in an area with frequent catastrophes, where the catastrophes have externalities on people who didn’t choose them, you want to lower variance, so that nothing ever gets bad enough to produce the catastrophe.
In an area where people can choose whatever they want, and are smart enough to choose good things rather than bad ones, you want to raise variance, so that the best thing will be very good indeed, and then everybody can choose that and bask in its goodness.
Scott’s essays on “anti-fragile” point to a need to define fragility in a way other than “I’ll know it when Nassim Taleb sees it.” Are we talking about a person, a choice, a process, a system. . .?
It could be that the admonition “Be anti-fragile!” has no practical implications. That is because most disagreements can be framed as disagreements about what are the important sources of fragility.
Conservatives see individual human beings as fragile, but they see the accumulated habits of civilization as anti-fragile. But a progressive could argue that the accumulated habits of civilization make a society fragile. As the environment changes, people need to change in response.
It strikes me that William Godwin covered this territory quite well back in his sadly under-appreciated but profound and immensely influential masterpiece from 1793, An Enquiry into Political Justice. Godwin’s 8 principles incorporate the notion of “fragility” in his notions of “injustice” and “security “:
1. The object of moral and political discourse is how to maximize the amount and variety of pleasure and happiness.
2. Injustice and violence produced the demand for government, but due to its propensity toward war and despotism and its perpetuation of inequality, government has come to embody and perpetuate injustice.
3. Government’s chief object is security, and it achieves this through abridging individual independence. This prevents the cultivation of the individual’s happiness. One should aim to maintain general security, while minimizing such damages.
4. Justice must aim at producing the greatest sum of happiness and it requires impartiality. Justice is universal.
5. One’s duty is to fulfill one’s capacity to bring about the general advantage. One’s right is to their share to this general advantage. Ordinarily, one’s contribution to general advantage should be at their discretion. One’s injury to the general good might sometimes warrant political superintendence.
6. One’s actions are based on feelings rather than reason. Reason merely allows the comparison and balancing of different feelings. Reason, therefore, allows us to regulate our feelings, making its improvement the best method to improve our social condition.
7. Reason’s clarity and strength depend on the cultivation of knowledge. The cultivation of knowledge is unlimited. Therefore, our social condition is capable of perpetual improvement; however, institutions calculated to give perpetuity to any particular mode of thinking, or condition of existence, are harmful.
8. The cultivation of happiness requires that we avoid prejudice and protect freedom of inquiry. It also requires leisure for intellectual cultivation, therefore extreme inequality is to be avoided.
Fragile is about losing from variance, while anti-fragility is about gaining from variance. I think of conservatives as seeking robustness, which neither gains nor loses from variance. (In contrast, I would think of libertarians as pursuing anti-fragility, and progressives as seeking to optimize for the existing circumstance, and accepting or ignoring fragility).*
*In the sense that, when they are playing Fantasy Dictator and thinking about systems design, they pursue systems that range from (at the fragile extreme) highly optimized, suppressing internal evolution and deviation, and more homogenous, through redundancy to diverse and evolutionary environments.
lupis42 wrote:
>> Fragile is about losing from variance, while anti-fragility is about gaining
>> from variance.
well stated–a good first approximation. We need to define variance. Someone else can take over on that one.
and also lupis42 wrote:
> ” I think of conservatives as seeking robustness, which neither gains nor
> loses from variance. (In contrast, I would think of libertarians as pursuing
> anti-fragility, and progressives as seeking to optimize for the existing
> circumstance, and accepting or ignoring fragility).*”
also good. Definitely Taleb criticizes managers who wish to get paid on an “incentive” basis by minimizing operation-and-design costs, running a nuclear power plant very “lean” by dispensing with backup systems.
robustness is a good concept–I think there are a whole bunch of concepts that we need to explore.
metals have hardness, tensile strength, resistance to corrosion. Obsidian blades are sharp but brittle. Iron blades less brittle.
A map with a bullet hole in it is still a map.
human individuals can be resilient to accidents, injuries, and failures–or not so much.
I feel like we are scratching the surface here.
Are we talking about…
individuals?
families?
communities?
businesses that can go bankrupt?
power plants? internal combustion engines? a house? a pickup truck? a fishing community?
sovereign national states? small city states? criminal syndicates?
Sometimes Taleb is talking about financial robustness, but he sometimes segues (sp?) into discussions of city states in Levant. I believe at some point he says that Beirut has been half-destroyed and then rebuilt again a half dozen times in the last two thousand some odd years.
I would say that the old Habsburg Monarchy (the Austrian part) was anti-fragile for hundreds of years. the Czechoslavakia excised from the Habsburg Monarchy in 1918 was far more fragile. You say that if there had no Hitler, Czechoslovakia would have been less fragile–the retort is that Hitler would have lived and died in obscurity had it not been for World War One and the fall of the Habsburgs, the Hohenzollerns, and the Romanovs.
Thanks for listening!
One could think of trying to optimize for some long-term measure of performance by trying to figure out the right combination of (volatility, volatility reaction function)
That is, “efforts to reduce general volatility” and “efforts to design institutional systems, or individual strategies and approaches that reduce expected damage from catastrophic scenarios arising from volatility.”
