Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (90 page)

Maps:
A reader, Jean-Louis, a mapmaker, writes to me: “As a mapmaker, I learned a long time ago that the key to good mapmaking is precisely the info you choose to leave out. I have made numerous clients notice that if a map is too literal and precise, it confuses people.”

Imam Ali:
Nahj-el-Balagha, Letter. 31.

The mosaic god is not antifragile:
For God—the Abrahamic-Mosaic God (of Jews, Christians, and Moslems)—is the representation of total robustness and infallibility. Note that counter to initial impressions, the essence of perfection is robustness, not antifragility. I’ve received many messages suggesting that the (Levantine) God should be put in the antifragile category. This would be a severe mistake according to Eastern Mediterranean religions. Antifragility for a deity may apply to Babylonian, Greek, Syrian, and Egyptian mythologies. But Levantine monotheistic theology, from the ancient Semitic El (or Al) to the modern Allah or, to a lesser extent, what people call “the Lord” in the Bible Belt, from Genesis to the Koran, progressed into a definition of an increasingly abstract God—hence closest to the definition of pure robustness. The monotheistic God is certainly not fragile; but he is not antifragile. By definition, thanks to his maximally abstract quality, he is what cannot be improved, which is the very property of perfection—only imperfect mortals can improve, therefore need antifragility to try to improve. In the Koran, one of the properties of God is
Smd,
a word that has no synonym even in Arabic, hence cannot be translated; its meaning can only be conveyed through the iteration of partial descriptions.
Smd
is that which has reached such degree of completeness that it does not depend on external circumstances, anything or anyone; a bulwark against all manner of attacks; He transcends the notion of time. The idea is also present in other Levantine systems. Orthodox theology, through
theosis,
seeks merger with God, the aspiration to a level of completeness, hence independence from anything else.

Interdicts in religion:
Fourest and Venner (2010) presents a list across all persuasions.

Steve Jobs:
Beahm (2011).

Gladwell:
“If you totted up all his hospital bills for the ten years that he had been on the streets—as well as substance-abuse-treatment costs, doctors’ fees, and other expenses—Murray Barr probably ran up a medical bill as large as anyone in the state of Nevada. ‘It cost us one million dollars not to do something about Murray,’ O’Bryan said.” Gladwell (2009).

Falsification and problems of induction:
See references in
The Black Swan
.

Smoking and overall medical effect:
Burch (2009).

Fractality:
Mandelbrot (1983).

Edgerton’s shock of the old:
Edgerton (2007).

Simplicity and Steve Jobs:
“That’s been one of my mantras—focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking
clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.”
BusinessWeek,
May 25, 1998.

Heuristics as powerful—and necessary—shortcuts:
Gigerenzer and Brighton (2009) bust the following myth, as presented in
The Selfish Gene
by Richard Dawkins, in which we find the following about how a baseball outfielder catches a ball: “[H]e behaves as if he had solved a set of differential equations in predicting the trajectory of the ball.… At some subconscious level, something functionally equivalent to the mathematical calculations is going on.”
    Not quite, Professor Dawkins. Gerd Gigerenzer et al. counter by saying that none of that is done. They write the following:

Instead, experiments have shown that players rely on several heuristics. The gaze heuristic is the simplest one and works if the ball is already high up in the air: Fix your gaze on the ball, start running, and adjust your running speed so that the angle of gaze remains constant. A player who relies on the gaze heuristic can ignore all causal variables necessary to compute the trajectory of the ball—the initial distance, velocity, angle, air resistance, speed and direction of wind, and spin, among others. By paying attention to only one variable, the player will end up where the ball comes down without computing the exact spot.

The same heuristic is also used by animal species for catching prey and for intercepting potential mates. In pursuit and predation, bats, birds, and dragonflies maintain a constant optical angle between themselves and their prey, as do dogs when catching a Frisbee.

To choose a mate, a peahen uses a heuristic: Rather than investigating all peacocks posing and displaying in a lek eager to get her attention or weighting and adding all male features to calculate the one with the highest expected utility, she investigates only three or four, and chooses the one with the largest number of eyespots.

To measure the area of a nest cavity, a narrow crack in a rock, an ant has no yardstick but a rule of thumb: Run around on an irregular path for a fixed period while laying down a pheromone trail, and then leave. Return, move around on a different irregular path, and estimate the size of the cavity by the frequency of encountering the old trail. This heuristic is remarkably precise.

Makridakis, forecasting, and less is more:
Makridakis et al. (1982, 1993), Makridakis and Hibon (2000), Makridakis and Taleb (2009).

Heuristic to measure risks:
Taleb, Canetti et al. (2012)—with IMF staff.

The Lindy effect was demonstrated in Mandelbrot (1997). Initially he used it for the artistic production, bounded by the life of the producer. In our conversations toward the end of his life, I suggested the boundary perishable/nonperishable and he agreed that the nonperishable would be powerlaw distributed while the perishable (the initial Lindy story) worked as a mere metaphor. Depending on
whether we condition for knowledge of the initial time, the remaining lifetime for the exponential remains constant regardless of future condition, for powerlaw increases with time since inception, by a factor of (
α
/1-
α
), where
α
is the tail exponent; for Gaussian or semi-Gaussian it decreases.

Gott:
Gott (1993, 1994) presented the Copernican idea but did not properly condition the probability; corrected in Caves (2000). See discussion in Rees (2003), a treatment of the paradox in Bostrom (2002).

