Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (59 page)

CHAPTER 20
 

Antifragility implies—contrary to initial instinct—that the old is superior to the new, and much more than you think. No matter how something looks to your intellectual machinery, or how well or poorly it narrates, time will know more about its fragilities and break it when necessary. Here, I expose a contemporary disease—linked to interventionism—called
neomania,
which brings fragility but I believe may be treatable if one is patient enough.

What survives must be good at serving some (mostly hidden) purpose that time can see but our eyes and logical faculties can’t capture. In this chapter we use the notion of fragility as a central driver of prediction.

Recall the foundational asymmetry: the antifragile benefits from volatility and disorder, the fragile is harmed. Well, time is the same as disorder.

As an exercise in the use of the distinction between fragility and antifragility, let us play prophet, with the understanding that it is not a good
career choice unless you have a thick skin, a good circle of friends, little access to the Internet, a library with a good set of ancient proverbs, and, if possible, the ability to derive personal benefits from your prophecy. As shown from the track record of the prophets: before you are proven right, you will be reviled; after you are proven right, you will be hated for a while, or, what’s worse, your ideas will appear to be “trivial” thanks to retrospective distortion. This makes it far more convincing to follow the Fat Tony method of focusing on shekels more than recognition. And such treatment has continued in modern times: twentieth-century intellectuals who have embraced the wrong ideas, such as Communism or even Stalinism, have remained fashionable—and their books remain on the bookstore shelves—while those who, like the political philosopher Raymond Aron, saw the problems got short shrift both before and after being acknowledged as having seen things right.

Now close your eyes and try to imagine your future surroundings in, say, five, ten, or twenty-five years. Odds are your imagination will produce
new
things in it, things we call
innovation, improvements, killer technologies,
and other inelegant and hackneyed words from the business jargon. These common concepts concerning innovation, we will see, are not just offensive aesthetically, but they are nonsense both empirically and philosophically.

Why? Odds are that your imagination will be adding things to the present world. I am sorry, but I will show in this chapter that this approach is exactly backward: the way to do it rigorously, according to the notions of fragility and antifragility, is to
take away
from the future, reduce from it, simply, things that do not belong to the coming times.
Via negativa
. What is fragile will eventually break; and, luckily, we can easily tell what is fragile. Positive Black Swans are more unpredictable than negative ones.

“
Time has sharp teeth that destroy everything,” declaimed the sixth-century (
B.C.
) poet Simonides of Ceos, perhaps starting a tradition in Western literature about the inexorable effect of time. I can trace a plethora of elegant classical expressions, from Ovid (
tempus edax rerum—
time devours everything) to the no less poetic twentieth-century Franco-Russian poetess Elsa Triolet (“time burns but leaves no ashes”). Naturally, this exercise triggered some poetic waxing, so I am now humming a French poem put to music titled
“Avec le temps”
about how time erases things, even bad memories (though it doesn’t say that it erases us as well in the process). Now, thanks to convexity effects, we can put a
little bit of science in these, and produce our own taxonomy of what should be devoured the fastest by that inexorable time. The fragile will eventually break—and, luckily, we are capable of figuring out what is fragile. Even what we believe is antifragile will eventually break, but it should take much, much longer to do so (wine does well with time, but up to a point; and not if you put it in the crater of a volcano).

The verse by Simonides that started the previous paragraph continues with the stipulation “even the most solid.” So Simonides had the adumbration of the idea, quite useful, that the most solid will be swallowed with more difficulty, hence last. Naturally, he did not think that something could be antifragile, hence never swallowed.

Now, I insist on the
via negativa
method of prophecy as being the only valid one: there is no other way to produce a forecast without being a turkey somewhere, particularly in the complex environment in which we live today. Now, I am not saying that new technologies will not emerge—something new will rule its day, for a while. What is currently fragile will be replaced by something else, of course. But this “something else” is unpredictable. In all likelihood, the technologies you have in your mind are not the ones that will make it, no matter your perception of their fitness and applicability—with all due respect to your imagination.

