Video from The Swedish Investor
The opposite of fragility is anti- fragility.
You and I deal with this concept in our lives everyday.
The pandemic has clearly shown our fragility and that our Hubris, our arrogance has incurred God's passive wrath. Just has God has done in the past with plagues, with confusing languages at the Tower of Babylon and the flood he now disciplines us in our futile sin.
Reflect personally on where you are at in this moment in time. Are you caught up in the politics and arrogance of our culture?
Taleb points out that many things require some kind of stress to function well, such as our bodies. If the environment is too disinfected for example, we lose the ability to resist infection. Vaccines introduce a little of what is harmful to build resistance to disease. Yet we are all-too fragile, vulnerable to being destroyed by one dose of a poison or virus, one accident in a vehicle at the wrong speed.
Nothing is the exact opposite of fragile, and that is why "There is no word for 'antifragility' in the main known languages, ancient, colloquial or slang." Taleb points out.
"Pope Francis said the coronavirus pandemic exposed the “fragility of world systems” and called for a “better kind of politics” that would serve the common good in his latest encyclical.
In the papal teaching, entitled Brothers All, Francis says: “As I was writing this letter, the Covid-19 pandemic unexpectedly erupted, exposing our false securities.
Aside from the different ways that various countries responded to the crisis, their inability to work together became quite evident.”
He said the fear and uncertainty brought on by the pandemic made it clear it was time to rethink “our styles of life, our relationships, the organization of our societies and, above all, the meaning of our existence.”
The Argentine head of the Catholic Church warned against plunging back into “feverish consumerism and new forms of egotistic self-preservation” once the health crisis has passed and that it was important to learn from the pandemic.
“If only we might keep in mind all those elderly persons who died for lack of respirators, partly as a result of the dismantling, year after year, of healthcare systems,” the pope said in the letter he signed before the tomb of St. Francis in Assisi, Italy." Latina Media Oct 4
The book is a difficult read and are all of Taleb's books yet there are pearls of wisdom and insight.
The Rule of Unintended consequences which Taleb points to is something all of are inherently aware of even if we can't name it. Crap happens even with the best plans.
We as proud creators tend to place too much weight on having an appropriate theory to explain why something works, rather than simply looking at whether it does or not.
Pope Francis was right. God is through our Human Spirit aware of our inward struggles, our unbelief. Search your heart, pray, work with other people. We have a great opportunity to change our world or in our sin can become a part of it's disorder!
Top 5 Takeaways:
1. Introducing the Triad: Fragile – Robust – Antifragile
2. Naïve Interventionism (Bear Favors)
3. Concavity & Convexity – Detecting What is Fragile and Antifragile
4. The Answer to the Black Swan Problem
5. The Barbell Strategy
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