There’s a tiny nugget of an insight in anti fragile; some systems indeed get weaker with disuse. Now that observation would’ve been better suited to a blog post, and what you’re supposed to \*do\* with that info is unclear, but it’s at least an insight.
Black swan, aside from being a middle finger to the elite clubs that he’s clearly angry at, could’ve been better served as a tweet; stop assuming that real life works on a bell curve.
I disagree about *Black Swan* to some extent, I found it a useful springboard into philosophy of science when I was a kid. It’s just not very interesting once you have a developed perspective.
My take is that most people aren’t going to get into the weeds with philosophy of science, so it’s good if people have a handy guide, and since it’s more boring than it is wrong I guess it’s ok
On the other hand there are some serious errors about the history of the philosophy of science, for example his account of Popper and falsificationism
A friend and I got into a big fight with Taleb and some of his fans (including an attempt to dox me): so once we get into media crit Taleb’s superficial appeal to some of those people is a big problem
It’s the only time I’ve found a dox attempt kind of frightening, because it went on for a while and then eventually died down
I’m pretty open about how I am on social media because I think anonymity isn’t really worth it for my purposes at this point, but this guy was really fucking mental
Like bizarre misspelled rants that went on for hours, and the guy eventually posted a decade old photo of me as some kind of attempted threat
Paradoxically it prompted me to be more open about my identity on the internet: I figured if someone was gonna really make empty threats like that - or even real ones - there wasn’t much point in putting my own effort into keeping them away
I’m not scared of these people, plus when I looked up the guy in question he turned out to be a failed crypto trader so lol
In *Black Swan* he misdefines Popper’s account of falsification so as to define it more like verificationism, which is a pretty common error
My friend - who is a Popper expert - called him out on it on twitter and we all ended up fighting about it, with my friend and I on one side and Taleb and fans on the other
One guy in particular got super angry that we were chastising his hero and a days long argument ensued which wound up with the fan trying to dox me
It's fairly illustrative that someone like Taleb who ostentatiously talks about rejecting the sort of herd swimmers of academia or whatever ends up getting the most sycophantic, uncritical hive-mind fanbase.
I don't have as strong an opinion on the book as I do the concept.
If he's popularizing useful ideas along the way to support his useless neologisms, great.
Options. Evolution. Exercise. Do these really have anything in
common? Or is each “antifragile” for its own reasons, such that a
category including all three of them wouldn’t be very helpful?
Nearly a good realisation here. Actually I would say it truly
occurred, but then he remembered this shit is his job now lmao
He thinks schooling dulls the mind, college makes people stupid and
conformist, and theory is fragile - it’s an attempt to shoehorn the
complexity of the world into a single formal system, then deny any
possibility of black swans/outside-the-system events, then collapse when
they inevitably happen.
Well then, thank god Taleb is much too smart to try shoving a bunch
of random disparate concepts together under one grand overarching theory
that purports to explain vast swaths of unrelated phenomena. I mean, it
would be pretty embarrassing if he did that, wouldn’t it?
Is it really true Spartan Hoplites antifragile and bloggers
fragile?
Siskind makes the argument that actually Bloggers are antifragile and
Hoplites are fragile, because Hoplites can’t fight on uneven terrain and
BLM made his readership go up.
This is why “antifragile” is such a bullshit term. It’s clearly
context dependant. What if I took your computer away? Not so antifragile
now, Scott! The example that both Scott and Taleb seem to agree on is
that evolution is antifragile. But this same kind of argument can be
applied to that—it’s not resilient to climate change. I find this whole
thing completely asinine. Stop coining neologisms that poorly capture
concepts that already exist. Of course a closet racist will get more
internet traffic during BLM, because race jumped into the limelight.
I feel like Taleb really wants to be Lebanese Heidegger but he
doesn’t know what nuance is.
Spartan hoplites also weren't that good compared to other hoplites, they won as much as they lost. And then it was still their reputation which made them a feared opponent. Apparently they once believed their own hype, and dressed up as a differenct city state and went 'Ha, they do not know they face SPARTANS!' (and then they got their spartan asses handed to them).
