What is antifragile? Anything that has more upside than downside from random events
Our minds are in the business of turning history into something smooth and linear, which makes us underestimate randomness
Odds of rare events are simply not computable; the rarer the event, the less tractable, and the less we know about how frequent its occurrence
Do not mistake the unknown for the nonexistent
Less is more and usually more effective
Depriving systems of stressors, vital stressors, is not necessarily a good thing
Humans fail to recognize situations outside the contexts in which they usually learn about them
Absence of challenge, degrades the best of the best
The more energy you put into trying to control your ideas and what you think about, the more your ideas end up controlling you
You may never know what type of person someone is unless they are given opportunities to violate moral or ethical codes
Mistaking absence of evidence as evidence of absence is a harmful mistake to make
A lesson to keep in mind is that one should not expect laurels for bringing the truth
Agency problem or principle-agent problem is when the incentives for the agent are divorced from those of the principle(someone using their services)
Its much easier to sell “Look what I did for you” than “Look what I avoided for you” in a society that is performance biased
Be the kind of person that reacts to signal not noise
Curiosity is antifragile and is magnified by attempts to satisfy it
Success brings an asymmetry; you now have a lot more to lose than gain; you are hence fragile
A stoic is someone who transforms fear into prudence, pain into information, mistakes into initiation, and desire into undertaking
The first step towards antifragility is in decreasing downside rather than increasing upside
Almost nothing can be done both hastily and safely
Financial independence when used intelligently can make you robust; it gives you options and allows you to make right choices
People with too many complicated tricks and methods in their brains start missing very elementary things; Strip things to their simplest possible model
Never respond with a straight answer to a question that makes no sense to you
Do not mistake the unintelligible for the unintelligent
The payoff i.e. what happens to you, is always the most important thing, not the event itself
A squeeze occurs when people have no choice but to do something, and do it right away, regardless of the costs
If you have favorable asymmetries, then in the long run you will be outperforming the average in presence of uncertainty
The learning of life is about what to avoid
Time can act as a cleanser of noise by confining to its dustbins all overhyped works
If there is something in nature that you do not understand, odds are it makes sense in a deeper way that is beyond your imagination
An attribution problem arises when the person imputes his positive results to his own skills and his failures to luck
Via negativa for happiness is basically not “the pursuit of happiness” but rather “avoidance of unhappiness”
If you take risks and face your fate with dignity, there is nothing you can do that makes you small; if you do not take risks, there is nothing you can do that makes you grand, nothing! Moreover, when you take risks, insults by half men are similar to barks by nonhuman animals; you cannot feel insulted by a dog
Hammurabi risk management; the idea that a builder has more knowledge than the inspector and can hide risks in the foundations where they can be most invisible; the remedy is to remove incentive in favor of delayed risk
Skin in the game/ captain and ship rule; every captain goes down with the ship; cure for the agency problem
Narrative fallacy is our tendency to fit a narrative to a series of connected or disconnected facts
Subtractive knowledge via negativa; similar to Jacorbi’s inversion rule; you know what is wrong with more certainty than you know anything else