The concept of antifragility: Shockingly Happy

http://williampeng.com/post/38700040137/shockingly-happy

by grosen • 14 years ago

68 36 14 years ago

EzGraphs• 14 years ago

Taleb's Antifragile book has a number of direct entrepreneurial references and many other ideas that are relevant but of more general interest (economics, technology, health related, etc). For example, he talks about the concept of options (based upon the financial vehicle) applying in other areas of life. In general if you have something with a small downside potential and large upside potential, it is an option that is antifragile. Learning new technical skills seems to me to fit into this area. By sacrificing a bit of time and a few bucks on training / books / videos you can develop a product that will delight users, address a need in the workplace, or otherwise create value. Limited downside and great potential upside.

pbateman• 14 years ago

This reminds me of pg's Relentlessly Resourceful essay.

http://paulgraham.com/relres.html

blackhole• 14 years ago

I want proof that the "Entitlement Generation" actually exists. I see it talked about everywhere, yet never experience it. Why, exactly, is my generation different from an older generation that thinks it's entitled to social security that a shrinking workforce could never possibly sustain? If we have entitlement problems, our entire society has entitlement problems, not just a bunch of sheltered kids.

confluence• 14 years ago

This is what one calls anecdotal overload and should set one's bullshit alarms blaring.

No data. No definitions. Just entrepreneurial feel good bullshit.

I stopped reading these types of articles for the purpose of trying to discern any type of value other than trying to understand how delusional people think. There are oh so many of them - I try to make sure I don't get freight trained by them.

pdog2• 14 years ago

Thank you! The "Entitlement Generation" may be in trouble, but the world they live in wasn't set up by them, it was set up by their parents.

The Last Psychiatrist[1] characterizes the previous generation as "The Dumbest Generation Of Narcissists In The History Of the World"[2] who aren't even aware of their own ignorance.

[1] http://thelastpsychiatrist.com

[2] http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2008/10/the_dumbest_generatio...

stephengillie• 14 years ago

From charlieflowers' comment[1]:

Prematurely generalize about the environment. ("It happened because <generation X> is an Entitlement Generation.")

People complaining about the entitlement generation are responding to their own fragility in a non-resilient way.

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4964091

enraged_camel• 14 years ago

Actually, the "entitlement" our generation is accused of is different than the entitlement that refers to programs like social security. The difference is one of connotation. The former implies that us "kids" have feelings of entitlement in the sense that we think we deserve everything (but actually don't). Whereas the latter is the literal meaning of entitlement, i.e. people pay a certain amount of money out of every paycheck for decades, and as a result are entitled to the returns in the form of social security when they retire.

georgemcbay• 14 years ago

Why, exactly, is my generation different from an older generation that thinks it's entitled to social security

I think baby boomers have a lot to be sorry for, but I hate when people handwave social security for them as a pure "entitlement" when they spent their entire working lives paying into the system.

dkarl• 14 years ago

I agree with other posters that it's unfair to complain that the so-called "entitlement generation" is any less hard-working than the ones that came before, because when push comes to shove, when they realize the necessity, they do work just as hard. That isn't to say that there haven't been generational changes, though. This generation, and mine before it, was overpraised by its parents to a degree that rarely happened in previous generations. When I read about people working hard to receive the praise of their parents, and feeling proud when praised by a teacher, I can't relate at all. It sounds as old-fashioned as mending clothes or having three channels on TV. Since when was praise a scarce, valued commodity? My generation (born in the late seventies) lived in praise like fish live in water. We don't feel it at all, but we feel its absence, keenly.

Also perhaps starting in my generation (though I missed it) and reaching its peak in the generation now coming to adulthood, was the phenomenon of training children to negotiate with their superiors. Parents train their children that they can always get a little more by asking for it. Argumentation, charm, and manipulation are implicitly encouraged. As a result, kids who have expectations laid down by a boss and teacher count on being able to move those expectations simply by asking. When a professor sticks to the grading standard described on the syllabus, many students are honestly shocked and bewildered. They come in, show their distress, plead, negotiate, and get... nothing? You always get something when you ask for it. To people who haven't been brought up that way, that attitude surely sounds like entitlement, and indeed a student behaving that way decades ago would have been branded "spoiled" and mocked among the teachers, but now it is regarded as a socially normal behavior that can't be held against the individual student.

These are two of the new characteristics by which the "entitlement generation" is recognized. I blame these things on the parents, not on the children, and I think they are both regressions, in the sense that they make our culture less pleasant and less efficient. We have entirely lost the value of praise and at the same time obliged ourselves to produce and consume it incessantly. Negotiation is an expenditure of time and energy, and it is wasteful for a professor, or a manager, to entertain a parade of underlings wheedling for exceptions to policy, and to penalize people who spend their time working instead of honing their appeals, when instead everyone might be doing useful work under a policy that is fairly and uniformly applied.

