignore such possibility as they think that they will beat the
odds. In other words, some class of foolish, even suicidal, risk taking is
healthy for the economy —under the condition that all people don't take the
same risks and that these risks remain small and localized at the individual
business.
Now by disrupting the model, as we will see, with bailouts, government
typically favor a certain class of firms that are large enough to be needed to
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Why The Aggregate Hates The Individual 32
save in order to avoid contagion to other business; by doing so, they transfer
fragility from the collective to the unfit, and suck up forces from the weak
whose failure does not threaten the system. People have difficulty realizing
that the solution is building a system in which nobody’s fall can drag others.*
What Does Not Kill Others
As an advocate of antifragility I need to warn about illusions 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 often
misinterpreted as meaning Mithridatization or hormesis. It could be a “what
did not kill me did not make me stronger, but spared me because I am
strong; but it killed others and the average population is now stronger
because the weak are gone”. I’ve discussed the problem in The Black Swan
with the false illusion of causality, with (as usual) a New York Times article
saying that the new mafia members, former Soviet exiles, had been
“hardened by a visit to 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
that, given the surviving population is sturdier than the original one, that
these trials are good for them. In other words the trial can just be an exit
exam. All we may be witnessing is the transfer of fragility (rather,
antifragility) from the individual to the system. 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.
* I will discuss the idea known as “creative destruction” in Chapter x. But in the
meanwhile there is a simple rule that has not been violated: whenever an idea that
makes practical and empirical sense, such as that of creative destruction, is attributed
to an economist, a philosopher has to be the true source, formulated in a more
sophisticated way. I initially found the reference in Marx, but it turned out to be in
Nietzsche.
 Why The Aggregate Hates The Individual 33

Me and Us inexorable disloyalty of mother nature. I detest the notion of improvement

thanks to harm to others. As a humanist, I stand against the antifragility of
This tension between individual interests and the collective is new in history:
systems at the expense of individuals, for if you follow the reasoning, this
in the past it was dealt away by the near-irrelevance of individuals. Sacrifice
makes us humans individually irrelevant.
for the sake of the collective shows, for instance, in the notion of heroism: it
The great benefit of the enlightenment has been to bring the individual
is good for the tribe, bad for those who perish under the fever of war. This
to the fore, with his rights, his freedom, his independence, his “pursuit of
instinct for heroism and the dissolution of individual interests in favor of the
happiness” (whatever that “happiness” means), and, most of all, his privacy.
collective has to become aberrant with suicide bombers. These pre-death
So, with all my criticism of scientism and the illusion of understanding the
terrorists get into a mood similar to an ecstatic trance in which their
world with great harm to mankind that came from the movements bundled
emotions drive them to ignore their own death. (It is completely wrong to
together under “enlightenment”, I will subscribe to the fight in favor of the
believe that suicide bombers act thanks to the promise of a reward of some
individual and his protection against the tyranny of the group. For, as we
Islamic paradise with virgins and other entertainment, for, as the
saw, the enlightenment and the political systems that emerged from it freed
anthropologist Scott Atran has signaled, the first suicide bombers in the
us (somewhat) from the interests of society, the tribe, or the family which
Levant were Greek-Orthodox revolutionaries —my tribe. Again, I despise
had dominated throughout history.
modern journalism).
A little color on the culture of the group over the individual. The unit in
There is like a switch in us that kills the individual in favor of the
traditional cultures is the collective; and it could be perceived to be harmed
collective, when people get into communal dances, mass riots, or engage in
by the behavior of an individual —the honor of the family is sullied when,
war. I felt that when performing the Levantine folk dance dabke, when,
say, a daughter becomes pregnant, a member of the family engages in large
dressed in Lebanese ancestral clothes, similar to Balkan and Greek clothing,
scale financial swindles and Ponzi schemes, or, worst, may even teach the
a certain number of people hold themselves by the shoulders as a chain, and
immoral subject of college economics. And the mores persisted way beyond
rhythmically pound the floor with the feet. You become part of a beast of,
the enlightenment. Even as recently as the late nineteen century or early
say, thirty or forty feet; your mood is that of the collective. You are part of
twentieth, it was common in, say, rural France, for someone to spend all his
what Elias Canetti calls the rhythmic and throbbing crowd. I have also felt a
saving to sponge out the debts of a remote cousin (called “passer l’éponge”,
different variety of crowd experience as a rioter, when fear of authorities
literarily use a sponge to erase the liability on the chalkboard); and do so in
vanishes completely under collective fever.
order to preserve the dignity and good name of the extended family. It was
Let us now generalize the point to the condition of humans. Looking at
perceived as a duty. (I reckon having done some of that myself in the twenty
the world from a certain distance, I see a total tension between man and
first century!)
nature —a tension in the tradeoff of fragilities. We saw how nature wants
Clearly the system needs to be there for the individual to survive. So
herself, the aggregate, to survive —not every species— just as, in turn, every
one needs to be careful in glorifying one interest against others in the
single species wants its individuals to be fragile (particularly after
presence of interdependence and complexity.
reproduction), for evolutionary selection to take place. We saw how, such
transfer of fragility from individuals to species is necessary for its overall For many persons on the reactionary “right”, particularly in the United
survival: species are potentially antifragile, given that DNA is information, States, even what one does in the privacy of his bedroom vitiates the purity
but members of the species are perishable hence ready to sacrifice and of the collective air. You represent that metaphorical dabke chain, even when
designed to do so for the benefit of the collective. you are alone.