Recall that the most fragile is the predictive, what is built on the basis of predictability—in other words, those who underestimate Black Swans will eventually exit the population.

An interesting apparent paradox is that, according to these principles, longer-term predictions are more reliable than short-term ones, given that one can be quite certain that what is Black Swan–prone will be eventually swallowed by history since time augments the probability of such an event. On the other hand, typical predictions (not involving the currently fragile) degrade with time; in the presence of nonlinearities, the longer the forecast the worse its accuracy. Your error rate for a ten-year forecast of, say, the sales of a computer plant or the profits of a commodity vendor can be a thousand times that of a one-year projection.

Consider the futuristic projections made throughout the past century and a half, as expressed in literary novels such as those by Jules Verne,
H. G. Wells, or George Orwell, or in now forgotten narratives of the future produced by scientists or futurists. It is remarkable that the tools that seem to currently dominate the world, such as the Internet, or more mundane matters such as the wheel on the suitcase of
Book IV
, were completely missing from these forecasts. But it is not here that the major error lies. The problem is that almost everything that was imagined never took place, except for a few overexploited anecdotes (such as the steam engine by Hero the Alexandrian or the assault vehicle by Leonardo da Vinci). Our world looks too close to theirs, much closer to theirs than they ever imagined or wanted to imagine. And we tend to be blind to that fact—there seems to be no correcting mechanism that can make us aware of the point as we go along forecasting a highly technocratic future.

There may be a selection bias: those people who engage in producing these accounts of the future will tend to have (incurable and untreatable)
neomania,
the love of the modern for its own sake.

Tonight I will be meeting friends in a restaurant (tavernas have existed for at least twenty-five centuries). I will be walking there wearing shoes hardly different from those worn fifty-three hundred years ago by the mummified man discovered in a glacier in the Austrian Alps. At the restaurant, I will be using silverware, a Mesopotamian technology, which qualifies as a “killer application” given what it allows me to do to the leg of lamb, such as tear it apart while sparing my fingers from burns. I will be drinking wine, a liquid that has been in use for at least six millennia. The wine will be poured into glasses, an innovation claimed by my Lebanese compatriots to come from their Phoenician ancestors, and if you disagree about the source, we can say that glass objects have been sold by them as trinkets for at least twenty-nine hundred years. After the main course, I will have a somewhat younger technology, artisanal cheese, paying higher prices for those that have not changed in their preparation for several centuries.

Had someone in 1950 predicted such a minor gathering, he would have imagined something quite different. So, thank God, I will not be dressed in a shiny synthetic space-style suit, consuming nutritionally optimized pills while communicating with my dinner peers by means of screens. The dinner partners, in turn, will be expelling airborne germs on my face, as they will not be located in remote human colonies across the galaxy. The food will be prepared using a very archaic technology (fire), with the aid of kitchen tools and implements that have not changed since
the Romans (except in the quality of some of the metals used). I will be sitting on an (at least) three-thousand-year-old device commonly known as the chair (which will be, if anything, less ornate that its majestic Egyptian ancestor). And I will be not be repairing to the restaurant with the aid of a flying motorcycle. I will be walking or, if late, using a cab from a century-old technology, driven by an immigrant—immigrants were driving cabs in Paris a century ago (Russian aristocrats), same as in Berlin and Stockholm (Iraqis and Kurdish refugees), Washington, D.C. (Ethiopian postdoc students), Los Angeles (musically oriented Armenians), and New York (multinationals) today.

David Edgerton showed that in the early 2000s we produce two and a half times as many bicycles as we do cars and invest most of our technological resources in maintaining existing equipment or refining old technologies (note that this is not just a Chinese phenomenon: Western cities are aggressively trying to become bicycle-friendly). Also consider that one of the most consequential technologies seems to be the one people talk about the least: the condom. Ironically, it wants to look like less of a technology; it has been undergoing meaningful improvements, with the precise aim of being less and less noticeable.