Spartans were, apparently, [good at running out of supplies in their own backyard](https://acoup.blog/2019/09/27/collections-this-isnt-sparta-part-vii-spartan-ends/). On a purely tactical level, they might have been *slightly* better at throwing their square of men at the other square of men, but bigger-picture problems more than made up for that.
Also, Hoplites were the dominant form of military personnel in the Mediterranean from the 8th BCE until the Samnite wars in the 4th century BCE. Calling a form of combat that dedicated a region for 400 years “fragile” is pretty fucking rich from a blogger, a word that’s been around for a few decades at best.
Yeah, that’s fair. The cultural dominance of Ancient Greece in the western canon is showing here; the Mediterranean is much bigger than Greece, you’re right.
Still, close to half a millenium of use in what is now Greece, Italy, and bits of Northern Africa isn’t too bad! Hardly a fragile form of combat.
Also, arguably while Hoplites went away with the city states of Greece, their tactics saw a brief resurgence with the rise of pikeman formations in the late medieval period.
Pikemen didn't have shields, though - the whole formation is named after the *hoplon*.
That said, I think you're if anything understating things - the legions weren't uniformly tactically better than phalanxes, cf Pyrrhus or Mithradates. Rome's kinda cheat mode of strategic depth was a killer, more than their tactical advantages. (Although I certainly wouldn't argue that the legions *weren't* impressive, or domininant by the mid 2nd C BCE.)
I mean, it is resilient to climate change. it has been before and it will be again. the real issue (from an anthropological perspective) is that *we* most likely won’t be
Taleb is our ally in the Great Sneer Project and he smacks down
rationalbros and an other assorted asshats with flair and pizzazz. His
later books are at least half-sneer (which arguably makes for
insuffrable long-form reading). His work repackages a lot of stuff from
the complexity sciences (already esoteric) in a differently esoteric
format, but he’s still popularizing a field that the Yud absolutely
hates, so thats also a big heart in my scrapbook.
He’s also a buffon who seems to have sniffed the fame glue a bit too
much, but we forgive him his transgessions, since its entertaining to
watch him dunk on idiots on the regular.
Yeah I have always given Taleb a pass because his rants against Pinker, Peterson, Tetlock and the IQ crowd are spectacularly funny and imo well-deserved, but that doesn't mean he is exempt from bullshit, e.g. on evolution. Seeing *Scott Alexander* comment on Taleb's evolutionary bullshit just broke my brain
This antifragile book sounds a bit like a book length rationalpost, honestly, complete with the "I'm better than domain experts because of my big brain", making up unnecessary terms and dubiously applying them everywhere, inserting pet peeves, etc
Aye, though in the context of his fat tail theses in Fooled by Randomness and the complex systems sciences he's repackaging, the claim of being better than many so called experts isn't completely unfounded. Complexity is an emerging science, one of the largest general movements at the bleeding edge of science, and a large blind spot in current thinking. Just injecting these few ideas to any established domain can actually yield profound insights.
But he's absolutely an acquired taste and even then tolerable in measured doses - your gripes are just.
I'll lay down my Taleb apologist's hat now, this certainly isn't the hill to build my fort on.
Taleb is a hideous dumbass of the smart variety, but every bit as much of a dumbass for it. I have not read a word from him that was worth the seconds.
I was first introduced to the concept in "The coddling of the American mind." It's a useful idea for describing and understanding natural systems which lose resiliency when they are not challenged. This book doesn't sound all that interesting, though, since I just summed up the concept in one sentence.
I actually like Taleb, but isn't that basically all of his books? I definitely feel like you could just take the first page of each chapter of any of his books and throw it up on a blog and you'd get the full argument and it would be just as coherent.
As I said elsewhere, if antifragile is a blog post stretched into a book, black swan should have been a tweet; “if you keep assuming that everything follows a normal distribution you’re gonna have a bad time“
It's not just robustness though, that's the point Taleb made about using a neologism. Antifragile things aren't merely protected against harms, or don't just survive losses, they actually get better and stronger when exposed to them.
