Taleb (btw are și paginã de fb; ca Amy Tan și Rabih Alameddine, de altfel; poftim, unul dintre multele avantaje ale reţelelor de socializare de prezentat tuturor cârcotașilor care deplâng îndepãrtarea virtualã de experienţe autentice și viaţa trãitã plenar) ia la puricat diverse aspecte ale existenţei noastre actuale din perspectiva lui potrivit cãreia soluţia universalã la relele socio-economico-culturalo-educaţionalo-istorico-medicalo-financiare ale omenirii constã în dobândirea acestei antifragilitãţi.
Si, cum el e o persoanã certãreaţã, impulsivã și acidã, cartea este o plãcere absolutã (chiar dacã uneori nu am fost de acord cu luãrile lui de poziţie –prea retrograde și tradiţionaliste pe alocuri- iar unele propuneri sau analize mi s-au pãrut de-a dreptul imbecile).
Sã vã introduc niţel în modul în care înţelege antifragilitatea prietenul nostru Taleb și în beneficiile acestei stãri de invincibilitate.
El pornește de la exemplul naturii și de la faptul cã aceasta nu trebuie sã demonstreze nimãnui cã are dreptate pentru cã este antifragilã și nu are nevoie nevoie de nici o confirmare pentru cã aceastã antifragilitate o face mai puternicã decât majoritatea celorlalte lucruri, inclusiv civilizaţia. In linii mari, cu cât un organism sau sistem trebuie sã se confrunte cu condiţii adverse de intensitate moderatã (altfel, dacã ar fi prea scãzutã nu ar avea nici o influenţã, iar dacã ar fi prea puternicã ar duce la anihilare, distrugere), cu atât el devine mai flexibil, mai adaptabil, mai experimentat, mai puternic, adicã mai antifragil.
"Crucially, if antifragility is the property of all those natural (and complex) systems that have survived, depriving these systems of volatility, randomness, and stressors will harm them. They will weaken, die, or blow up. We have been fragilizing the ecoonomy, our health, political life, education, almost everything... by suppressing randomness and volatility. Just as spending a month in bed (preferably with an unabridged version of War and Peace and access to The Sopranos’ entire eighty-six episodes) leads to muscle atrophy, complex systems are weakened, even killed, when deprived of stressors. Much of our modern, structured, world has been harming us with top-down policies and contraptions (dubbed "Soviet-Harvard delusions" in the book) which do precisely this: an insult to the antifragility of systems."
Cartea preia o idee mai veche a lui Taleb: apariţia Black Swan-urilor (lebede negre –are și o carte pe tema aceasta). Aceste lebede sunt dezastre (de exemplu, accidentul nuclear de la Fukushima) care ne dezechilibreazã și care nu sunt luate în calcul în mod adecvat întrucât specialiștii care analizeazã riscurile iau ca punct de reper ultimul mare dezastru, uitând cã acesta, la rândul lui, a cauzat un nivel foarte ridicat de pagube tocmai pentru cã specialiștii luaserã în calcul cel mai mare dezastru produs înaintea lui și care s-a dovedit a nu fi cel mai mare dezastru posibil (de exemplu, cel mai puternic tsunami care ar putea afecta o centralã nuclearã dintr-o insulã japonezã).
"Black Swans (capitalized) are large-scale unpredictable and irregular events of massive consequence –unpredicted by a certain observer, and such unpredictor is generally called the "turkey" when he is both surprised and harmed by these events. I have made the claim that most of history comes from Black Swans events, while we worry about fine-tuning our understanding of the ordinary, and hence develop models, theories, or representations that cannot possibly track them or measure the possibility of these shocks.
Black Swans hijack our brains, making us feel "sort of" or "almost" predicted them, because they are retrospectively explainable. We don’t realize the role of these Swans in life because of this illusion of predictability. Life is more, a lot more, labyrinthine than shown in our memory –our minds are in the business of turning history into something smooth and linear, which makes us underestimate randomness."
Taleb face o pledoarie împotriva aroganţei noastre de a dori deţinerea controlului absolut și de a raţionaliza totul. Deși, personal, consider cã acest proces de a înţelege ce se întâmplã în jurul nostru și în noi înșine este în general constructiv și pozitiv, trebuie sã admit cã Taleb are un punct bun atunci când vine vorba de a exagera aceastã dorinţã de a ne bãga nasul peste tot și a schimba lucrurile în numele unei idei de mai bine care rãmâne, în ultimã instanţã, relativã.
"[...] simplicity has been difficult to implement in modern life because it is against the spirit of a certain brand of people who seek sophistication so they can justify their profession.
Less is more and usually more effective. Thus I will produce a small number of tricks, directives, and interdicts –how to live in a world we don’t understand, or, rather, how to not be afraid to work with things we patently don’t understand, and, more principally, in what manner we should work with these. Or, even better, how to dare to look our ignorance in the face and not be ashamed of being human –be aggressively and proudly human. But that may require some structural changes.
What I propose is a road map to modify our man-made systems to let the simple –and natural- take their course."
Unul dintre marile rele ale societãţii actuale pe care îi place lui Taleb sã-l atace este faptul cã avem mulţi dãtãtori cu pãrerea (aka formatori de opinie, analiști economico-financiari etc.) care nu sunt deloc impactaţi de sfaturile pe care le dau. Ceea ce-i scapã de responsabilitatea personalã, dar societatea nici nu-i trage la rãspundere în caz cã au debitat prostii sub formã de îndrumãri, consiliere care au adus prejudicii celor de bunã credinţã care le-au urmat.
