Fluctuat nec mergitur (fluctuates, or floats, but does not sink) goes the Latin saying.
HUNGRY DONKEYS
So far we have argued that preventing randomness in an antifragile system is not always a good idea. Let us now look at the situation in which adding randomness has been a standard operating method, as the needed fuel for an antifragile system permanently hungry for it.
A donkey equally famished and thirsty caught at an equal distance between food and water would unavoidably die of hunger or thirst. But he can be saved thanks to a random nudge one way or the other. This metaphor is named Buridan’s Donkey, after the medieval philosopher Jean de Buridan, who—among other, very complicated things—introduced the thought experiment. When some systems are stuck in a dangerous impasse, randomness and only randomness can unlock them and set them free. You can see here that absence of randomness equals guaranteed death.
The idea of injecting random noise into a system to improve its functioning has been applied across fields. By a mechanism called stochastic resonance, adding random noise to the background makes you hear the sounds (say, music) with more accuracy. We saw earlier that the psychological effect of overcompensation helps us get signals in the midst of noise; here it is not psychological but a physical property of the system. Weak SOS signals, too weak to get picked up by remote receptors, can become audible in the presence of background noise and random interference. By adding to the signal, random hiss allows it to rise sufficiently above the threshold of detection to become audible—nothing in that situation does better than randomness, which comes for free.
Consider the method of annealing in metallurgy, a technique used to make metal stronger and more homogeneous. It involves the heating and controlled cooling of a material, to increase the size of the crystals and reduce their defects. Just as with Buridan’s donkey, the heat causes the atoms to become unstuck from their initial positions and wander randomly through states of higher energy; the cooling gives them more chances of finding new, better configurations.
As a child I was exposed to a version of this annealing effect by watching my father, who was a man of habits, tap a wooden barometer every day upon coming home. He would gently strike the barometer, then get a reading for his homemade weather forecast. The stress on the barometer got the needle unstuck and allowed it to find its true equilibrium position. That’s a local brand of antifragility. Inspired by the metallurgical technique, mathematicians use a method of computer simulation called simulated annealing to bring more general optimal solutions to problems and situations, solutions that only randomness can deliver.
Randomness works well in search—sometimes better than humans. Nathan Myhrvold brought to my attention a controversial 1975 paper published in Science showing that random drilling was superior to whatever search method was being employed at the time.
And, ironically, the so-called chaotic systems, those experiencing a brand of variations called chaos, can be stabilized by adding randomness to them. I watched an eerie demonstration of the effects, presented by a doctoral student who first got balls to jump chaotically on a table in response to steady vibrations on the surface. These steady shocks made the balls jump in a jumbled and inelegant manner. Then, as by magic, he moved a switch and the jumps became orderly and smooth. The magic is that such change of regime, from chaos to order, did not take place by removing chaos, but by adding random, completely random but low-intensity shocks. I came out of the beautiful experiment with so much enthusiasm that I wanted to inform strangers on the street, “I love randomness!”
Political Annealing
It has been hard to explain to real people that stressors and uncertainty have their role in life—so you can imagine what it would be like to explain it to politicians. Yet this is where a certain dose of randomness is needed the most.
I was once shown the script of a film based on a parable of a city completely ruled by randomness—very Borgesian. At set intervals, the ruler randomly assigns to the denizens a new role in the city. Say the butcher would now become a baker, and the baker a prisoner, etc. At the end, people end up rebelling against the ruler, asking for stability as their inalienable right.
I immediately thought that perhaps the opposite parable should be written: instead of having the rulers randomize the jobs of citizens, we should have citizens randomize the jobs of rulers, naming them by raffles and removing them at random as well. That is similar to simulated annealing—and it happens to be no less effective. It turned out that the ancients—again, those ancients!—were aware of it: the members of the Athenian assemblies were chosen by lot, a method meant to protect the system from degeneracy. Luckily, this effect has been investigated with modern political systems. In a computer simulation, Alessandro Pluchino and his colleagues showed how adding a certain number of randomly selected politicians to the process can improve the functioning of the parliamentary system.
Or sometimes the system benefits from a different type of stressors. For Voltaire, the best form of government was the one tempered with political assassination. Regicide is sort of the equivalent of tapping on the barometer to make it work better. That, too, creates some often-needed reshuffling, and one that would never have been done voluntarily. The void created at the top allows the annealing effect, causing the new leader to emerge. The secular drop in premature deaths in society has deprived us of a naturalistic managerial turnover. Murder is the standard procedure for succession in the mafia (the last publicized annealing was when John Gotti murdered his predecessor in front of a New York steakhouse to become the capo of the family). Outside the mafia, bosses and board members now stay longer, a fact that impedes many domains: CEOs, tenured academics, politicians, journalists—and we need to offset this condition with random lotteries.
