## Metadata - Author: [[Nassim Nicholas Taleb]] - Full Title: Antifragile - Category: #books ## Highlights - A donkey equally famished and thirsty caught at an equal distance between food and water would unavoidably die of hunger or thirst. But he can be saved thanks to a random nudge one way or the other. This metaphor is named Buridan’s Donkey, after the medieval philosopher Jean de Buridan, who—among other, very complicated things—introduced the thought experiment. When some systems are stuck in a dangerous impasse, randomness and only randomness can unlock them and set them free. You can see here that absence of randomness equals guaranteed death. ([Location 1951](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0083DJWGO&location=1951)) - There is a dependence on narratives, an intellectualization of actions and ventures. Public enterprises and functionaries—even employees of large corporations—can only do things that seem to fit some narrative, unlike businesses that can just follow profits, with or without a good-sounding story. Remember that you need a name for the color blue when you build a narrative, but not in action—the thinker lacking a word for “blue” is handicapped; not the doer. (I’ve had a hard time conveying to intellectuals the intellectual superiority of practice.) ([Location 2068](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0083DJWGO&location=2068)) - Medicine has known about iatrogenics since at least the fourth century before our era—primum non nocere (“first do no harm”) is a first principle attributed to Hippocrates and integrated in the so-called Hippocratic Oath taken by every medical doctor on his commencement day. It just took medicine about twenty-four centuries to properly execute the brilliant idea. In spite of the recitations of non nocere through the ages, the term “iatrogenics” only appeared in frequent use very, very late, a few decades ago—after so much damage had been done. ([Location 2138](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0083DJWGO&location=2138)) - Errors in physics get smaller from theory to theory—so saying “Newton was wrong” is attention grabbing, good for lurid science journalism, but ultimately mendacious; it would be far more honest to say “Newton’s theory is imprecise in some specific cases.” Predictions made by Newtonian mechanics are of astonishing precision except for items traveling close to the speed of light, something you don’t expect to do on your next vacation. ([Location 2190](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0083DJWGO&location=2190)) - Unlike with medicine, where iatrogenics is distributed across the population (hence with Mediocristan effects), because of concentration of power, social science and policy iatrogenics can blow us up (hence, Extremistan). ([Location 2201](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0083DJWGO&location=2201)) - Incidentally, those who do too much somewhere do too little elsewhere—and editing provides a quite fitting example. Over my writing career I’ve noticed that those who overedit tend to miss the real typos (and vice versa). I once pulled an op-ed from The Washington Post owing to the abundance of completely unnecessary edits, as if every word had been replaced by a synonym from the thesaurus. I gave the article to the Financial Times instead. The editor there made one single correction: 1989 became 1990. The Washington Post had tried so hard that they missed the only relevant mistake. As we will see, interventionism depletes mental and economic resources; it is rarely available when it is needed the most. ([Location 2223](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0083DJWGO&location=2223)) - Experiments show that alertness is weakened when one relinquishes control to the system (again, lack of overcompensation). Motorists need the stressors and tension coming from the feeling of danger to feed their attention and risk controls, rather than some external regulator—fewer pedestrians die jaywalking than using regulated crossings. ([Location 2252](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0083DJWGO&location=2252)) - Alas, it has been hard for me to fit these ideas about fragility and antifragility within the current U.S. political discourse—that beastly two-fossil system. Most of the time, the Democratic side of the U.S. spectrum favors hyper-intervention, unconditional regulation, and large government, while the Republican side loves large corporations, unconditional deregulation, and militarism—both are the same to me here. They are even more the same when it comes to debt, as both sides have tended to encourage indebtedness on the part of citizens, corporations, and government ([Location 2260](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0083DJWGO&location=2260)) - There is an element of deceit associated with interventionism, accelerating in a professionalized society. It’s much easier to sell “Look what I did for you” than “Look what I avoided for you.” Of course a bonus system based on “performance” exacerbates the problem. I’ve looked in history for heroes who became heroes for what they did not do, but it is hard to observe nonaction; I could not easily find any. The doctor who refrains from operating on a back (a very expensive surgery), instead giving it a chance to heal itself, will not be rewarded and judged as favorably as the doctor who makes the surgery look indispensable, then brings relief to the patient while exposing him to operating risks, while accruing great financial rewards to himself. The latter will be driving the pink Rolls-Royce. ([Location 2272](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0083DJWGO&location=2272)) - the Romans revered someone who, at the least, resisted and delayed intervention. One general, Fabius Maximus was nicknamed Cunctator, “the Procrastinator.” He drove Hannibal, who had an obvious military