"At no point in history have so many non-risk-takers, that is, those with no personal exposure, exerted so much control.
The chief ethical rule is the following: Thou shalt not have antifragility at the expense of the fragility of others."
Toate profesiile "artificiale" create de nivelul tot mai sofisticat al mediului academic, știinţific, economic, financiar etc. în care trãim sunt cele mai fragile, cele mai impactate de orice variaţie serioasã a factorilor din domeniul în care activeazã și au cel mai scãzut grad de autonomie intelectualã.
"[...] someone earning close to minimum wage, say, a construction worker or taxi driver, does not overly depend on his reputation and is free to have his own opinions. He would be merely robust compared to the artist, who is antifragile. A mid-level bank employee with a mortgage would be fragile to the extreme. In face he would be completely a prisoner of the value system that invites him to be corrupt to the core – because of his dependence on the annual vacation in Barbados. [...] Take this easy-to-use heuristic [...] to detect the independence and robustness of someone’s reputation. With few exceptions, those who dress outrageously are robust or even antifragile in reputation; those clean-shaven types who dress in suits and ties are fragile to information about them."
Recomandarea de bazã a lui Taleb (cu care eu nu sunt întrutotul de acord; ca de exemplu în domeniul medical unde el susţine cã riscurile unei intervenţii nu sunt justificate decât atunci când afecţiunea aduce un real pericol pentru supravieţuirea bolnavului –este suficient de severã pentru a justifica aplicarea unui tratament deoarece altfel pacientul ar muri, altfel organismul ar trebui lãsat sã se vindece prin mijloace proprii) constã în a recunoaște și respecta antifragilitatea sistemului pentru a nu interveni în dereglarea lui decât în condiţiile în care este clar cã, în lipsa unui sprijin exogen, acesta ar dispãrea sub impactul factorilor adverși, de stres.
"[...] all I am saying is that we need to avoid being blind to the natural antifragility of systems, their ability to take care of themselves, and fight our tendency to harm and fragilize them by not giving them a chance to do so."
Idei care mi-au plãcut:
-critica adusã tendinţei noastre exacerbate de a face descoperiri și de a înţelege un domeniu pe baze teoretice
"[...] I feel corrupt and unethical if I have to look up a subject in a library as part of the writing itself. This acts as a filter –it is the only filter. If the subject is not interesting enough for me to look it up independently, for my own curiosity or purposes, and I have not done so before, then I should not be writing about it at all, period. It does not mean that libraries (physical and virtual) are not acceptable; it means that they should not be the source of any idea. Students pay to write essays on topics for which they have to derive knowledge from a library as a self-enhancement exercise; a professional who is compensated to write and is taken seriously by others should use a more potent filter. Only distilled ideas, ones that sit in us for a long time, are acceptable –and those that come from reality.
It is time to revive the not well-known philosophical notion of doxastic commitment, a class of beliefs that go beyond talk, and to which we are committed enough to take personal tasks."
-curiozitatea ca un comportament antifragil care trebuie încurajat
"Curiosity is antifragile, like an addiction, and is magnified by attempts to satisfy it –books have a secret mission and ability to multiply, as everyone who has wall-to-wall bookshelves knows well."
-oamenii care se pricep la o meserie, într-un domeniu nu sunt buni oratori, nu știu sã se facã plãcuţi de public
"Clearly, it is unrigorous to equate skills at doing with skills at talking. My experience of good practitioners is that they can be totally incomprehensible –they do not have to put much energy into turning their insight and internal coherence into elegant style and narratives. Entrepreneurs are selected to be just doers, not thinkers, and doers do, they don’t talk, and it would be unfair, wrong, and downright insulting to measure them in the talk department."
-sistemul școlar nu te educã, nu te formeazã ca un bun specialist, nu te face om cult; ceea ce faci tu în afara lui te definește cu adevãrat
"[...] This made me focus on what an intelligent antistudent needed to be: an autodidact –or a person of knowledge compared to the students called "swallowers" in Lebanese dialect, those who „swallow school material” and whose knowledge is only derived from the curriculum. The edge, I realized, isn’t in the package of what was on the official program of the baccalaureate, which everyone knew with small variations multiplying into large discrepancies in grades, but exactly what lay outside it."
Ce mi-a plãcut cel mai mult la Taleb este cã a aplicat bunul simţ la multe dintre valorile pe care noi le înghiţim fãrã sã le digerãm, fãrã sã le punem mai întâi sub semnul întrebãrii pentru a le valida veridicitatea, cã vorbește despre nocivitatea modelelor umane promovate în principal de sistemul economic și șmecheriile financiare de care au profitat ca marcã a unui statut superior.
"I am even more distraught for the future of the human race when I see a nerd behind a computer in a D.C. suburb, walking distance from a Starbucks coffeehouse, or a shopping mall, capable of blowing up an entire battalion in a remote place, say Pakistan, and afterward going to the gym for a "workout" (compare his culture to that of knights or samurai). Cowardice enhanced by technology is all connected: society is fragilized by spineless politicians, draft dodgers afraid of polls, and journalists building narratives, who create explosive deficits and compound agency problems because they want to look good in the short term. [...] These people will not get a statue from future generations."
