Abdullah MUSLIM’s Reviews > Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder > Status Update

Predicting—any prediction—without skin in the
game can be as dangerous for others as unmanned nuclear plants without the engineer
sleeping on the premises. Pilots should be on the plane.

People in risk management only consider risky things that have hurt them
in the past (given their focus on “evidence”), not realizing that, in the past, before these
events took place, these occurrences that hurt them severely were completely without
precedent, escaping standards.

when a collection of people write “There is nothing new here” and each one cites a different
originator of the idea, one can safely say there is something effectively new.

If you
are looking for your misplaced wallet in your living room, in a trial and error mode,
you exercise rationality by not looking in the same place twice. In many pursuits, every
trial, every failure provides additional information, each more valuable than the
previous one—if you know what does not work, or where the wallet is not located.

It means letting children play a little bit, not much more than a little bit, with fire and learn from injuries, for the sake of their own future safety.

Take the situation in which you have a lot to lose
and little to gain. If an additional quantity of wealth, say, a thousand Phoenician
shekels, would not benefit you, but you would feel great harm from the loss of an
equivalent amount, you have an asymmetry. And it is not a good asymmetry: you are
fragile.

It’s much easier to sell “Look what I did for you” than “Look
what I avoided for you.”

Time for American policy makers to understand that the more they intervene in other
countries for the sake of stability, the more they bring instability (except for emergencyroom-style cases). Or perhaps time to reduce the role of policy makers in policy
affairs.
One of life’s packages: no stability without volatility.

my characterization of a loser is someone who, after making a mistake,
doesn’t introspect, doesn’t exploit it, feels embarrassed and defensive rather than
enriched with a new piece of information, and tries to explain why he made the mistake
rather than moving on. These types often consider themselves the “victims” of some
large plot, a bad boss, or bad weather.

When you want deviations, and you
don’t care about the possible dispersion of outcomes that the future can bring, since
most will be helpful, you are antifragile.