Antifragile on Janusworx

What I Learnt from Antifragile (V)

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Mon, 18 Jan 2021 05:45:00 +0530

This post was first sent to my newsletter on November 16th, 2020.
[You really ought to subscribe][1] :)

Teaching Birds How to Fly, & Skin in the Game!
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This probably is the last post, I have on Antifragile, for now.

These lessons over the past few weeks are those, that have sunk in for me, and something that I use on a daily basis. I’ll write more as I learn and internalise some new piece of wisdom (knowing the book, I’m sure I will).

Skin in the Game, is the most important thing, I have learnt from the book.
(It was important enough, to Taleb too, that he went wrote a whole book on it, after Antifragile.

The only folks I should ever listen to, follow, are the folks who have done it, who are doing the work, the folks who have skin in the game.
The world rests of the shoulders of doers.

It is not enough for me to just read a blog to learn Python or programming.
There are a whole lot of folks, spouting opinions, and telling me how to do things. But a guy, who has walked the path I want to walk, who uses his skills the way I aim to, who uses it to better the world he lives in?
Him, I will listen to and do what he tells me to, because he talks to me with his scars.

When I wanted to get out of debt, I read a whole lot of books, but the only person whose advice I followed, was Dave Ramsey

I was a rebellious teen and would have my disagreements with my parents, but growing up, I realise I still live the values they taught me. Because they lived it themselves. Hard work and faith.

The teaching birds how to fly is the flip side of the coin.
It speaks to folks who tell stories and explanations about things and events, after the fact.
Everything, I see, most near everything was built by tinkerers and doers.
Not by folks who theorised and saw the whole picture in their mind and then brought forth perfection.
There might be a few who do that, but that’s not how the rest of the world works.
And I had to learn this the hard way.
There are tons of people who explain things, who tell me how things work, or how things should be done.
But without skin in the game, this is like what Taleb calls, teaching birds how to fly.
Imagine some stuffy manager, with his charts and his plans and his MBA going upto a sparrow and lecturing the poor thing on how exactly it should flap its wings and how it should pose its body for maximum aerodynamic efficiency.
I imagine the sparrow would just ruffle its feathers and go look for the next bird feeder.
The manager, though will still labour under the illusion, that he taught the sparrow to fly!
And then go on to give talks and publish posts on social media as the world’s leading avian technologist.
In the meanwhile it does not matter one whit to the sparrow as it flits about and dives for its grain and berries and whatnot, using its innate knowledge.
So now I always pay attention to whether it is Max Planck himself, who teaches me … or his driver.

This I now know. That when it comes to my relationships or advice or anything that relates to other people, they ought to have skin in the game if they want me to take them seriously.

The same thing helps me look at the big things that I have no control over. Do the decision makers of things that affect me, have skin in the game? Are they affected if things go south? If not, I realise that all this is just a charade, and I am an unwilling victim, and I have to route my life around such events and decisions.

Also applies to the advice I give to my mentees or my friends.
I keep my opinions to myself.
Unless I am asked.
And then, I will only ever talk about the things I have done, the stuff I have experience with, the experiences that life has given me the scars for.
I will happily talk to you about how to lose weight, or computers and networks, or getting out of debt, or writing.
But if you ask me about politics in India or what needs to be done to save the strays of Mumbai, or how to double your money in 10 days, I sadly have no answer for you.
Because I know nothing :)

Look at what the other side is telling you.
Heads, you lose? Tails, they win?
Is someone taking advantage of the fact that you cannot see what they are doing?

It’s simple in the end.
Are they willing to put their money where their mouth is?
Look at whether they have skin in the game.

What I Learnt from Antifragile (IV)

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Mon, 28 Dec 2020 05:45:00 +0530

This post was first sent to my newsletter on November 7th, 2020.
[You really ought to subscribe][1] :)

What I Learnt from Antifragile (IV)
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In a world with too much choice … Lindy is the cure
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via Screenrant

So here’s a little distinction I learnt.
We, ~~who are about to die~~, mortals need to become antifragile.
We know, we are going to die someday, and are always being buffeted by the storms of life, so we seek to get stronger.

