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Welcome to today’s What is The Future For Cities podcast and its Research episode; my name is Fanni, and today I will introduce a book by summarising it. The episode really is just a short summary of the original book, and, in case it is interesting enough, I would encourage everyone to check out the whole book.

Our summary today works with the book titled Antifragile: Things that gain from disorder from 2014 by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. This summary is based on Larry Prusak’s summary which Taleb has praised, another summary found on Farnam Steet Blog, and my own reading experience. Since we are investigating the future of cities, I though it would be interesting to see how systems can work beyond sustainability and robustness, antifragile, as Nassim Nicholas Taleb defines it. The book is about how systems can become antifragile and what the advantages are of becoming one through many different examples.

The book is a philosophical tract about the design and evolution of structures for human and non-human institutions. Taleb discussed the fragilista approach of the top-down planners who while creating policies, also create unintended consequences, making systems more fragile than before, instead of making them antifragile.

So what antifragile means? It refers to something that is unbreakable, yes, but not because it is impervious to assult. It actually grows and flourishes because it is stressed and then allowed to order itself in response. Something that benefits from shocks, thrives and grows when exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder and stressors, and it loves adventure, risk and uncertainty. Like the Hydra from Greek mythology: when one head cut off, two grow back in its place.

Antifragility is beyond resilience and robustness. In Taleb’s work, the resilient resists shocks and stays the same, while antifragile gets better. Antifragility allows an entitiy not merely to withstand all the black swans coming its way but to absorb their forceful volatility and emerge only stronger. Fragile things have their real opposite not in durable things, but in things that gain from disorder. Contrastring antifragile and fragile, robust appears in the middle, creating an intermediate category between the two.

Taleb assigns antifragility to everything that has changed with time: evolution, culture, ideas, revolutions, political and legal systems, the rise of cities, cultures, and bacterial resistance, even our own existence as a species on this planet. Antifragility determines the boundaries and barriers between something that is living and organic (or complex) and a physical object, like a desk.

Antifragility has a singular property of allowing us to deal with the unknown, to do things without understanding them, and do them well. According to Taleb, we, as humans, are much better at doing than at thinking thanks to antifragility. As antifragility and fragility are on one spectrum, understanding one helps to understand the other better as well. Just as we cannot improve health without reducing disease, or increase wealth without first decreasing losses.

If we are able to grasp the mechanisms of antifragility, we can build a systematic and broad guide to nonpredictive decisions under the uncertainty of any situation with randomness, unpredictability, opacity or incomplete understanding of things.

The opposite of antifragility, fragility can be measured much easier than to predict some risks threatening the fragile element. These risks are called black swans with their impossibility of calculating the risks of consequential rare events and predicting their occurrence. And the sensitivity to harm from volatility is tractable more so than forecasting the event that would cause the harm. Throughout the book, Taleb proposes rules for moving from the fragile toward the antifragile, with reduction of fragility for harnessing antifragility. Based on the comparison between fragility and antifragility, we can almost always detect antifragility using a simple asymmetry: anything that has more upside than downside from random events, or certain shocks, is antifragile, the reverse is fragile.

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. For example, we have been fragilizing the economy, our health , political life, education, almost everything by suppressing randomness and volatility. This is the tragedy of modernity: as with neurotically overprotective parents, those trying to help are often hurting us the most, the effect also known as iatrogenics. In iatrogenics, the treatment and intervention causes more harm than benefits.

Although the modern world may increase technical knowledge, it will also make things more fragile. The black swan events seem predictable with hindsight. But, according to Taleb, life is more complex than shown in our memory. Our brains are in the business to make history into something smooth and linear which makes us underestimate randomness. So when we see one, we fear it and overreact. Due to this thriving for order, some human sytems tend to be exposed to harm from black swans and almost never get any benefit from them. You get pseudo-order when you seek order, you only get a measure of order and control when you embrace randomness.

Complex systems are full of interdependencies and non-linear responses. In this case, nonlinear means that when you double the dose of a medication, you don’t get double the effects. In such environments, simple causal associations are misplaced, it is hard to see how things work by looking at single parts. MAN-made complex systems tend to develop cascades and runaway chains of reactions that decrease, even eliminate, predictability and cause outside events. So the modern world may be increasing in technological knowledge but, paradoxically, it is making things a lot more unpredictable. An annoying aspect of the black swan problem, in fact the central and largely missed point, is that the odds of rare events are simply not computable.

And robustness in itself is not enough. Taleb took Mother Nature as the perfect example of antifragility. Nature is not just safe. It is aggressive in destroying and replacing in selecting and reshuffling. When it comes to random events, robust is certainly not good enough. In the long run, everything with the most minute vulnerability breaks, given the ruthlessness of time – yet our planet has been around for billions of years and convincingly, robustness just can’t be it: you need perfect robustness for a crack not to end up crashing the system. Given the unattainability of perfect robustness, we need a mechanism by which the system regenerates itself continuously by using, rather than suffering from random events, unpredictable shocks, stressors and volatility. Fragile and antifragile are relative – there is no absolute. You may be more antifragile than your neighbour but that doesn’t make you antifragile. Complex systems are weakened, even killed when deprived of stressors.

All of this can lead to some pretty significant conclusions. Often it is impossible to be antifragile, but falling short of that you should be robust, not fragile. How you become robust? Make sure you are not fragile. Eliminate things that make you fragile. As Taleb put it: you have to avoid debt because debt makes the system more fragile. You have to increase redundancies in some spaces. You have to avoid optimization. In the black swan world, optimization isn’t possible. The best you can achieve is a reduction of fragility and greater robustness.

As the most important things, I would like to highlight 3 aspects:

1.  Man-made systems tend to be more fragile and thus more prone to failure.
2. Robustness is not enough for something to grow and thrive on risks and in the real world, for that, antifragility is needed.
3. For the system to be antifragile, systems need to allow small mistakes to learn from and to mitigate the biggest disasters

Additionally, it would be great to talk about the following questions:

1. Which is better: sustainable or antifragile?
2. How would an antifragile city or living would look like?
3. How can you apply the antifragility concept in real life?

What was the most interesting part for you? What questions did arise for you? Do you have any follow up questions? Let me know on Twitter @WTF4Cities or on the website where the transcripts and show notes are available! I hope this was an interesting research for you as well, and thanks for tuning in!

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