superiority, crazy by avoiding and delaying engagement. ([Location 2282](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0083DJWGO&location=2282)) - There is a Latin expression festina lente, “make haste slowly.” The Romans were not the only ancients to respect the act of voluntary omission. The Chinese thinker Lao Tzu coined the doctrine of wu-wei, “passive achievement.” ([Location 2292](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0083DJWGO&location=2292)) - Few understand that procrastination is our natural defense, letting things take care of themselves and exercise their antifragility; it results from some ecological or naturalistic wisdom, and is not always bad—at an existential level, it is my body rebelling against its entrapment. It is my soul fighting the Procrustean bed of modernity. ([Location 2294](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0083DJWGO&location=2294)) - Since procrastination is a message from our natural willpower via low motivation, the cure is changing the environment, or one’s profession, by selecting one in which one does not have to fight one’s impulses. Few can grasp the logical consequence that, instead, one should lead a life in which procrastination is good, as a naturalistic-risk-based form of decision making. ([Location 2310](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0083DJWGO&location=2310)) - In fact we humans are very bad at filtering information, particularly short-term information, and procrastination can be a way for us to filter better, to resist the consequences of jumping on information, as we discuss next. ([Location 2317](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0083DJWGO&location=2317)) - Did you ever wonder why heads of state and very rich people with access to all this medical care die just as easily as regular persons? Well, it looks like this is because of overmedication and excessive medical care. ([Location 2355](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0083DJWGO&location=2355)) - Likewise, those in corporations or in policy making (like Fragilista Greenspan) who are endowed with a sophisticated data-gathering department and are therefore getting a lot of “timely” statistics are capable of overreacting and mistaking noise for information—Greenspan kept an eye on such fluctuations as the sales of vacuum cleaners in Cleveland to, as they say, “get a precise idea about where the economy is going,” and of course he micromanaged us into chaos. ([Location 2357](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0083DJWGO&location=2357)) - The more frequently you look at data, the more noise you are disproportionally likely to get (rather than the valuable part, called the signal); hence the higher the noise-to-signal ratio. And there is a confusion which is not psychological at all, but inherent in the data itself. Say you look at information on a yearly basis, for stock prices, or the fertilizer sales of your father-in-law’s factory, or inflation numbers in Vladivostok. Assume further that for what you are observing, at a yearly frequency, the ratio of signal to noise is about one to one (half noise, half signal)—this means that about half the changes are real improvements or degradations, the other half come from randomness. This ratio is what you get from yearly observations. But if you look at the very same data on a daily basis, the composition would change to 95 percent noise, 5 percent signal. And if you observe data on an hourly basis, as people immersed in the news and market price variations do, the split becomes 99.5 percent noise to 0.5 percent signal. That is two hundred times more noise than signal—which is why anyone who listens to news (except when very, very significant events take place) is one step below sucker. ([Location 2365](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0083DJWGO&location=2365)) - Consider the iatrogenics of newspapers. They need to fill their pages every day with a set of news items—particularly those news items also dealt with by other newspapers. But to do things right, they ought to learn to keep silent in the absence of news of significance. Newspapers should be of two-line length on some days, two hundred pages on others—in proportion with the intensity of the signal. But of course they want to make money and need to sell us junk food. ([Location 2373](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0083DJWGO&location=2373)) - I have been repeating that in a natural environment, a stressor is information. Too much information would thus be too much stress, exceeding the threshold of antifragility. ([Location 2377](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0083DJWGO&location=2377)) - Just as we are not likely to mistake a bear for a stone (but likely to mistake a stone for a bear), it is almost impossible for someone rational, with a clear, uninfected mind, someone who is not drowning in data, to mistake a vital signal, one that matters for his survival, for noise—unless he is overanxious, oversensitive, and neurotic, hence distracted and confused by other messages. Significant signals have a way to reach you. ([Location 2384](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0083DJWGO&location=2384)) - To conclude, the best way to mitigate interventionism is to ration the supply of information, as naturalistically as possible. This is hard to accept in the age of the Internet. It has been very hard for me to explain that the more data you get, the less you know what’s going on, and the more iatrogenics you will cause. People are still under the illusion that “science” means more data. ([Location 2398](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0083DJWGO&location=2398)) - The final episode of the upheaval in Egypt was unpredictable for all observers, especially those involved. As such, blaming the CIA or some other intelligence agency is as