But what about the non mortal, the non living?
Are there antifragile, erm things?
Taleb posits, that things have the opposite quality. They don’t have to get antifragile.
They just have to have really long lives, for you to know what is good (or at least common sense and dependable) and what isn’t.
This helps you choose from the daily craziness of what do I do? What do I choose?

It’s simple really.
What things have lasted forever?
What piece of advice, has been handed down from generation to generation?
What book has been passed down through the years?
What kind of architecture has lasted through the ages?

Stick to them, stick to age, stick to ancient wisdom and life becomes so much simpler.
That’s not to say that they can’t be wrong, or that old things cannot fall apart, or that you cannot improve or think new things.
Just that, when you don’t want to do the thinking, or you are not quite up to speed on something, or you are paralysed with choice, choosing something Lindy is the safest (and also mostly, the best) thing that you can do.

The term, Lindy comes from a deli at Broadway in New York city.
Quoting Albert Goldman describing a shared folk belief on the longevity of a comedian’s show/series on TV,

… the life expectancy of a television comedian is proportional to the total amount of his exposure on the medium.

If, pathetically deluded by hubris, he undertakes a regular weekly or even monthly program, his chances of survival beyond the first season are slight; but if he adopts the conservation of resources policy favored by these senescent philosophers of “the Business”, and confines himself to “specials” and “guest shots”, he may last to the age of Ed Wynn.

Benoit Mandelbrot modified this, and expressed it mathematically to state that regardless of material, the more appearances comedians make, the more future appearances they are predicted to make. (depending on various other factors, of course)

Taleb, then took this concept and ran with it. From Antifragile …

For the perishable, every additional day in its life translates into a shorter additional life expectancy.

For the nonperishable, every additional day may imply a longer life expectancy.

…

In general, the older the technology, not only the longer it is expected to last, but the more certainty I can attach to such a statement.

He goes on to exemplify this, using my favouritest things, books …

If a book has been in print for forty years, I can expect it to be in print for another forty years. But, and that is the main difference, if it survives another decade, then it will be expected to be in print another fifty years. This, simply, as a rule, tells you why things that have been around for a long time are not “aging” like persons, but “aging” in reverse. Every year that passes without extinction doubles the additional life expectancy. This is an indicator of some robustness. The robustness of an item is proportional to its life!

And plays on Broadway and ancient buildings,

Gott made a list of Broadway shows on a given day, May 17, 1993, and predicted that the longest-running ones would last longest, and vice versa. He was proven right with 95 percent accuracy.

…

He had, as a child, visited both the Great Pyramid (fifty-seven hundred years old), and the Berlin Wall (twelve years old), and correctly guessed that the former would outlive the latter.

And all this because of time.
Like Warren Buffett says,

It’s only when the tide goes out, that you learn who’s been swimming naked.

Time shows things for what they are.
Time filters the chaff.
Time erodes and polishes things to their essence.
So whatever survives time, needs to be given more weight in my opinion.

How do I use this myself?
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While I am not necessarily concerned with building something that is Lindy ¹, whenever I want to use something, I make sure I choose the Lindy option.
I use this with the books, I choose to read. As do other smart people, I follow.
I learnt more from the Bible and the Upanishads and the Stoics, than I do from any modern non fiction book.

I use this with the tools, I used to write. I used to earlier write using Word, and then a program called Textmate, followed by a program called Scrivener, followed by a program called Sublime Text, followed by a program called, Visual Studio Code.
It was frustrating, trying to keep up with the changes and incompatibilites and the do this and do that and can work here and not there, nature of these programs. I can tolerate this craziness in other areas of my life, not with my writing.
So I learnt Vi and then Emacs and settled on using Emacs. Why?
Despite their steep-ish learning curve, they run almost everywhere and have been in existence since 1976.
These programs are older than me!
So I’m sure, they will be around and will continue to work for a long time to come.

Dad crafted furniture.
And he was obsessed with all his creations being beautiful, functional and lasting forever.
I have a stool at home, that he made when I was two. Forty years later, I still use it daily.
Mom uses a sickle to break coconuts. She’s been using the same one that he crafted when they got married and she needed cooking implements. That too, is older than me.