The simple analogy he used to express this idea is: a box marked fragile will have its contents easily damaged if care is not taken, while a box marked robust will be able to withstand moving and shaking and drops etc. without having the contents break, but a box marked antifragile will actually have its contents improve the more the box is mishandled and bruised. The fragile box will be marked "Don't Shake", the robust box will not be marked at all since it can withstand the trip, but the antigragile box will actually be marked with "Please shake me!"
In a previous conversation I had it was argued that hormesis is a word/concept he should have used for this that's already in the lexicon and one he was aware of, but advantageous hormetic effects have a threshold after which they revert back to being harmful, they follow a concave dose/response curve, whereas antifragility follows a convex-shaped curve that leaves itself open to gains while closing off losses. This is the essence of his options investing strategy and the mathematical model underpinning the whole idea of antifragility. The neologism comes out of a need to distinguish this convex-structured model from other possibly similar, but not really the same, ideas.
> In a previous conversation I had it was argued that hormesis is a word/concept he should have used for this that's already in the lexicon and one he was aware of, but advantageous hormetic effects have a threshold after which they revert back to being harmful, they follow a concave dose/response curve, whereas antifragility follows a convex-shaped curve that leaves itself open to gains while closing off losses. This is the essence of his options investing strategy and the mathematical model underpinning the whole idea of antifragility. The neologism comes out of a need to distinguish this convex-structured model from other possibly similar, but not really the same, ideas.
Ok, but then most of the examples in his book aren’t antifragile. Exercise, evolution, etc all have thresholds above which more volatility is harmful.
You're right, they all have thresholds, but if we include the adaptive response as part of the system, then there's a ratcheting up process where the thresholds are continuously raised. Maybe then it's not so different from hormesis if you take an iterated approach over time, I'd have to think about that more, but then antifragile would still be a term useful for talking about this more generalized iterated process.
I don't get it, are you also against asymptotic curves because you can never reach the apex, or infinitesimal limits, because they're exaggerated? Those are the foundations for theoretical computer science and calculus, respectively, so some models with "unattainable goal states" have turned out to be quite useful. Taleb argues for the convex functions underlying antifragility to offer a similar mathematical and conceptual basis when analyzing and designing sociotechnical systems that is different-enough from "robustness" to warrant a new term and further investigation.
Also, it's not, as you've mischaracterized it, simply resistance to entropy, as in the ability to resist disorder, but is an active increase in order--it's more inline with the admittedly fringe word "syntropy", not exactly negative entropy, which is a word he could have used, but maybe was wise to come up with his own.
No, in paragraph one I argued against your claim that there is no use in creating new words/concepts for things that have "in-practice unattainable goal states". In paragraph two I pointed out the distinction between "resistance" to disorder and "gaining" from disorder, the latter being Taleb's idea, the former being your mischaracterization.
Anything else you need clarification with?
Wait, I'm trying to be sincere here, so if I was wrong with your comment(s) let me know.
You said robustness is system design that prevents destruction from entropy, which you claimed is "barely a tractable problem" anyway. You then said that inventing the word antifragile to represent something "better than the best state we can hope for" is unhelpful. In a follow-up comment you said it's not useful to coin a word for an in-practice unattainable goal state.
I understood this all to mean that you think robustness is designing systems to just resist disorder (only retain current ordered state), that this is already at, if not past, the limit of our capabilities to do in practice, and that antifragile is then useless/unhelpful due to it representing an impossible idea that is unattainable in the real world because you've claimed robustness is the best we can do. Is that correct?
From my end, I wanted to say that antifragility does not just result in the preservation of a previously ordered structure (robustness) which is a neutral result, but results in positive beneficial improvement upon the ordered structure--a new higher ordered structure. The important distinction is that it is not just resistance to entropy, it is closer to the idea of syntropy, creation of higher ordered states as opposed to maintaining the current ordered state. I was trying to argue for the usefulness / helpfulness of this distinction which is what antifragile represents.
