Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (63 page)

Of course you may be lucky enough to hit on a jewel here and there, but in general, at best, conversation with an academic would be like the conversation of plumbers, at the worst that of a concierge bandying the worst brand of gossip: gossip about uninteresting people (other academics), small talk. True, the conversation of top scientists can sometimes be captivating, those people who aggregate knowledge and for whom cruising the subject is effortless as the entire small parts of the field come glued together. But these people are just currently too rare on this planet.

I complete this section with the following anecdote. One of my students (who was majoring in, of all subjects, economics) asked me for a rule on what to read. “As little as feasible from the last twenty years, except history books that are not about the last fifty years,” I blurted out, with irritation as I hate such questions as “what’s the best book you’ve ever read,” or “what are the ten best books,”—my “ten best books ever” change at the end of every summer. Also, I have been hyping Daniel Kahneman’s recent book, because it is largely an exposition of his research of thirty-five and forty years ago, with filtering and modernization. My recommendation seemed impractical, but, after a while, the student developed a culture in original texts such as Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and Hayek, texts he believes he will cite at the age of eighty. He told me that after his detoxification, he realized that all his peers do is read
timely
material that becomes instantly obsolete.

In 2010,
The Economist
magazine asked me to partake in an exercise imagining the world in 2036. As they were aware of my reticence concerning forecasters, their intention was to bring a critical “balance” and use me as a counter to the numerous imaginative forecasts, hoping for my usual angry, dismissive, and irascible philippic.

Quite surprised they were when, after a two-hour (slow) walk, I wrote a series of forecasts at one go and sent them the text. They probably thought at first that I was pulling a prank on them, or that someone
got the wrong email and was impersonating me. Outlining the reasoning on fragility and asymmetry (concavity to errors), I explained that I would expect the future to be populated with wall-to-wall bookshelves, the device called the telephone, artisans, and such, using the notion that most technologies that are now twenty-five years old should be around in another twenty-five years—once again, most, not all.
⁷
But the fragile should disappear, or be weakened. Now, what is fragile? The large, optimized, overreliant on technology, overreliant on the so-called scientific method instead of age-tested heuristics. Corporations that are large today should be gone, as they have always been weakened by what they think is their strength: size, which is the enemy of corporations as it causes disproportionate fragility to Black Swans. City-states and small corporations are more likely to be around, even thrive. The nation-state, the currency-printing central bank, these things called economics departments, may stay nominally, but they will have their powers severely eroded. In other words, what we saw in the left column of the Triad should be gone—alas to be replaced by other fragile items.

By issuing warnings based on vulnerability—that is, subtractive prophecy—we are closer to the original role of the prophet: to warn, not necessarily to predict, and to predict calamities
if people don’t listen
.

The classical role of the prophet, at least in the Levantine sense, is not to look into the future but to talk about the present. He tells people what to do, or, rather, in my opinion, the more robust what
not
to do. In the Near Eastern monotheistic traditions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, the major role of the prophets is the protection of monotheism from its idolatrous and pagan enemies that may bring calamities on the straying population. The prophet is someone who is in communication with the unique God, or at least can read his mind—and, what is key, issues warnings to His subjects. The Semitic
nby,
expressed as
Nevi
or
nebi
(in the original Hebrew), the same with minor differences in pronunciation in Aramaic (
nabi’y
) and Arabic (
nabi
), is principally someone connecting with God, expressing what is on God’s mind—the meaning of
nab’
in Arabic is “news” (the original Semitic root in Acadian,
nabu,
meant “to call”). The initial Greek translation,
pro-phetes,
meant “spokesman,” which is retained in Islam, as a dual role for Mohammed the Prophet is that of the Messenger (
rasoul
)—there were some small ranking differences between the roles of spokesman (
nabi
) and messenger (
rasoul
). The job of mere forecasting is rather limited to seers, or the variety of people involved in divination such as the “astrologers” so dismissed by the Koran and the Old Testament. Again, the Canaanites had been too promiscuous in their theologies and various approaches to handling the future, and the prophet is precisely someone who deals only with the One God, not with the future like a mere Baalite.

