It’s a lopsided world

About six months ago, four books by mathematician and philosopher Nassim Nicholas Taleb were re-released as a package deal. The book titles are Antifragile, The Black Swan, Fooled by Randomness, and The Bed of Procrustes. Called the “Incerto 4-Book Bundle,” this collection is available in the Kindle electronic format ($51.99). A boxed set of the physical books will be available in October ($70).

You don’t need this bundle to get the books, though. They’re widely available individually.

Taleb’s main turf is the notion of uncertainty, or, if you prefer, risk. He applies his outlook and strategies to many elements of life, ranging from seeking (or avoiding) doctors to avoiding (or seeking) financial speculation.

Of these four books, the most recent is The Bed of Procrustes. This is a small collection of Taleb’s aphorisms. The other books form sort of a trilogy of works on uncertainty and how it plays a role in our lives.

If you’re looking for nutritious fare for your summertime reading you can’t go wrong with Taleb, especially with Antifragile, which is, in a word, a masterpiece. I’ve mentioned it a few times in this space. I couldn’t ever do justice to the book by trying to summarize it, so I enjoy taking the occasional random concept and thinking about it.

Even if we don’t see risk directly, we certainly do see its manifestations. So we often see the superficial layer of effects while remaining oblivious to the deeper network of causes. Quite often these causes aren’t just randomness but are rooted in reactions to randomness; these reactions spawn their own consequences, and those consequences spawn, in turn, yet more consequences.

Meanwhile, randomness itself can, and often does, look non-random. This notion, as you might suspect, inspired the book Fooled by Randomness.

The smart answer to an uncertain world isn’t to try hiding from risk at all costs, since this would, among other things, sever our appreciation of reality, a situation that, from what I see, is increasingly common in our virtually based world. If we forget about reality, though, reality doesn’t forget about us. It just patiently eyes us while licking its chops.

One insidious thing about school is that we’re often conditioned to worship the concept of the average and the related concept of the bell curve, a symmetrical curve that has a centralized bias around an average. What Taleb points out is that risks, and, more importantly, their consequences, are often asymmetrical.

For example, if you drive along Middle Road at midnight on a payday Friday, a random occurrence can take 40 years off your lifespan, but no random occurrence is realistically likely to add 40 years to it. This is a lopsided situation, not a symmetrical situation. And it just goes to remind us how an extreme event, like a car crash, can change our entire lives. “Unlikely” doesn’t mean “not important.”

On the other hand, if you’re stuck in a dead end career that doesn’t pay well, your only shot at improving your future might be to take some risks, risks that, unlike a drive down Middle Road, have some potential upside. Many successful novels, for instance, were penned by the glow of midnight oil as their authors paid the rent with ho-hum day jobs. Of course, many more unsuccessful novels were penned by writers in the same situations. But as long as they can’t fine you for failure to sell a novel, there’s some upside here and, in terms of cash flow, no disastrous downside.

A related example I see quite often is two-earner couples, where one has a normal career while the other takes a more entrepreneurial path. Assuming that the normal job is enough to cover their living expenses, they can reach for a jackpot while still keeping their feet on solid ground.

By contrast, and probably more common, are two-earner couples that need both of their incomes to keep solvent. We’re back to Middle Road where risk is a threat, not a promise. Sometimes this unenviable situation is unavoidable, and sometimes it comes via a taste for living the high life.

Anyway, Antifragile inspires me to think about such things. That’s part of its charm. A book that inspires thinking is more useful than a book that just talks.

As for the term, “antifragile,” it refers to systems that gain from volatility and random shocks (up to a point, anyway). We all know what “fragile” means, of course; it’s what you write on a package because the contents might shatter if somebody drops the box. But there are many processes, be they biological or economic, in which, over time, the repeated dropping of the conceptual box actually strengthens the contents. People are often scared of risk and volatility, but trying to avoid them entirely can actually create situations that are ultimately weaker, not stronger, and hence more fragile than they’d otherwise be.

For my summertime reading I’ll be poking my nose in these books again. And if you take a look at any of them, our uncertain world will have one certain thing: You and I will have plenty of interesting stuff to talk about.