Quotes About Adaptation

We sacrifice ourselves in favor of our genes, trading our fragility for their survival.

Things break on a small scale all the time, in order to avoid large-scale generalized catastrophes.

we got here by accident does not mean that we should continue to take the same risks.

People with an engineering-oriented mind will tend to look at everything around as an engineering problem. This is a very good thing in engineering, but when dealing with cats, it is a much better idea to hire veterinarians than circuit engineers…

What survives must be good at serving some (mostly hidden) purpose that time can see but our eyes and logical faculties can't capture.

the antifragile benefits from volatility and disorder, the fragile is harmed.

The fragility of every startup is necessary for the economy to be antifragile, and that's what makes, among other things, entrepreneurship work: the fragility of individual entrepreneurs and their necessarily high failure rate.

complex systems are weakened, even killed, when deprived of stressors.

when its wording is slightly modified.

Someone paid a price for the system to improve.

Corollary to Moore's Law: every ten years, collective wisdom degrades by half.*

show how some degree of unpredictability (or lack of knowledge) can be beneficial to our defective species.

This, I will call the cross-sectional problem: At a given time in the market, the most successful traders are likely to be those that are best fit to the latest cycle. This does not happen too often with dentists or pianists—because these professions are more immune to randomness.

The convex (left) is antifragile, the concave (right) is fragile (has

you need to make more and more to stay in the same place.

Nature is all about the exploitation of optionality; it illustrates how optionality is a substitute for intelligence.

it does not come naturally to me.*

As we saw, nature has a filter to keep the good baby and get rid of the bad.

In fact, the most interesting aspect of evolution is that it only works because of its antifragility; it is in love with stressors, randomness, uncertainty, and disorder—while individual organisms are relatively fragile, the gene pool takes advantage of shocks to enhance its fitness.

The fragile has no option. But the antifragile needs to select what's best—the best option.

users of these machines gain no strength beyond an initial phase.

my ideas on redundancy in systems.

with skills that do not transfer outside of the very machine that they trained on.

We learn from repetition—at the expense of events that have not happened before.