Nor has the vocation of Levantine prophet been a particularly desirable professional occupation. As I said at the beginning of the chapter, acceptance was far from guaranteed: Jesus, mentioning the fate of Elijah (who warned against Baal, then ironically had to go find solace in Sidon, where Baal was worshipped), announced that
no one becomes a prophet in his own land
. And the prophetic mission was not necessarily voluntary. Consider Jeremiah’s life, laden with
jeremiads
(lamentations), as his unpleasant warnings about destruction and captivity (and their causes) did not make him particularly popular and he was the personification of the notion of “shoot the messenger” and the expression
veritas odium parit—
truth brings hatred. Jeremiah was beaten, punished, persecuted, and the victim of numerous plots, which involved his own brothers. Apocryphal and imaginative accounts even have him stoned to death in Egypt.

Further north of the Semites, in the Greek tradition, we find the same focus on messages, warnings about the present, and the same punishment inflicted on those able to understand things others don’t. For example, Cassandra gets the gift of prophecy, along with the curse of not being believed, when the temple snakes cleaned her ears so she could hear some special messages. Tiresias was made blind and transformed into a woman for revealing the secrets of the gods—but, as a consolation, Athena licked his ears so he could understand secrets in the songs of birds.

Recall the inability we saw in
Chapter 2
to learn from past behavior. The problem with lack of recursion in learning—lack of second-order thinking—is as follows. If those delivering some messages deemed valuable for the long term have been persecuted in past history, one would expect that there would be a correcting mechanism, that intelligent people
would end up learning from such historical experience so those delivering new messages would be greeted with the new understanding in mind. But nothing of the sort takes place.

This lack of recursive thinking applies not just to prophecy, but to other human activities as well: if you believe that what will work and do well is going to be a
new
idea that others did not think of, what we commonly call “innovation,” then you would expect people to pick up on it and have a clearer eye for new ideas without too much reference to the perception of others. But they don’t: something deemed “original” tends to be modeled on something that was new at the time but is no longer new, so being an Einstein for many scientists means solving a similar problem to the one Einstein solved when at the time Einstein was not solving a standard problem at all. The very idea of being an Einstein in physics is no longer original. I’ve detected in the area of risk management the similar error, made by scientists trying to be new in a standard way. People in risk management only consider risky things that have hurt them in the past (given their focus on “evidence”), not realizing that, in the past, before these events took place, these occurrences that hurt them severely were completely without precedent, escaping standards. And my personal efforts to make them step outside their shoes to consider these second-order considerations have failed—as have my efforts to make them aware of the notion of fragility.

In Aristotle’s
Magna Moralia,
there is a possibly apocryphal story about Empedocles, the pre-Socratic philosopher, who was asked why a dog prefers to always sleep on the same tile. His answer was that there had to be some
likeness
between the dog and that tile. (Actually the story might be even twice as apocryphal since we don’t know if
Magna Moralia
was actually written by Aristotle himself.)

Consider the match between the dog and the tile. A natural, biological, explainable or nonexplainable match, confirmed by long series of recurrent frequentation—in place of rationalism, just consider the history of it.

Which brings me to the conclusion of our exercise in prophecy.

I surmise that those human technologies such as writing and reading that have survived are like the tile to the dog, a match between natural friends, because they correspond to something deep in our nature.

Every time I hear someone trying to make a comparison between a book and an e-reader, or something ancient and a new technology, “opinions” pop up, as if reality cared about opinions and narratives. There are secrets to our world that only practice can reveal, and no opinion or analysis will ever capture in full.

This secret property is, of course, revealed through time, and, thankfully, only through time.

Let’s take this idea of Empedocles’ dog a bit further: If something that makes no sense to you (say, religion—if you are an atheist—or some age-old habit or practice called irrational); if that something has been around for a very, very long time, then, irrational or not, you can expect it to stick around much longer, and outlive those who call for its demise.

CHAPTER 21