So then if you are saying there's no such thing as syntropy/antifragility/whatever word for this idea, and that robustness (resistance to disorder/entropy) is the best we can ever do or hope for, then that's where our conflict resides I guess. In that case, sure, I agree with you that antifragile is a useless word if it's just fantasy! My whole point in this convoluted thread was to try to argue for its reality, and, hence, its usefulness, but maybe things got away from us in the conversation. Anyway, take care.
That's fair, and I'm inclined to agree with you in so far as we're talking about *things*, but processes, natural or social, seem to be more amenable to those analyses, and I'd argue that antifragility comes in handy to discern such qualities in those domains.
To add, many modern technological things that are a combination of things & processes, like software services, in my opinion, are better looked at as processes firstly, and things secondarily, and so antifragile will apply to them. As more things become processes ("software is eating the world") antifragility will become more useful. I know Netflix specifically, and I'm sure most other cloud services which require high reliability/uptime, depends on something called the "chaos monkey" which is a perfect example of applied antifragility.
Lastly, I did mischaracterize your mischaracterization, sorry, sometimes my arguments against conclusions leak out onto the premises even if they're perfectly fine like yours were.
When you buy an a call, you have a defined lower bound on your losses
(what you paid for the option) and an unlimited possible upside. So
volatility increases the price of options. Why did that take eleven
sentences?
Wow, even the first example is in the top 10 dumbest things I’ve ever
read. Just wow. Invest in oil today folks. Clearly I’m missing the
genius but wow.
Lol, the only way someone in the rationalsphere can describe someone as 'bad' is by associating them with sneerclub. You'd think "high-decouplers" would be able to call pedophiles bad without needing to invoke sneerclub.
I don’t think I’ve ever taken against an author quite so quickly as I did with Black Swan. Not because it was wrong, particularly, just obnoxious.
Plus he picked a fight with Mary Beard. I’m only ever on one side of that argument…
Nearly a good realisation here. Actually I would say it truly occurred, but then he remembered this shit is his job now lmao
Well then, thank god Taleb is much too smart to try shoving a bunch of random disparate concepts together under one grand overarching theory that purports to explain vast swaths of unrelated phenomena. I mean, it would be pretty embarrassing if he did that, wouldn’t it?
Siskind makes the argument that actually Bloggers are antifragile and Hoplites are fragile, because Hoplites can’t fight on uneven terrain and BLM made his readership go up.
This is why “antifragile” is such a bullshit term. It’s clearly context dependant. What if I took your computer away? Not so antifragile now, Scott! The example that both Scott and Taleb seem to agree on is that evolution is antifragile. But this same kind of argument can be applied to that—it’s not resilient to climate change. I find this whole thing completely asinine. Stop coining neologisms that poorly capture concepts that already exist. Of course a closet racist will get more internet traffic during BLM, because race jumped into the limelight.
I feel like Taleb really wants to be Lebanese Heidegger but he doesn’t know what nuance is.
More and more, I simply have no idea what I’m reading with these people.
Taleb is our ally in the Great Sneer Project and he smacks down rationalbros and an other assorted asshats with flair and pizzazz. His later books are at least half-sneer (which arguably makes for insuffrable long-form reading). His work repackages a lot of stuff from the complexity sciences (already esoteric) in a differently esoteric format, but he’s still popularizing a field that the Yud absolutely hates, so thats also a big heart in my scrapbook.
He’s also a buffon who seems to have sniffed the fame glue a bit too much, but we forgive him his transgessions, since its entertaining to watch him dunk on idiots on the regular.
As usual, I gave up after seeing the scrollbar size
You! Can’t! Make! Me! Click!
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When you buy an a call, you have a defined lower bound on your losses (what you paid for the option) and an unlimited possible upside. So volatility increases the price of options. Why did that take eleven sentences?
Wow, even the first example is in the top 10 dumbest things I’ve ever read. Just wow. Invest in oil today folks. Clearly I’m missing the genius but wow.
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Best of luck with your surgery!