Unfortunately, you cannot randomize a political party out of existence. What is plaguing us in the United States is not the two-party system, but being stuck with the same two parties. Parties don’t have organic built-in expiration dates.
Finally the ancients perfected the method of random draw in more or less difficult situations—and integrated it into divinations. These draws were really meant to pick a random exit without having to make a decision, so one would not have to live with the burden of the consequences later. You went with what the gods told you to do, so you would not have to second-guess yourself later. One of the methods, called sortes virgilianae (fate as decided by the epic poet Virgil), involved opening Virgil’s Aeneid at random and interpreting the line that presented itself as direction for the course of action. You should use such method for every sticky business decision. I will repeat until I get hoarse: the ancients evolved hidden and sophisticated ways and tricks to exploit randomness. For instance, I actually practice such randomizing heuristic in restaurants. Given the lengthening and complication of menus, subjecting me to what psychologists call the tyranny of choice, with the stinging feeling after my decision that I should have ordered something else, I blindly and systematically duplicate the selection by the most overweight male at the table; and when no such person is present, I randomly pick from the menu without reading the name of the item, under the peace of mind that Baal made the choice for me.
THAT TIME BOMB CALLED STABILITY
We saw that absence of fire lets highly flammable material accumulate. People are shocked and outraged when I tell them that absence of political instability, even war, lets explosive material and tendencies accumulate under the surface.
The Second Step: Do (Small) Wars Save Lives?
The anti-Enlightenment political philosopher Joseph de Maistre remarked that conflicts strengthen countries. This is highly debatable—war is not a good thing, and, as the victim of a brutal civil war, I can attest to its horrors. But what I find interesting—and elegant—in his reasoning is his pointing out the mistake of analyzing losses from a given event and ignoring the rest of the story. It is also interesting that people tend to grasp the opposite more easily, that is, spot the error of
analyzing immediate gains without taking into account the long-term side effects. For we look at casualties as losses without taking into account the second step, what happens later—unlike gardeners, who understand rather well that pruning trees strengthens them.
Likewise peace—some kind of forced, constrained, non-natural peace—may be costly in lives: just consider the great complacency that led to the Great War after almost a century of relative peace in Europe, coupled with the rise of the heavily armed nation-state.
Again, we all love peace and we all love economic and emotional stability—but do not want to be suckers in the long term. We seek vaccination at every new school year (injecting ourselves with a bit of harm to build immunity) but fail to transfer the mechanism to political and economic domains.
What to Tell the Foreign Policy Makers
To summarize, the problem with artificially suppressed volatility is not just that the system tends to become extremely fragile; it is that, at the same time, it exhibits no visible risks. Also remember that volatility is information. In fact, these systems tend to be too calm and exhibit minimal variability as silent risks accumulate beneath the surface. Although the stated intention of political leaders and economic policy makers is to stabilize the system by inhibiting fluctuations, the result tends to be the opposite. These artificially constrained systems become prone to Black Swans. Such environments eventually experience massive blowups, of the type seen in Figure 3, catching everyone off guard and undoing years of stability or, in almost all cases, ending up far worse than they were in their initial volatile state. Indeed, the longer it takes for the blowup to occur, the worse the resulting harm to both economic and political systems.
Seeking stability by achieving stability (and forgetting the second step) has been a great sucker game for economic and foreign policies. The list is depressingly long. Take rotten governments like the one in Egypt before the riots of 2011, supported by the United States for four decades in order “to avoid chaos,” with the side effect of a coterie of privileged pillagers using superpowers as a backstop—identical to bankers using their “too big to fail” status to scam taxpayers and pay themselves high bonuses.
Saudi Arabia is the country that at present worries and offends me the most; it is a standard case of top-down stability enforced by a superpower at the expense of every single possible moral and ethical metric—and, of course, at the expense of stability itself.
So a place “allied” to the United States is a total monarchy, devoid of a constitution. But that is not what is morally shocking. A group of between seven and fifteen thousand members of the royal family runs the place, leading a lavish, hedonistic lifestyle in open contradiction with the purist ideas that got them there. Look at the contradiction: the stern desert tribes whose legitimacy is derived from Amish-like austerity can, thanks to a superpower, turn to hedonistic uninhibited pleasure seeking—the king openly travels for pleasure with a retinue that fills four Jumbo jets. Quite a departure from his ancestors. The family members amassed a fortune now largely in Western safes. Without the United States, the country would have had its revolution, a regional breakup, some turmoil, then perhaps—by now—some stability. But preventing noise makes the problem worse in the long run.