Antifragility shmantifragility. Some of the ideas of selection here are Likewise, we humans may have to be self-centered at the expense of
not very comfortable to this author, which makes the writings of some other species, even if it leads to more fragility on the part of nature, if it
sections rather painful — I detest the ruthlessness of selection, the insures our survival. Our interests —as a human race —prime over that of
nature; and we can tolerate some inefficiency, some fragility, in order to

11/4/11 © Copyright 2011 by N. N. Taleb. This draft version cannot be disseminated or quoted.

protect individuals although sacrificing nature too much may lead to hurting
ourselves.
We saw the a trade-off between the interests of the collective and those
of the individual. An economy cannot survive without breaking individual
eggs; protection is harmful, and constraining the forces of evolution to
benefit individuals does not seem required. But we can protect individuals
from starvation, provide some social net. And give them respect. Or more, as
we see next.
National Entrepreneur Day
Meanwhile, if as a utopist, I hate what I am figuring out, I think that there is
hope.
Remember the logic a few paragraphs ago of heroism and the respects
it commands comes as compensation by society for those who take risks for
others. Well, entrepreneurship is a risky and heroic activity— it is needed for
the system for the arguments we just saw.
In addition, there are epistemological considerations. Someone who
did not find something is providing others with knowledge, the best
knowledge, that of absence (what does not work) —yet he gets little or no
credit for it. He is a central part of the process with incentives going to others
and, what is worse, no recognition or respect.
I am ingrate towards the man whose overconfidence caused him to
open a restaurant, and fail, enjoying my nice meal while he is probably eating
canned tuna.
So to progress, modern society should be treating ruined entrepreneurs
in the same manner humanity has been honoring dead soldiers perhaps not
with as much honor (the entrepreneur is alive), but using exactly the same
logic. For there is no such thing as failed soldier, dead or alive —likewise
there is no failed entrepreneur or failed scientific researcher, no more than
there is a successful babbler, consultant, or business school or social science
professorxviii.
And compare entrepreneurs to bureaucrats and manager of companies
who climb the ladder of hierarchy and just rise to the top and hijack the
credit. Not only do managers have little skin in the game but they are only
getting the upside. The same with journalists, economists or financial
11/4/11 © Copyright 2011 by N. N. Taleb. This draft version cannot be disseminated or quoted.
Why The Aggregate Hates The Individual 34
blogger; they just pontificate in the complete safety of their position. Their
cohort is rarely at risk.xix
My dream —the solution— is that we would have a national
entrepreneur day, with the message: "Most of you will fail, disrespected,
impoverished, but thank you for the risks you are taking and the sacrifices
you are making for the sake of the economic growth of the planet and pulling
others out of poverty. Our nation thanks you."*
Next
This chapter introduced and discussed antifragility in a very general way,
and presented a table of triads that will fuel the rest of the book —sort of a
trialectic Fragile-Robust-Antifragile. The main points are: 1) Antifragility is
love of some disorder, chaos, randomness, Black Swans, etc. 2) There are
various types of antifragility, such as hormesis or evolutionary pressures, 3)
Antifragility having no name, was part of the practical consciousness, not the
cultural one and has been harmed by explicit knowledge, 4) The denial of
antifragility is harmful, which is what modernity is about, 5) Nerds
constrain systems by choking them of antifragility, 6) ...
The next chapter will introduce two characters and the chapter after next will
get deeper into the results of our denial of antifragility, how it leads us to
fragilize systems and produce Black Swans by the establishment of top-down
controls. I repeat the two missions of the book: show antifragility, help detect
it, and come up with a program to make the world more robust, even
antifragile to Black Swans.
* My correspondent Jean-Louis Reault wrote “I have noticed that the
more people glorify the entrepreneur as an abstraction, the more they will
scorn an actual one they meet.”