So, I think the "entitlement generation" is accurately diagnosed, though not justly blamed. Their sense of entitlement is just an illusion that their parents programmed into them, an ultimately cruel one, designed to help them "get theirs" in a world of easy growth and riches. It reflects their parents' view of the world as a place where wealth increases inexorably and is handed out most freely to the individuals who, via self-regard and self-assertion, contrive to appear to deserve it most. Now they're adjusting to a world their parents did not prepare them for, and they're bound to look a little foolish at times, through no fault of their own.

rheide• 14 years ago

If that's what helps you deal with failure then go for it. I agree with most of the points mentioned in the article but I don't see how that leads to 'antifragility' as the solution. A healthy dose of realism (perhaps cynicism..) works fine for me.

dpapathanasiou• 14 years ago

"The prototypical entrepreneur is highly risk-seeking to the point of irrationality. A simple cost-benefit analysis would dissuade most people from traveling down this path; yet, the entrepreneur is an entrepreneur because of the risk involved."

If that is his understanding of Taleb's book, then he has misread it completely.

Taleb says the best approach is a dumbell strategy, combining conservative choices with convex options whose downside risk is fixed or finite but whose upside is unlimited.

wpeng2• 14 years ago

Thanks for the comment - appreciate it and thanks for reading. I qualify that point with the following paragraph:

"When you look at the decision tree from that perspective, it seems not so bad: failure is always the same, a zero, while the return (however you define it: monetary, happiness, utility, etc.) is astronomical, and worth it."

thoughtcriminal• 14 years ago

Rejection Therapy [1] is what I would think a perfect example of antifragility in the wild. [2] People learn to manage their anxiety in stressful social situations and become more resilient to rejection after playing for awhile. Entrepreneurs like Jia Jiang even leverage rejections to launch and grow their startups. [3]

[1] http://rejectiontherapy.com

[2] http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/health-and-fitness/healt...

[3] http://www.entresting.com/blog/100-days-of-rejection-therapy...

unoti2• 14 years ago

Rejection therapy has its ideological roots in Stoicism, just as the central ideas of this article does. Seneca talks about spending a few days each month wallowing in the things that you fear the most, so that they can't control you.

And with regard to the anti-fragility thing, this is discussed at length also in Letters from a Stoic. Seneca talks about not being overly dominated by your fears, but also you can be a slave to hope as well. The idea of being happy and free when poor, and cautious when prosperous is also straight out of stoicism.

When I read Seneca in Letters from a Stoic, I get the impression that he's a mental martial arts master, constantly training to be in control of his mind and his happiness, always pursuing excellence.

http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2009/04/13/stoicism-101...

nacker2• 14 years ago

You would enjoy this site http://gettingstronger.org

Likewise http://mises.org/books/stoics.pdf

As a long-time fan of Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, I was pleasantly surprised to discover the links between them and modern anarcho-capitalists like Hazlitt and Mises.

eshvk• 14 years ago

The third reference was beautiful. Thank you for posting that. I am a huge fan of pushing the envelope of things I find uncomfortable and I definitely need to think about doing something like this!

michaelochurch2• 14 years ago

I really hate this "entitled Millennial" schtick. It's complete fucking bullshit. Are there some overprivileged, sheltered assclowns in my generation? Sure, as with every other. The idea that this applies to the whole set is insulting and ridiculous.

Most of us just want a fair shake. We don't want to be given the prize for doing nothing, because that makes it vacuous, but we want a fair opportunity to compete-- not some bullshit meritocracy that has already been set up to make the well-connected rich kids come out the winners. When it comes to excellence, we know that we will have to do the legwork. We just want the entrenched, incompetent morons who are currently in power to get out of the fucking way so we can do something great. We're not asking for a meaningless victory. We're asking to be liberated from the meaningless defeat that most people get.

wpeng2• 14 years ago

Sorry you found that insulting - wasn't my intention at all. It was a generalization I used to make a point, but would take an entire separate post to unpack, so I didn't do it justice. I agree with you completely.

codex• 14 years ago

So, you could be successful if only the morons in the previous generation would let you? Is that how the previous generation became successful? Sounds like entitlement to me.

scarmig• 14 years ago

"Is [the morons in the previous generation letting you] how the previous generation became successful?"

More or less, yes.