injudicious as funding it to forecast such events. Governments are wasting billions of dollars on attempting to predict events that are produced by interdependent systems and are therefore not statistically understandable at the individual level. ([Location 2469](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0083DJWGO&location=2469)) - What is nonmeasurable and nonpredictable will remain nonmeasurable and nonpredictable, no matter how many PhDs with Russian and Indian names you put on the job—and no matter how much hate mail I get. There is, in the Black Swan zone, a limit to knowledge that can never be reached, no matter how sophisticated statistical and risk management science ever gets. ([Location 2565](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0083DJWGO&location=2565)) - Success brings an asymmetry: you now have a lot more to lose than to gain. You are hence fragile. ([Location 2805](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0083DJWGO&location=2805)) - Seneca’s practical method to counter such fragility was to go through mental exercises to write off possessions, so when losses occurred he would not feel the sting—a way to wrest one’s freedom from circumstances. ([Location 2818](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0083DJWGO&location=2818)) - So 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 its destination, economic growth with fragilities is not to be called growth, something that has not yet been understood by governments. ([Location 2912](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0083DJWGO&location=2912)) - What do we mean by barbell? The barbell (a bar with weights on both ends that weight lifters use) is meant to illustrate the idea of a combination of extremes kept separate, with avoidance of the middle. In our context it is not necessarily symmetric: it is just composed of two extremes, with nothing in the center. One can also call it, more technically, a bimodal strategy, as it has two distinct modes rather than a single, central one. I initially used the image of the barbell to describe a dual attitude of playing it safe in some areas (robust to negative Black Swans) and taking a lot of small risks in others (open to positive Black Swans), hence achieving antifragility. That is extreme risk aversion on one side and extreme risk loving on the other, rather than just the “medium” or the beastly “moderate” risk attitude that in fact is a sucker game (because medium risks can be subjected to huge measurement errors). ([Location 2918](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0083DJWGO&location=2918)) - A barbell can be any dual strategy composed of extremes, without the corruption of the middle—somehow they all result in favorable asymmetries. ([Location 2934](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0083DJWGO&location=2934)) - I suppose that the main benefit of being rich (over just being independent) is to be able to despise rich people (a good concentration of whom you find in glitzy ski resorts) without any sour grapes. It is even sweeter when these farts don’t know that you are richer than they are. ([Location 3305](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0083DJWGO&location=3305)) - If life is lived forward but remembered backward, as Kierkegaard observed, then books exacerbate this effect—our own memories, learning, and instinct have sequences in them. Someone standing today looking at events without having lived them would be inclined to develop illusions of causality, mostly from being mixed-up by the sequence of events. ([Location 3535](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0083DJWGO&location=3535)) - I am not even dead yet, but am already seeing distortions about my work. Authors theorize about some ancestry of my ideas, as if people read books then developed ideas, not wondering whether perhaps it is the other way around; people look for books that support their mental program. ([Location 3539](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0083DJWGO&location=3539)) - Is democracy epiphenomenal? Supposedly, democracy works because of this hallowed rational decision making on the part of voters. But consider that democracy may be something completely accidental to something else, the side effect of people liking to cast ballots for completely obscure reasons, just as people enjoy expressing themselves just to express themselves. ([Location 3569](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0083DJWGO&location=3569)) - I am not saying that for an individual, education is useless: it builds helpful credentials for one’s own career—but such effect washes out at the country level. Education stabilizes the income of families across generations. A merchant makes money, then his children go to the Sorbonne, they become doctors and magistrates. The family retains wealth because the diplomas allow members to remain in the middle class long after the ancestral wealth is depleted. But these effects don’t count for countries. ([Location 3620](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0083DJWGO&location=3620)) - I once ran into Alison Wolf at a party (parties are great for optionality). As I got her to explain to other people her evidence about the lack of effectiveness of funding formal education, one person got frustrated with our skepticism. Wolf’s answer to him was “real education is this,” pointing at the room full of people chatting. Accordingly, I am not saying that knowledge is not important; the skepticism in this discussion applies to the brand of commoditized, prepackaged, and pink-coated knowledge, stuff one can buy in the open market and use for self-promotion. Further, let me remind the reader that scholarship and organized education are not the same. ([Location 3632](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0083DJWGO&location=3632)) - Education has benefits aside from