Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (62 page)

Alas, contemporary architecture is smooth, even when it tries to look whimsical. What is top-down is generally unwrinkled (that is, unfractal) and feels dead.

Sometimes modernism can take a naturalistic turn, then stop in its tracks. Gaudi’s buildings in Barcelona, from around the turn of the twentieth century, are inspired by nature and rich architecture (Baroque and Moorish). I managed to visit a rent-controlled apartment there: it felt like an improved cavern with rich, jagged details. I was convinced that I had been there in a previous life. Wealth of details, ironically, leads to inner peace. Yet Gaudi’s idea went nowhere, except in promoting modernism in its unnatural and naive versions: later modernistic structures are smooth and completely stripped of fractal jaggedness.

I also enjoy writing facing trees, and, if possible, wild untamed gardens with ferns. But white walls with sharp corners and Euclidian angles and crisp shapes strain me. And once they are built, there is no way to get rid of them. Almost everything built since World War II has an unnatural smoothness to it.

For some, these buildings cause even more than aesthetic harm—many Romanians are bitter about the dictator Nicolae Ceausescu’s destruction of traditional villages replaced by modern high-rises. Neomania and dictatorship are an explosive combination. In France, some blame the modernistic architecture of housing projects for the immigrant riots. As the journalist Christopher Caldwell wrote about the unnatural living conditions: “Le Corbusier called houses ‘machines for living.’ France’s housing projects, as we now know, became machines for alienation.”

Jane Jacobs, the New York urban activist, took a heroic stance as a political-style resistant against neomania in architecture and urban planning, as the modernistic dream was carried by Robert Moses, who
wanted to improve New York by razing tenements and installing large roads and highways, committing a greater crime against natural order than Haussmann, who, as we saw in
Chapter 7
, removed during the nineteenth century entire neighborhoods of Paris to make room for the “Grand Boulevards.” Jacobs stood against tall buildings as they deform the experience of urban living, which is conducted at street level. Further, her bone with Robert Moses concerns the highway, as these engines for travel suck life out of the city—to her a city should be devoted to pedestrians. Again, we have the machine-organism dichotomy: to her the city is an organism, for Moses it is a machine to be improved upon. Indeed, Moses had plans to raze the West Village; it is thanks to her petitions and unremitting resistance that the neighborhood—the prettiest in Manhattan—has survived nearly intact. One might want to give Moses some credit, for not all his projects turned out to be nefarious—some might have been beneficial, such as the parks and beaches now accessible to the middle class thanks to the highways.

Recall the discussion of municipal properties—they don’t translate into something larger because problems become more abstract as they scale up, and the abstract is not something human nature can manage properly. The same principle needs to apply to urban life: neighborhoods are villages, and need to remain villages.

I was recently stuck in a traffic jam in London where, one hears, the speed of traveling is equal to what it was a century and a half ago, if not slower. It took me almost two hours to cross London from one end to the other. As I was depleting the topics of conversation with the (Polish) driver, I wondered whether Haussmann was not right, and whether London would be better off if it had its Haussmann razing neighborhoods and plowing wide arteries to facilitate circulation. Until it hit me that, in fact, if there was so much traffic in London, as compared to other cities, it was because people wanted to be there, and being there for them exceeded the costs. More than a third of the residents in London are foreign-born, and, in addition to immigrants, most high net worth individuals on the planet get their starter pied-à-terre in Central London. It could be that the absence of these large avenues and absence of a dominating state is part of its appeal. Nobody would buy a pied-à-terre in Brasilia, the perfectly top-down city built from scratch on a map.

I also checked and saw that the most expensive neighborhoods in
Paris today (such as the Sixth Arrondissement or Île Saint-Louis) were the ones that had been left alone by the nineteenth-century renovators.

