Antifragile

The antifragile loves randomness and uncertainty, which also meanscruciallya love of errors, a certain class of errors. Antifragilty has a singular property of allowing us to deal with the unknown, to do things without understanding them and do them well. We are largely better at doing than we are at thinking, thanks to antifragility. I’d rather be dumb and antifragile than extremely smart and fragile, any time.

Complex systems are full of interdependencies-hard to detect-and nonlinear responses. “Nonlinear” means that when you double the dose of, say, a medication, or when you double the number of employees in a factory, you don’t get twice the initial effect, but rather a lot more or a lot less.

Some jobs and professionals are fragile to reputation harm, something that in the age of the Internet cannot be possibly controlled-these jobs aren’t worth having. You do not want to “control” your reputation; you won’t be able to do it by controlling information flow.

One learns new words without making a nerd-effort, but rather another type of effort: to communicate, mostly by being forced to read the mind of the other person-suspending one’s fear of making mistakes. Success, wealth and technology make this mode of acquisition much more difficult. Yet, the best way to learn a language may be an episode of jail in a foreign country.

Every plane crash brings us closer to safety, improves the system, and makes the next flight safer-those who perish contribute to the overall safety of others.

When my grandfather asked his friend during the Lebanese war why he did not go back to Aleppo, his answer was categorical: “We people of Aleppo prefer war to prison.” I thought that meant that they were going to put him in jail, but then I realized that by “prison” he meant loss of political and economic freedoms