stabilizing family incomes. Education makes individuals more polished dinner partners, for instance, something non-negligible. But the idea of educating people to improve the economy is rather novel. The British government documents, as early as fifty years ago, an aim for education other than the one we have today: raising values, making good citizens, and “learning,” not economic growth ([Location 3645](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0083DJWGO&location=3645)) - You make forays into the future by opportunism and optionality. So far in Book IV we have seen the power of optionality as an alternative way of doing things, opportunistically, with some large edge coming from asymmetry with large benefits and benign harm. It is a way—the only way—to domesticate uncertainty, to work rationally without understanding the future, while reliance on narratives is the exact opposite: one is domesticated by uncertainty, and ironically set back. You cannot look at the future by naive projection of the past. ([Location 3766](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0083DJWGO&location=3766)) - As Yogi Berra said, “In theory there is no difference between theory and practice; in practice there is.” ([Location 3771](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0083DJWGO&location=3771)) - Consider the role of heuristic (rule-of-thumb) knowledge embedded in traditions. Simply, just as evolution operates on individuals, so does it act on these tacit, unexplainable rules of thumb transmitted through generations—what Karl Popper has called evolutionary epistemology. But let me change Popper’s idea ever so slightly (actually quite a bit): my take is that this evolution is not a competition between ideas, but between humans and systems based on such ideas. An idea does not survive because it is better than the competition, but rather because the person who holds it has survived! Accordingly, wisdom you learn from your grandmother should be vastly superior (empirically, hence scientifically) to what you get from a class in business school (and, of course, considerably cheaper). My sadness is that we have been moving farther and farther away from grandmothers. ([Location 3790](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0083DJWGO&location=3790)) - No, we don’t put theories into practice. We create theories out of practice. ([Location 3884](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0083DJWGO&location=3884)) - the indifference to beauty in collective workplaces, ([Location 4003](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0083DJWGO&location=4003)) - a religious belief in the unconditional power of organized science, one that has replaced unconditional religious belief in organized religion. ([Location 4035](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0083DJWGO&location=4035)) - when a result is initially discovered by an academic researcher, he is likely to disregard the consequences because it is not what he wanted to find—an academic has a script to follow. So, to put it in option terms, he does not exercise his option in spite of its value, a strict violation of rationality ([Location 4071](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0083DJWGO&location=4071)) - since you cannot forecast collaborations and cannot direct them, you cannot see where the world is going. All you can do is create an environment that facilitates these collaborations, and lay the foundation for prosperity. ([Location 4119](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0083DJWGO&location=4119)) - historically, skepticism has been mostly skepticism of expert knowledge rather than skepticism about abstract entities like God, and that all the great skeptics have been largely either religious or, at least, pro-religion (that is, in favor of others being religious). ([Location 4124](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0083DJWGO&location=4124)) - One single episode, the asbestos liabilities, bankrupted families of Lloyd underwriters, losing income made over generations. One single episode. ([Location 4190](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0083DJWGO&location=4190)) - Let me stop to issue rules based on the chapter so far. (i) Look for optionality; in fact, rank things according to optionality, (ii) preferably with open-ended, not closed-ended, payoffs; (iii) Do not invest in business plans but in people, so look for someone capable of changing six or seven times over his career, or more (an idea that is part of the modus operandi of the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen); one gets immunity from the backfit narratives of the business plan by investing in people. It is simply more robust to do so; (iv) Make sure you are barbelled, whatever that means in your business. ([Location 4194](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0083DJWGO&location=4194)) - history has been written by those who want you to believe that reasoning has a monopoly or near monopoly on the production of knowledge. ([Location 4206](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0083DJWGO&location=4206)) - The Romans were an anti-theoretical pragmatic bunch; the Arabs loved everything philosophical and “scientific” and put Aristotle, about whom nobody seemed to have cared much until then, on a pedestal. For instance we know very, very little of the skeptical empirical school of Menodotus of Nicomedia—we know a lot more about Galen, the rationalist. Medicine, for the Arabs, was a scholarly pursuit and founded on the logic of Aristotle and the methods of Galen; they abhorred experience.6 Medical practitioners were the Other. ([Location 4212](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0083DJWGO&location=4212)) - The biologist and intellectual E. O. Wilson was once asked what represented the most hindrance to the development of children; his answer