Finally, the best argument against teleological design is as follows. Even after they are built, buildings keep incurring mutations as if they needed to slowly evolve and be taken over by the dynamical environment: they change colors, shapes, windows—and character. In his book
How Buildings Learn,
Stewart Brand shows in pictures how buildings change through time, as if they needed to metamorphose into unrecognizable shapes—strangely buildings, when erected, do not account for the optionality of future alterations.

The skepticism about architectural modernism that I am proposing is not unconditional. While most of it brings unnatural stress, some elements are a certain improvement. For instance, floor-to-ceiling windows in a rural environment expose us to nature—here again technology making itself (literally) invisible. In the past, the size of windows was dictated by thermal considerations, as insulation was not possible—heat escaped rather quickly from windows. Today’s materials allow us to avoid such constraint. Further, much French architecture was a response to the tax on windows and doors installed after the Revolution, so many buildings have a very small number of windows.

Just as with the unintrusive shoes that allow us to feel the terrain, modern technology allows some of us to reverse that trend, as expressed by Oswald Spengler, which makes civilization go from plants to stone, that is, from the fractal to the Euclidian. We are now moving back from the smooth stone to the rich fractal and natural. Benoît Mandelbrot wrote in front of a window overlooking trees: he craved fractal aesthetics so much that the alternative would have been inconceivable. Now modern technology allows us to merge with nature, and instead of a small window, an entire wall can be transparent and face lush and densely forested areas.

One example of the neomania of states: the campaign for metrification, that is, the use of the metric system to replace “archaic” ones on grounds
of efficiency—it “makes sense.” The logic might be impeccable (until of course one supersedes it with a better, less naive logic, an attempt I will make here). Let us look at the wedge between rationalism and empiricism in this effort.

Warwick Cairns, a fellow similar to Jane Jacobs, has been fighting in courts to let market farmers in Britain keep selling bananas by the pound, and similar matters as they have resisted the use of the more “rational” kilogram. The idea of metrification was born out of the French Revolution, as part of the utopian mood, which includes changing the names of the winter months to
Nivôse, Pluviôse, Ventôse
, descriptive of weather, having decimal time, ten-day weeks, and similar naively rational matters. Luckily the project of changing time has failed. However, after repeated failures, the metric system was implemented there—but the old system has remained refractory in the United States and England. The French writer Edmond About, who visited Greece in 1832, a dozen years after its independence, reports how peasants struggled with the metric system as it was completely unnatural to them and stuck to Ottoman standards instead. (Likewise, the “modernization” of the Arabic alphabet from the easy-to-memorize old Semitic sequence made to sound like words, ABJAD, HAWWAZ, to the logical sequence A-B-T-TH has created a generation of Arabic speakers without the ability to recite their alphabet.)

But few realize that naturally born weights have a logic to them: we use feet, miles, pounds, inches, furlongs, stones (in Britain) because these are remarkably intuitive and we can use them with a minimal expenditure of cognitive effort—and all cultures seem to have similar measurements with some physical correspondence to the everyday. A meter does not match anything; a foot does. I can imagine the meaning of “thirty feet” with minimal effort. A mile, from the Latin
milia passum,
is a thousand paces. Likewise a stone (14 pounds) corresponds to … well, a stone. An inch (or
pouce
) corresponds to a thumb. A furlong is the distance one can sprint before running out of breath. A pound, from
libra,
is what you can imagine holding in your hands. Recall from the story of Thales in
Chapter 12
that we used
thekel
or
shekel:
these mean “weight” in Canaanite-Semitic languages, something with a physical connotation, similar to the pound. There is a certain nonrandomness to how these units came to be in an ancestral environment—and the digital system itself comes from the correspondence to the ten fingers.

As I am writing these lines, no doubt, some European Union official
of the type who eats 200 grams of well-cooked meat with 200 centiliters’ worth of red wine every day for dinner (the optimal quantity for his health benefits) is concocting plans to promote the “efficiency” of the metric system deep into the countryside of the member countries.