Some people, by luck or otherwise, end up moving up the food chain; others down. But one's parents' social class is a strong predictor of one's own social class.

michaelochurch2• 14 years ago

So, you could be successful if only the morons in the previous generation would let you?

This isn't about me, personally. I'm fine. However, I think most people in my generation have been screwed, and the ones who have avoided it (present company included) tend to be fairly privileged. If you were born in 1990 in the U.S. with average means, then chances are that you're not beating away venture capitalists with a stick.

What's especially hilarious to me is that the age obsessions of VC-istan are thinly-veiled classism. A meritocracy wouldn't give a shit how old you are. The age narcissism is just a way for rich people to brand themselves, because people of average means don't get their startups bought at age 24. They have to work normal people jobs for a few years. The age bullshit is to keep the latter crowd out.

We need a society where the best people are free to excel, rather than wasting their lives taking orders. We'd have such a better world if the incompetent morons currently running it just stepped down and let some actually smart people take the reins. They can keep all their private jets and gaudy houses, but the decision-making power should go to people who actually have a few brain cells to rub together.

Entitlement, to me, suggests people wanting to be rewarded for just existing, with no desire to actually do anything. I don't see that in my generation. Yes, there's some of it, as there is everywhere, but it's not a defining trait. I see a lot of pissed-off people, but I see people who work really hard.

maxwin• 14 years ago

There seems to be a trend to invent new words for an old concept when writing articles. I don't know if the intention is to attract eye balls or to claim that "hey I invent this concept". But most of the times, what you discover is not new. Why invent "The concept of antifragility" when there is a word called "resilience" . Since English is not my first language, please correct me if I am wrong.

pdog2• 14 years ago

The antifragile is beyond the resilient or robust. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile benefits from shocks and gets better.

gagabity• 14 years ago

This is quite thoroughly explained in the book, the anti-fragile benefits from adversity, the resilient does not.

nacker2• 14 years ago

Nothing new under the sun, kids. Hormesis. Look it up.

http://gettingstronger.org/stoicism/

sp332• 14 years ago

In general I agree with you. But in this case the point of the term is to highlight the contrast against the "fragile".

SatvikBeri• 14 years ago

The whole point of the word is that "resilience" has different associations. Resilience is typically associated with the ability to withstand damage, whereas antifragility is the ability to recover from damage.

GlennS• 14 years ago

Antifragility? Why not 'resiliance'?

aduric• 14 years ago

The difference is explained in the book.

yyyytttt• 14 years ago

Antifragility sounds exciting, but there's really nothing there. In the context of economics, it simply means relying on competition instead of central planning (by government or by TBTF banks). Outside of economics Taleb has no real examples of antifargility. Engineering is always about robustness, you have 0 examples of engineering systems that are "antifragile".

diego• 14 years ago

The idea is that the evolution of engineering systems is antifragile because they benefit from trial and error. Computers keep getting better over time because of how the industry identifies and fixes issues. An obvious (but not the best) example would be the Macbook power connector. A given system cannot be antifragile (unless it learns on its own), but the evolution of technology can be. Contrast with economics, where (he argues) policy makers learn little or nothing after each boom-bust cycle.

exit• 14 years ago

burdening the world with 6 (six!) descendants sounds pretty entitled to me.

charlieflowers2• 14 years ago

Wow, I just found something really insightful. It was in the link that the parent article offered.

On Quora, the second highest response is excellent. It's from Michael O Church, and here's the heart of it:

"Resiliency comes from an ability to realistically analyze setbacks, which often have complex causes. People who aren't resilient have a variety of unhealthy tendencies, listed from the most unhealthy to the least:

* Internalize the rejection. ("It happened because I'm a loser.") This leads to depression and implosion.

* Exaggerate the damage or long-lasting nature (perceived autocorrelation) of the rejection. ("Now that I got fired, I'll never get another job.") This leads to bitterness and "cold" anger, which is more dangerous than the "hot" kind because it's long-lasting and tends toward generalization.

* Get angry about it. ("It happened because he is an asshole.") This leads to "hot" anger and, often, stupid behaviors (revenge).

* Prematurely generalize about the environment. ("It happened because <industry X> is full of sharks.") This doesn't usually impair general psychological health, but it creates an inaccurate model of the world and leads to sub-optimal choices and lost opportunities in the future."

I'm going to have to find some way to get this in front of my face every day for a few months until I internalize it. I have found myself making each of those mistakes at times, and when presented in this manner, it is crystal clear that they are nothing more than reasoning errors.

ErikAugust• 14 years ago

Tell you what's fragile: taking out college loans. Great read by the way.

The concept of antifragility: Shockingly Happy

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