You can only reduce volatility so much, but even within those limits, you don’t want to go down to 0, because some variety and churn and “creative destruction” is necessary for the evolutionary process of competition and selection.
On the other hands, maximum chaos makes things to unpredictable and uncertain to make it worthwhile to invest in many risky, long-term plans.
Maybe you could map this up to ideological tendencies, “Three Languages of Politics”-style.
Libertarians tend to be friendly towards volatility and against more than the minimally necessary state interventions to reduce it. They are friendly towards creative destruction, and would prefer small players to pursue different ‘fragile’ approaches of high risk, high reward, but the system overall to be ‘anti-fragile’ and avoid big collapses, or catastrophes resulting from rare bad scenarios. Usually the market takes care of this, but there scenarios which include market failures exist.
Conservatives and Progressives have a less positive attitude towards volatility in some areas, and tend to favor state interventions to reduce churn and mitigate fallout. Though they tend to either tolerate or wish to buffer change and risk and dynamism in different social and cultural domains.
This was a dissappointing read from Scott because he (uncharacteristically) doesn’t seem to have tried to engage with the book. My guess is the point of the disparate examples is for the reader to induce the broader meaning of the terms in question and highlighting salient attributes in different contexts that interest the author.
His prior book review post does so.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-antifragile
Antifragility is the state of becoming stronger and healthier despite/because of being damaged.
Muscle growth, step 1: overuse the muscle to the point of (minor) injury.
Hydras are antifragile.
Epistemology is antifragile. Every incorrect prediction is an opportunity to find a bug.
You can very easily make a thing more safe, but force fragility elsewhere.
We could, for instance make all consumer products robustly safe, but as a result make everything so much more cumbersome and expensive that overall, the effect is to make people’s lives more fragile.
It seems impossible to reduce this to a “definition” that provides rules of thumb for us to proceed. The “you know it when you see it” perspective seems more useful here.
You’ll know you’ve made progress in figuring out what exactly “fragile” means when Taleb calls you a charlatan, as is his wont. The guy seems a bit fragile himself.
For me, fragile is a fine Italian word, as used by Darren McGavin in “A Christmas Story”
Lol – thanks for the Christmas Story reference.
“It’s indescribably beautiful.”
https://youtu.be/Yzht2_41caU
I once wrote an essay in which I called Taleb “disagreeable,” which I explained meant that he was low on the Big Five personality trait known as “agreeableness.” He tweeted out a thunderous “Personality psychology is BS!”
Rather than take this as the criticism that was intended, I took it as confirmation.
Heh. Calling NNT merely “disagreeable” is generous, which of course is part of your charitable approach. His criticisms of psychology are usually on-point, and in keeping with seeing psychology as more social discipline than social science, though I don’t know of any serious problems with the Big Five. TBF is especially relevant when dealing with education/boys/the bogus ADHD diagnosis.
There are some valid criticisms of the mainstream research into psychological types. A lot is done via surveys, which is fraught with well-known analytical hazards.
Still, that individuals tend to act and behave in predictable fashion as if they have particular kinds of common personalities is one of the most obvious observations one can make from one’s own life experience and social encounters. It’s just “character”.
For example, it’s easy to predict that Taleb is going to react in his characteristically melodramatic and aggressively histrionic way when one says this with, “Bunk!” “Frauds!” “Charlatans!”
Heh, that’s the difference between “emotionally fragile” and “emotionally volatile”.
That was supposed to be in reply to John Salmon.
I think we need to posit that antifragility is always limited to a range of stresses. A certain amount of stress strengthens a muscle, a larger amount sprains the muscle, and beyond a certain point the entire arm rips off. Very few things are so antifragile that nuking them makes them stronger.
Conservatives see individual human beings as fragile, but they see the accumulated habits of civilization as anti-fragile. But a progressive could argue that the accumulated habits of civilization make a society fragile.
On the gun-control issue, progressives see individuals as “too fragile”, with legal guns giving “too much volatility”.
I define “fragile” as easily broken. There is a cost to making anything less fragile, often including making it less beautiful, or making it more expensive / less efficient.
The N. Texas electric blackout in response to colder than normal, colder than expected winter, shows fragility. This fragile (=broken) problem could have been reduced by spending money to winterize their system.
But the Texas gov bet, by his actions, that building more wind turbines was a better use of the money. They created more efficiency and lower cost energy – but increased fragility.
Most would now say it was not the best bet, and it’s quite likely that “winterize the grid” has shot up in priority. It’s not clear how many of them will be calling to spend money to winterize the S. Texas grid, which didn’t have such problems. This time. (I’d bet less than 5% of alarmists will call for winterizing the S. Texas grid instead of building more solar.)
Few people want “fragility” as a positive, it’s just a derived characteristic dependent on how much is spent for backup / recovery systems to minimize costs in worst case scenarios.
John Cochrane, in his testimony on the grid, could have noted that few of the climate change alarmists were calling for winterizing the gas lines instead of building more wind and solar generation.