was the soccer mom. He did not use the notion of the Procrustean bed, but he outlined it perfectly. His argument is that they repress children’s natural biophilia, their love of living things. But the problem is more general; soccer moms try to eliminate the trial and error, the antifragility, from children’s lives, move them away from the ecological and transform them into nerds working on preexisting (soccer-mom-compatible) maps of reality. Good students, but nerds—that is, they are like computers except slower. Further, they are now totally untrained to handle ambiguity. ([Location 4269](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0083DJWGO&location=4269)) - It is as if the mission of modernity was to squeeze every drop of variability and randomness out of life—with (as we saw in Chapter 5) the ironic result of making the world a lot more unpredictable, as if the goddesses of chance wanted to have the last word. ([Location 4279](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0083DJWGO&location=4279)) - I wasn’t exactly an autodidact, since I did get degrees; I was rather a barbell autodidact as I studied the exact minimum necessary to pass any exam, overshooting accidentally once in a while, and only getting in trouble a few times by undershooting. But I read voraciously, wholesale, initially in the humanities, later in mathematics and science, and now in history—outside a curriculum, away from the gym machine so to speak. I figured out that whatever I selected myself I could read with more depth and more breadth—there was a match to my curiosity. And I could take advantage of what people later pathologized as Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder (ADHD) by using natural stimulation as a main driver to scholarship. The enterprise needed to be totally effortless in order to be worthwhile. The minute I was bored with a book or a subject I moved to another one, instead of giving up on reading altogether—when you are limited to the school material and you get bored, you have a tendency to give up and do nothing or play hooky out of discouragement. The trick is to be bored with a specific book, rather than with the act of reading. So the number of pages absorbed could grow faster than otherwise. And you find gold, so to speak, effortlessly, just as in rational but undirected trial-and-error-based research. It is exactly like options, trial and error, not getting stuck, bifurcating when necessary but keeping a sense of broad freedom and opportunism. Trial and error is freedom. ([Location 4331](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0083DJWGO&location=4331)) - Avoidance of boredom is the only worthy mode of action. Life otherwise is not worth living.) ([Location 4342](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0083DJWGO&location=4342)) - My parents had an account with the largest bookstore in Beirut and I would pick up books in what seemed to me unlimited quantities. There was such a difference between the shelves of the library and the narrow school material; so I realized that school was a plot designed to deprive people of erudition by squeezing their knowledge into a narrow set of authors. I started, around the age of thirteen, to keep a log of my reading hours, shooting for between thirty and sixty a week, a practice I’ve kept up for a long time. I read the likes of Dostoyevsky, Turgenev, Chekhov, Bishop Bossuet, Stendhal, Dante, Proust, Borges, Calvino, Céline, Schultz, Zweig (didn’t like), Henry Miller, Max Brod, Kafka, Ionesco, the surrealists, Faulkner, Malraux (along with other wild adventurers such as Conrad and Melville; the first book I read in English was Moby-Dick) and similar authors in literature, many of them obscure, and Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Marx, Jaspers, Husserl, Lévi-Strauss, Levinas, Scholem, Benjamin, and similar ones in philosophy because they had the golden status of not being on the school program, and I managed to read nothing that was prescribed by school so to this day I haven’t read Racine, Corneille, and other bores. One summer I decided to read the twenty novels by Émile Zola in twenty days, one a day, and managed to do so at great expense. Perhaps joining an underground anti-government group motivated me to look into Marxist studies, and I picked up the most about Hegel indirectly, mostly through Alexandre Kojève. When I decided to come to the United States, I repeated, around the age of eighteen, the marathon exercise by buying a few hundred books in English (by authors ranging from Trollope to Burke, Macaulay, and Gibbon, with Anaïs Nin and other then fashionable authors de scandale), not showing up to class, and keeping the thirty- to sixty-hour discipline. In school, I had figured out that when one could write essays with a rich, literary, but precise vocabulary (though not inadequate to the topic at hand), and maintain some coherence throughout, what one writes about becomes secondary and the examiners get a hint about one’s style and rigor from that. And my father gave me a complete break after I got published as a teenager in the local paper—“just don’t… ([Location 4343](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0083DJWGO&location=4343)) - When, at Wharton, I discovered that I wanted to specialize in a profession linked to probability and rare events, a probability and randomness obsession took control of my mind. I also smelled some flaws with statistical stuff that the professor could not explain, brushing them away—it was what the professor was brushing away that had to be the meat. I realized that there was a fraud somewhere, that “six sigma” events (measures of very rare events) were grossly miscomputed and we had no basis for their computation, but I could not articulate my realization clearly, and was getting humiliated by people who started smoking me with complicated math. I saw the limits