BURN FROM IT OR LEARN FROM IT (Chaos getting Sorted) :
You go to school, you study, get good grades, you take an office job in a company and you settle. This is the narrative of life most of the households have. Basically; the narrative of playing it safe and looking forward to a day where ultimately all problems of your life gets settled (once you get a good paying job basically).
Among few other qualitative and quantitative indicators the lindy effect is a great indicator for fragility and anti-fragility. If something have managed to survive for a long-time ; be it an idea, a habit, a building, a technology, a book, a company, etc, etc.We can conclude it's either robust or anti-fragile. We can do this because time is the ultimate stressor. Something that has survived time has necessarily also survived a lot of random events. That what is fragile, would've gone extinct.
Little do we realize that 'settling' in a true sense is actually not part of the game.
The more we have the goal in our minds to settle the harder it would be to actually be secured in life. Then what's the answer?
The answer is that you should stop seeing randomness and Uncertainty as a bad thing.
You see, it's all the perception of things in our mind that brings suffering. If you take non-seurity as a part and parcel of your life then it won't seem that bothersome.
Something even better starts to happen when you stop assuming seurity, you LEARN FROM YOUR MISTAKES AND IMPROVE!
You see, when you see black swans and randomness in general as something unwanted, then you refuse to learn from it and tend to make the same decisions in the future and play the blame game. On the otherhand, when you assume Uncertainty then you tend to ACTUALLY REDUCE IT IN THE FUTURE BY LEARNING FROM IT IN THE PAST, without trying too hard to predict it before hand (We are not gods)!
This nature of being is called 'Anti-fragility '.
These are things that gain from Randomness and Uncertainty rather than breaking down from it.
In general there are 3 types of system that exist in nature:
1) The fragile: Things that breakdown when faced with randomness and uncertainties. E.g; glass, weak people, etc.
2) The robust: Things that neither gain nor breakdown from random stressors and uncertainties. E.g: Diamonds, Very Hard rocks, etc.
3) The Anti-fragile: Things that gain and improve from randomness, uncertainties and random stressors. E.g: Humans and Evolution of Living organisms on earth in general.
--> Naïve Intervensionism: Anti-fragile systems are often better left alone. Unnecessary external intervention to correct an Anti-fragile system is what in turn turns it weak. This is one of the ways antifragile systems are turned into fragile systems because intervention actually reduces the healthy amount of randomness and uncertainty that the system needed to grow stronger .
E.g: Soccer moms, A friend who uses anti-septics all day and politicians who are bailing out banks.
--> The Lindy Effect: When it comes to non-perishable things, that which is old is also that which is expected to survive the longest (old is gold). This is the "Lindy Effect".
--> Answer to the Black Swan Problem and randomness in general:
Negative Black Swans and unforseen risks cause a lot of trouble. So it would be optimal if it would be possible to forsee them. But we'll, that's the issue with the unpredictable, it's not possible to predict. What's far easier is to see if the system is exposed to such Uncertainties. We can try to change the system from a fragile one to a robust or anti-fragile one. By focusing on exposure to failure, we make the predictions about the failure largely irrelevant. In a fragile system, we introduce redundancy to reduce the fragility, i.e, an anti-fragile or robust system often have options.
E.g: 1) A airport check people for weapons before they board a plane, not because we think they carry weapons but because the harm we expose ourselves to if we don't do so is really big. The checking of people increase the effort of the airline personal, but it's not comparable to the price that the passenger will have to pay, should the accident be there. We introduced redundancy into a fragile system to reduce the fragility.
2) Nature Understands this well; humans have 2 kidneys, 2 breasts, 2 testicle, fat reserves, etc, etc. Also our systems are anti-fragile sort of like that of the airport, in a sense that our body overcompensates to stressors. If you do one rep in 100 kg in deadline, your body will prepare you for lifting 109 kg for the next time. Humans don't understand this as good as nature does, unfortunately. We tend to remove redundancy and options for the sake of efficiency.
Evolution also is highly anti-fragile and has options in it. Individuals die and even whole species go extinct from time to time. The surviving genes are better than the one which go extinct, the survival of the fittest. How can nature do this? It's because of optionality. If the dinosaurs can't handle change, random stressors and uncertainties of nature then maybe the mamals can!
Thus I finally conclude this series of mine on "Chaos getting Sorted" after a long journey of 4 years (2020- 2024) of understanding, reading, experiences and realizations from life.
Thankyou all for reading!