Quotes About Adaptation

It hit me right there and then that these antifragile hormetic responses were just a form of redundancy, and all the ideas of Mother Nature converged in my mind. It is all about redundancy. Nature likes to overinsure itself.

anything that has more upside than downside from random events (or certain shocks) is antifragile; the reverse is fragile.

for Mother Nature, opinions and predictions don't count; surviving is what matters.

Wind extinguishes a candle and energizes fire. Likewise with randomness, uncertainty, chaos: you want to use them, not hide from them. You want to be the fire and wish for the wind. This summarizes this author's nonmeek attitude to randomness and uncertainty.

Not everything that happens happens for a reason, but everything that survives survives for a reason.

Not seeing a tsunami or an economic event coming is excusable; building something fragile to them is not.

Don't talk about "progress" in terms of longevity, safety, or comfort before comparing zoo animals to those in the wilderness.

Technology is the result of antifragility, exploited by risk-takers in the form of tinkering and trial and error, with nerd-driven design confined to the backstage.

Organisms need, to use the metaphor of Marcus Aurelius, to turn obstacles into fuel—just as fire does.

There is a Yiddish saying: "If I am going to be forced to eat pork, it better be of the best kind.

It is the system and its fragility, not events, that must be studied—what

Humans somehow fail to recognize situations outside the contexts in which they usually learn about them.

Systems learn by removing parts, via negativa.*4

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 more modest level of robustness, but we are on our way. And 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.

we can control a function of x, f(x), even if x remains vastly beyond our understanding.

The French writer Edmond About, who visited Greece in 1832, a dozen years after its independence, reports how peasants struggled with the metric system as it was completely unnatural to them and stuck to Ottoman standards instead.

For an idea to have survived so long across so many cycles is indicative of its relative fitness. Noise, at least some noise, was filtered out. Mathematically, progress means that some new information is better than past information, not that the average of new information will supplant past information, which means that it is optimal for someone, when in doubt, to systematically reject the new idea, information, or method. Clearly and shockingly, always. Why?

complex systems do not have obvious one-dimensional cause-and-effect mechanisms, and that under opacity, you do not mess with such a system.

One Thousand And One Days, or How Not to Be a Sucker

We are faulty and there is no need to bother trying to correct our flaws. We are so defective and so mismatched to our environment that we can just work around these flaws. I

The main idea behind complex systems is that the ensemble behaves in ways not predicted by its components.

Education is an institution that has been growing without external stressors; eventually the thing will collapse.

The model was right, it worked well, but the game turned out to be a different one than anticipated.

What makes life simple is that the robust and antifragile don't have to have as accurate a comprehension of the world as the fragile—and