of probability in front of me, clear as crystal, but could not find the words to express the point. So I went to the bookstore and ordered (there was no Web at the time) almost every book with “probability” or “stochastic” in its title. I read nothing else for a couple of years, no course material, no newspaper, no literature, nothing. I read them in bed, jumping from one book to the next when stuck with something I did not get immediately or felt ever so slightly bored. And I kept ordering those books. I was hungry to go deeper into the problem of small probabilities. It was effortless. That was my best investment—risk turned out to be the topic I know the best. Five years later I was set for life and now I am making a research career out of various aspects of small probability events. Had I studied the subject by prepackaged means, I would be… ([Location 4364](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0083DJWGO&location=4364)) - One day in the 1980s I had dinner with a famous speculator, a hugely successful man. He muttered the hyperbole that hit home: “much of what other people know isn’t worth knowing.” To this day I still have the instinct that the treasure, what one needs to know for a profession, is necessarily what lies outside the corpus, as far away from the center as possible. But there is something central in following one’s own direction in the selection of… ([Location 4377](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0083DJWGO&location=4377)) - the difference between narrated, intelligible knowledge, and the more opaque kind that is entirely probed by tinkering— ([Location 4388](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0083DJWGO&location=4388)) - There is this error of thinking that things always have a reason that is accessible to us—that we can comprehend easily. ([Location 4389](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0083DJWGO&location=4389)) - the most severe mistake made in life is to mistake the unintelligible for the unintelligent—something ([Location 4390](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0083DJWGO&location=4390)) - FAT TONY: “Then, my good Socrates, why do you think that we need to fix the meaning of things?” SOCRATES: “My dear Mega-Tony, we need to know what we are talking about when we talk about things. The entire idea of philosophy is to be able to reflect and understand what we are doing, examine our lives. An unexamined life is not worth living.” FAT TONY: “The problem, my poor old Greek, is that you are killing the things we can know but not express. And if I asked someone riding a bicycle just fine to give me the theory behind his bicycle riding, he would fall from it. By bullying and questioning people you confuse them and hurt them.” Then, looking at him patronizingly, with a smirk, very calmly: FAT TONY: “My dear Socrates … you know why they are putting you to death? It is because you make people feel stupid for blindly following habits, instincts, and traditions. You may be occasionally right. But you may confuse them about things they’ve been doing just fine without getting in trouble. You are destroying people’s illusions about themselves. You are taking the joy of ignorance out of the things we don’t understand. And you have no answer; you have no answer to offer them.” ([Location 4455](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0083DJWGO&location=4455)) - We may be drawn to think that Friedrich Hayek would be in that antifragile, antirationalist category. He is the twentieth-century philosopher and economist who opposed social planning on the grounds that the pricing system reveals through transactions the knowledge embedded in society, knowledge not accessible to a social planner. But Hayek missed the notion of optionality as a substitute for the social planner. In a way, he believed in intelligence, but as a distributed or collective intelligence—not in optionality as a replacement for intelligence.3 ([Location 4553](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0083DJWGO&location=4553)) - We practitioners and quants aren’t too fazed by remarks on the part of academics—it would be like prostitutes listening to technical commentary by nuns. ([Location 4662](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0083DJWGO&location=4662)) - when a collection of people write “There is nothing new here” and each one cites a different originator of the idea, one can safely say there is something effectively new. ([Location 4686](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0083DJWGO&location=4686)) - One Saturday evening in November 2011, I drove to New York City to meet the philosopher Paul Boghossian for dinner in the Village—typically a forty-minute trip. Ironically, I was meeting him to talk about my book, this book, and more particularly, my ideas on redundancy in systems. I have been advocating the injection of redundancy into people’s lives and had been boasting to him and others that, since my New Year’s resolution of 2007, I have never been late to anything, not even by a minute (well, almost). Recall in Chapter 2 my advocacy of redundancies as an aggressive stance. Such personal discipline forces me to build buffers, and, as I carry a notebook, it allowed me to write an entire book of aphorisms. Not counting long visits to bookstores. Or I can sit in a café and read hate mail. With, of course, no stress, as I have no fear of being late. But the greatest benefit of such discipline is that it prevents me from cramming my day with appointments (typically, appointments are neither useful nor pleasant). Actually, by another rule of personal discipline I do not make appointments (other than lectures) except the very same morning, as a date on the calendar makes me feel like a prisoner, but that’s another story. ([Location 4822](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0083DJWGO&location=4822))