So, we can apply criteria of fragility and robustness to the handling of information—the fragile in that context is, like technology, what does not stand the test of time. The best filtering heuristic, therefore, consists in taking into account the age of books and scientific papers. Books that are one year old are usually not worth reading (a very low probability of having the qualities for “surviving”), no matter the hype and how “earth-shattering” they may seem to be. So I follow the Lindy effect as a guide in selecting what to read: books that have been around for ten years will be around for ten more; books that have been around for two millennia should be around for quite a bit of time, and so forth. Many understand this point but do not apply it to academic work, which is, in much of its modern practice, hardly different from journalism (except for the occasional original production). Academic work, because of its attention-seeking orientation, can be easily subjected to Lindy effects: think of the hundreds of thousands of papers that are just noise, in spite of how hyped they were at the time of publication.

The problem in deciding whether a scientific result or a new “innovation” is a breakthrough, that is, the opposite of noise, is that one needs to see all aspects of the idea—and there is always some opacity that time, and only time, can dissipate. Like many people watching cancer research like a hawk, I fell for the following. There was at some point a great deal of excitement about the work of Judah Folkman, who, as we saw in
Chapter 15
, believed that one could cure cancer by choking the blood supply (tumors require nutrition and tend to create new blood vessels, what is called
neovascularization
). The idea looked impeccable on paper, but, about a decade and a half later, it appears that the only significant result we got was completely outside cancer, in the mitigation of macular degeneration.

Likewise, seemingly uninteresting results that go unnoticed, can, years later turn out to be breakthroughs.

So time can act as a cleanser of noise by confining to its dustbins all these overhyped works. Some organizations even turn such scientific
production into a cheap spectator sport, with ranking of the “ten hottest papers” in, say, rectal oncology or some such sub-sub-specialty.

If we replace scientific results with scientists, we often get the same neomaniac hype. There is a disease to grant a prize for a promising scientist “under forty,” a disease that is infecting economics, mathematics, finance, etc. Mathematics is a bit special because the value of its results can be immediately seen—so I skip the criticism. Of the fields I am familiar with, such as literature, finance, and economics, I can pretty much ascertain that the prizes given to those under forty are the best reverse indicator of value (much like the belief—well tested—by traders that companies that get hyped up for their potential and called “best” on the cover of magazines or in books such as
Good to Great
are about to underperform and one can derive an abnormal profit by shorting their stock). The worst effect of these prizes is penalizing those who don’t get them and debasing the field by turning it into an athletic competition.

Should we have a prize, it should be for “over a hundred”: it took close to one hundred and forty years to validate the contribution of one Jules Regnault, who discovered optionality and mapped it mathematically—along with what we dubbed the philosopher’s stone. His work stayed obscure all this time.

Now if you want to be convinced of my point of how noisy science can be, take any elementary textbook you read in high school or college with interest then—in any discipline. Open it to a random chapter, and see if the idea is still relevant. Odds are that it may be boring, but still relevant—or nonboring, and still relevant. It could be the famous 1215 Magna Carta (British history), Caesar’s Gallic wars (Roman history), a historical presentation of the school of Stoics (philosophy), an introduction to quantum mechanics (physics), or the genetic trees of cats and dogs (biology).

Now try to get the proceedings of a random conference about the subject matter concerned that took place five years ago. Odds are it will feel no different from a five-year-old newspaper, perhaps even less interesting. So attending breakthrough conferences might be, statistically speaking, as much a waste of time as buying a mediocre lottery ticket, one with a small payoff. The odds of the paper’s being relevant—and interesting—in five years is no better than one in ten thousand. The fragility of science!

Even the conversation of a high school teacher or that of an unsuccessful college professor is likely to be more worthwhile than the latest
academic paper, less corrupted with neomania. My best conversations in philosophy have been with French lycée teachers who love the topic but are not interested in pursuing a career writing papers in it (in France they teach philosophy in the last year of high school). Amateurs in any discipline are the best, if you can connect with them. Unlike dilettantes, career professionals are to knowledge what prostitutes are to love.