Survival papers and distributional properties:
Often powerlaws are mistaken for exponential distributions, owing to lack of data in the tails. So I assume a priori that an exponential is likely to be powerlaw, but not the reverse, as the error in the opposite direction is vastly less likely. Pigolotti et al. (2005). For empires, Arbesman (2011), Khmaladze et al. (2007, 2010), Taagepera (1978, 1979). For firms: Fujiwara. Also Turchin (2003, 2009).

Conditional expected time of survival across distributions:
Sornette and Knopoff (1997). They show how, paradoxically, the longer one waits for an earthquake, the longer he would be expected to wait.

Le Corbusier:
Christopher Caldwell, “Revolting High Rises,”
New York Times,
November 27, 2005.

Cairns and ancient measures:
Cairns (2007). His work was brought to my attention by Yoav Brand, who graciously offered me his book after a lecture.

Nonteleological design:
How buildings mutate and change, Brand (1995).

The Dog:
Moral,
ii. 11; 1208 b 11. “And he says that when a dog was accustomed always to sleep on the same tile, Empedokles was asked why the dog always sleeps on the same tile, and he answered that the dog had some likeness to the tile, so that the likeness is the reason for its frequenting it.”

Medicina soror philosophiae:
For reflective histories of medicine, Mudry (2006), Pigeaud (2006); Camguillem (1995) discussion of iatrogenics. For the spirit, Pager (1996), Bates (1995).

Islamic medicine:
Porman and Savage-Smith (2007), Djebbar (2001).

De motu animali
and attempts to mathematize medicine:
In Wear (1995). Let me reiterate: math is good, the wrong math is not good.

Ancient medicine:
Edelstein (1987), Lonrig (1998). Vivian Nutton’s
Ancient Medicine
(Nutton [2004]) is informative, but near-silent about the empiricists, and not too detailed about ancient practices outside of a few standard treatises. More on medicine (skeptics and methodists) in the monumental Zeller (1905) or even better the superb
Les Sceptiques Grecs
by Brochard.

Oranges:
As they are named in Modern Greek,
portokali,
a corruption of “Portuguese”—further corrupted in Levantine Arabic into
burduqan,
and present under that name in the Sicilian dialect.

Medical heuristics:
Palmieri (2003).

Medieval and Renaissance:
French (2003).

General history:
Conrad et al. (1995), Porter (2002, 2003), Meslin et al. (2006), Kennedy (2004).

Iatrogenics:
Sharpe and Faden (1998), most complete; Illich (1995) the first movement; Hadler (2009) for the back, Duffin (1999), Welsh et al. (2011) on overdiagnosis (though no argument about noise/signal and filtering), Lebrun (1995).

Agency and iatrogenics:
Just a random example: “Surgeons do more operations if they’re on the board of surgery centers,” June 22, 2012, “The Daily Stat,”
Harvard Business Review
.

More amusing historical perspective of iatrogenics:
Gustave Jules A. Witkowski, 1889,
Le mal qu’on a dit des médecins.

Rationalism/Galenism:
Garicia-Ballester (1995).

Montaigne:
“Mais ils ont cet heur, selon Nicocles, que le soleil esclaire leur succez, et la terre cache leur faute; et, outre-cela, ils ont une façon bien avantageuse de se servir de toutes sortes d’evenemens, car ce que la fortune, ce que la nature, ou quelque autre cause estrangere (desquelles le nombre est infini) produit en nous de bon et de salutaire, c’est le privilege de la medecine de se l’attribuer. Tous les heureux succez qui arrivent au patient qui est soubs son regime, c’est d’elle qu’il les tient. Les occasions qui m’ont guery, moy, et qui guerissent mille autres qui n’appellent point les medecins à leurs secours, ils les usurpent en leurs subjects; et, quant aux mauvais accidents, ou ils les desavouent tout à fait, en attribuant la coulpe au patient par des raisons si vaines qu’ils n’ont garde de faillir d’en trouver tousjours assez bon nombre de telles.
 …
”
[Note the detection of the attribution problem.]
    
On demandoit à un Lacedemonien qui l’avoit fait vivre sain si long temps: L’ignorance de la medecine, respondit il.
    
Et Adrian l’Empereur crioit sans cesse, en mourant, que la presse des medecins l’avoit tué.

Modern alternative medicine:
Singh and Edzard (2008)—they had their skin in the game, as they were sued for it.

Homeopathy and empirical evidence:
Goldacre (2007). See also the highly readable
Bad Science,
Goldacre (2009).

Modern evidence-based medicine:
Manual in Sacket et al. (1998). Flaws of rationalistic methods, Silverman (1999), Gauch (2009), Sestini and Irving (2009).

Icing:
Collins (2008): “There is insufficient evidence to suggest that cryotherapy improves clinical outcome in the management of soft tissue injuries.” I could not find papers saying the opposite. What benefits are proffered seem so marginal it is not even funny.

Convexity of blood pressure:
Numbers from Welch et al. (2011).

Jensen’s inequality and pulmonary ventilators:
Brewster et al. (2005), Graham et al. (2005), Mutch et al. (2007).

Paracelsus:
Interesting character as a rebel; alas, seems to have been hijacked by homeopathy advocates such as Coulter (2000). Biographies in Ball (2006), Bechtel (1970), Alendy (1937).

Immortalization:
Gray (2011).

Stendhal:
Le Rouge et le noir: “La besogne de cette journée sera longue et rude, fortifions-nous par un premier déjeuner; le second viendra à dix heures pendant la grand’messe
.
”
Chapitre XXVIII.