Plus or Minus Bad Teeth: Antifragility and Robustness to Error
Focus on reducing fragility and exposure to failure rather than trying to predict rare events. Build systems that are robust or even benefit from errors and human defects.
THE IDEA
Plus or Minus Bad Teeth
You can control fragility a lot more than you think. So let us refine in three points:
(i) Since detecting (anti)fragility—or, actually, smelling it—is easier, much easier, than prediction and understanding the dynamics of events, the entire mission reduces to the central principle of what to do to minimize harm (and maximize gain) from forecasting errors, that is, to have things that don’t fall apart, or even benefit, when we make a mistake.
(ii) We do not want to change the world for now (leave that to the Soviet-Harvard utopists and other fragilistas); we should first make things more robust to defects and forecast errors, or even exploit these errors, making lemonade out of the lemons.
(iii) As for the lemonade, it looks as if history is in the business of making it out of lemons; antifragility is necessarily how things move forward under the mother of all stressors, called time.
Further, after the occurrence of an event, we need to switch the blame from the inability to see an event coming (say a tsunami, an Arabo-Semitic spring or similar riots, an earthquake, a war, or a financial crisis) to the failure to understand (anti)fragility, namely, “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.
Also, as to the naive type of utopianism, that is, blindness to history, we cannot afford to rely on the rationalistic elimination of greed and other human defects that fragilize society. Humanity has been trying to do so for thousands of years and humans remain the same, plus or minus bad teeth, so the last thing we need is even more dangerous moralizers (those who look in a permanent state of gastrointestinal distress). Rather, the more intelligent (and practical) action is to make the world greed-proof, or even hopefully make society benefit from the greed and other perceived defects of the human race.
In spite of their bad press, some people in the nuclear industry seem to be among the rare ones to have gotten the point and taken it to its logical consequence. Writing after the Fukushima disaster, I point to proposals that focus on exposure to failure: smaller reactors, underground siting and layers of protection intended to limit the consequences of an accident. These illustrate the aim of reducing harm if a failure occurs; whether a particular design achieves that aim requires engineering assessment.
Another illustration, this time in economics, is the Swedish government’s focus on total fiscal responsibility after their budget troubles in 1991—it makes them much less dependent on economic forecasts. This allowed them to shrug off later crises.
When to use it
Designing financial regulations that limit exposure to market crashes instead of trying to predict them.
Building infrastructure (e.g., coastal defenses) that can withstand extreme weather events without relying on precise climate forecasts.
Developing software systems with automatic rollback mechanisms so that errors do not cause catastrophic failures.
Creating organizational processes that turn employee mistakes into learning opportunities rather than liabilities.
FROM THEORY TO EVERYDAY LIFE
In practice
Nuclear reactor design post-Fukushima
Taleb discusses post-Fukushima proposals for smaller reactors, underground siting and additional containment. His point is to reduce the consequences of failure rather than rely entirely on forecasting it; the passage does not establish the safety of a particular design.
Swedish fiscal policy after 1991
After a budget crisis, Sweden adopted strict fiscal responsibility, which made the economy less dependent on economic forecasts and more resilient to later global crises.
A MOMENT TO REFLECT
Put it to work.
In what areas of your life or work are you overly focused on predicting rare events rather than reducing fragility?
What systems around you could be redesigned to be 'greed-proof' or benefit from human imperfections rather than trying to eliminate them?
Can you think of a recent mistake that could have been less harmful if the underlying system had been built to be more robust?
Often confused with
CONTINUE THE CONVERSATION
Source texts
- Antifragile (Nassim Nicholas Taleb)