Quotes About Adaptation

social treadmill effect: You get rich, move to rich neighborhoods, then become poor again. To that add the psychological treadmill effect; you get used to wealth and revert to a set point of satisfaction. This problem of some people never really getting to feel satisfied by wealth (beyond a given point) has been the subject of technical discussions on happiness.

why did we build something so fragile to these types of events?" Not seeing a tsunami or an economic event coming is excusable; building something fragile to them is not.

what is made to fly will not do well trapped on the ground

Survival comes first, truth, understanding, and science later.

There is a Yiddish saying: "If I am going to be forced to eat pork, it better be of the best kind." If I am going to be fooled by randomness, it better be of the beautiful (and harmless) kind.

Transportation didn't get safer just because people learn from errors, but because the system does. The experience of the system is different from that of individuals; it is grounded in filtering.

Given the unattainability of perfect robustness, we need a mechanism by which the system regenerates itself continuously by using, rather than suffering from, random events, unpredictable shocks, stressors, and volatility.

don't understand?" is, simply, work on the undesirable states of f(x). It is often easier to modify f(x) than to get better knowledge of x. (In other words, robustification rather than forecasting Black Swans.) Example: If I buy an insurance on

reality provides such forced revisions of beliefs at quite a high frequency. Many

An observation that people who live permanently in an adoptive country tend to progressively generalize the bad and particularize the good, that is, attribute the bad traits in people they encounter to the national trait of the natives, and the good things to the individual. This holds equally well for French people living in the U.S. as it does for Americans living in France.

my characterization of a loser is someone who, after making a mistake, doesn't introspect, doesn't exploit it, feels embarrassed and defensive rather than enriched with a new piece of information, and tries to explain why he made the mistake rather than moving on.

Our minds are not quite designed to understand how the world works, but, rather, to get out of trouble rapidly and have progeny.

as societies gain in complexity, with more and more "cutting edge" sophistication in them, and more and more specialization, they become increasingly vulnerable to collapse.

Mark Buchanan's Ubiquity, Philip Ball's Critical Mass, and Paul Ormerod's Why Most Things Fail.

We need tricks to get us there but before that we need to accept the fact that we are mere animals in need of lower forms of tricks, not lectures.

Frano Barovi? reading this chapter wrote to me: "Machines: use it and lose it; organisms: use it or lose it." Also note that everything alive needs stressors, but not all machines need to be left alone—a point we will visit in our discussion of annealing. But

had no name for the color blue but managed rather well without it—we stayed for a long part of our history culturally, not biologically, color blind.

The hidden benefit of antifragility is that you can guess worse than random and still end up outperforming.

innovation and sophistication spark from initial situations of necessity, in ways that go far beyond the satisfaction of such necessity

The Procrustean bed in life consists precisely in simplifying the non-linear and making it linear—the simplification that distorts.

Per il robusto un errore è informazione, per il debole un errore è solo un errore

For the antifragile, shocks bring more benefits (equivalently, less harm) as their intensity increases (up to a point).

Every plane crash brings us closer to safety, improves the system, and makes the next flight safer…

survival pressures within the organism play a role in its overall improvement under external stress.