Clearly the “alliance” between the Saudi royal family and the United States was meant to provide stability. What stability? How long can one confuse the system? Actually “how long” is irrelevant: this stability is similar to a loan one has to eventually pay back. And there are ethical issues I leave to Chapter 24, particularly casuistry, when someone finds a justification “for the sake of” to violate an otherwise inflexible moral rule.2 Few people are aware of the fact that the bitterness of Iranians toward the United States comes from the fact that the United States—a democracy—installed a monarch, the repressive Shah of Iran, who pillaged the place but gave the United States the “stability” of access to the Persian Gulf. The theocratic regime in Iran today is largely the result of such repression. We need to learn to think in second steps, chains of consequences, and side effects.
More worrisome, U.S. policy toward the Middle East has historically, and especially since September 11, 2001, been unduly focused on the repression of any and all political fluctuations in the name of preventing “Islamic fundamentalism”—a trope that almost every regime has used. Aside from the fact that killing Islamists compounds their numbers, the West and its autocratic Arab allies have strengthened Islamic fundamentalists by forcing them underground.
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 emergency-room-style cases). Or perhaps time to reduce the role of policy makers in policy affairs.
One of life’s packages: no stability without volatility.
WHAT DO WE CALL HERE MODERNITY?
My definition of modernity is humans’ large-scale domination of the environment, the systematic smoothing of the world’s jaggedness, and the stifling of volatility and stressors.
Modernity corresponds to the systematic extraction of humans from their randomness-laden ecology—physical and social, even epistemological. Modernity is not just the postmedieval, postagrarian, and postfeudal historical period as defined in sociology textbooks. It is rather the spirit of an age marked by rationalization (naive rationalism), the idea that society is understandable, hence must be designed, by humans. With it was born statistical theory, hence the beastly bell curve. So was linear science. So was the notion of “efficiency”—or optimization.
Modernity is a Procrustean bed, good or bad—a reduction of humans to what appears to be efficient and useful. Some aspects of it work: Procrustean beds are not all negative reductions. Some may be beneficial, though these are rare.
Consider the life of the lion in the comfort and predictability of the Bronx Zoo (with Sunday afternoon visitors flocking to look at him in a combination of curiosity, awe, and pity) compared to that of his cousins in freedom. We, at some point, had free-range humans and free-range children before the advent of the golden period of the soccer mom.
We are moving into a phase of modernity marked by the lobbyist, the very, very limited liability corporation, the MBA, sucker problems, secularization (or rather reinvention of new sacred values like flags to replace altars), the tax man, fear of the boss, spending the weekend in interesting places and the workweek in a putatively less interesting one, the separation of “work” and “leisure” (though the two would look identical to someone from a wiser era), the retirement plan, argumentative intellectuals who would disagree with this definition of modernity, literal thinking, inductive inference, philosophy of science, the invention of social science, smooth surfaces, and egocentric architects. Violence is transferred from individuals to states. So is financial indiscipline. At the center of all this is the denial of antifragility.
There is a dependence on narratives, an intellectualization of actions and ventures. Public enterprises and functionaries—even employees of large corporations—can only do things that seem to fit some narrative, unlike businesses that can just follow profits, with or without a good-sounding story. Remember that you need a name for the color blue when you build a narrative, but not in action—the thinker lacking a word for “blue” is handicapped; not the doer. (I’ve had a hard time conveying to intellectuals the intellectual superiority of practice.)
Modernity widened the difference between the sensational and the relevant—in a natural environment the sensational is, well, sensational for a reason; today we depend on the press for such essentially human things as gossip and anecdotes and we care about the private lives of people in very remote places.
Indeed, in the past, when we were not fully aware of antifragility and self-organization and spontaneous healing, we managed to respect these properties by constructing beliefs that served the purpose of managing and surviving uncertainty. We imparted improvements to the agency of god(s). We may have d
enied that things can take care of themselves without some agency. But it was the gods that were the agents, not Harvard-educated captains of the ship.
So the emergence of the nation-state falls squarely into this pro-gression—the transfer of agency to mere humans. The story of the nation-state is that of the concentration and magnification of human errors. Modernity starts with the state monopoly on violence, and ends with the state’s monopoly on fiscal irresponsibility.
We will discuss next two central elements at the core of modernity. Primo, in Chapter 7, naive interventionism, with the costs associated with fixing things that one should leave alone. Secundo, in Chapter 8 and as a transition to Book III, this idea of replacing God and the gods running future events with something even more religiously fundamentalist: the unconditional belief in the idea of scientific prediction regardless of the domain, the aim to squeeze the future into numerical reductions whether reliable or unreliable. For we have managed to transfer religious belief into gullibility for whatever can masquerade as science.
1 The financier George Cooper has revived the argument in The Origin of Financial Crises—the argument is so crisp that an old trader friend, Peter Nielsen, has distributed it to every person he knows.
Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder Page 13