I’d bet on Yamaha surviving the vicissitudes of fate and time, more than Uber or Twitter.
Japan has many, many more, by the way.

Same thing with old architecture.
I lay bets on the Taj Mahal surviving longer than all the modern buildings in Lutyen’s Delhi.

So, if you ever need a quick way to decide something, look at what past you did.
Then look at what folks in the older generation did.
Then look at what your grandparents generation did.
And onwards and upwards.

If there is a shining, silver thread that extends through time, then that is what you can safely choose and do.
Listening to grandma’s advice, is always a good thing :)

actually the trick is you don’t have to think about posterity until the posterity ↩︎

What I Learnt from Antifragile (III)

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Sun, 15 Nov 2020 13:24:23 +0530

This post was sent to my newsletter on October 25th, 2020.
[You really ought to subscribe][1] :)

What I Learnt from Antifragile (III)
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What Does Not Kill Me … Antifragility for the Collective
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What does not kill me makes me stronger.
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Maxims and Arrows

The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places.
But those that will not break it kills.
It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially.
If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.
— Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms

That, in a nutshell, explains my learning today.
To become Antifragile, we need to ~~understand~~ be aware of what we do, our actions and then see who it ultimately benefits.

via Greek Myth Fandom

Antifragility, like I imagined in my head, was me getting stronger with every blow that life dealt me, Hydra like.
If you cut off one head, I would just grow another one.
But I realised that everything comes at the expense of something.
If I am growing Antifragile, something else has to give.
If there’s just nature on the otherside, we’re fine. But if there are people, then we better be careful about how we get Antifragile.

There’s also the notion of scale. Something small, dying to make the bigger collective stronger.
So there’s always a balancing act and a constant need to be observant.

This is how I imagine it, in a few scenarios in my life.

My cells need to die, my muscles need to tear in order that I build up my strength.
Here the individual is nature (my cells), dying in order to make me (my body, the collective) much stronger.
Imagine if that did not happen, if each cell decided, why should I die?
Actually, you don’t have to imagine.
That’s what cancer is.

If I die this year, I am insured. My folks get a hefty payout. (Antifragility for my family’s finances)
But the insurance company can only afford to do this, because they have money from a ton of folks placing the same bet as I did. That we would croak this year.
This is again the individual (me) benefiting the collective (the vast pool of people, who do not have enough saved, yet want to provide for their loved ones).

A nasty one is when someone uses this for their own benefit.
They win, but the collective loses.
Scams of various sorts come to mind here, where an unscrupulous person, takes advantage and become antifragile at the benefit of other people.

The flip side is the hero, where the individual takes risks and sacrifices to benefit the collective
Soldiers, Teachers, Firefighters, Tinkerers, Entrepreneurs are all examples of folks who sacrifice individually so that society as a whole benefits.

So this is what I learnt. To see how actions towards antifragility (mine or others) have ramifications on my life.
To always see if I or society benefit. Not someone else taking undue advantage.

What I Learnt from Antifragile (II)

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Sun, 01 Nov 2020 05:45:00 +0530

This post was sent to my newsletter on October 18th, 2020
[You really ought to subscribe][1] :)

What I Learnt from Antifragile (II)
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I fell sick and missed writing last week.
I have to live up the name of the news letter, anyhoo.
It would not be erratic without me whiffing once in a while, non?
Apologies all around, anyway!

The Barbell Heuristic to Taking Risks
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Basically a shortcut to figuring out whether you ought to do something or not, based on the risks it entails.
How do we take a decision, when we don’t know all the pros and cons?
How do we decide in an uncertain world?
Simply put,

What kind / amount of loss am I willing to accept, to gain some reward?

Life basically consists of three outcomes:

The safe outcome, with little to no success, but you don’t lose anything
The normal outcome, with some middling success, but you stand to lose some.
- But here’s the kicker. You might stand to lose everything, if you don’t understand the risks you take, or if the risk is unknowable. (Blow ups due to these unknown risks are what are now popularly called, thanks to Taleb’s earlier book, Black Swans)
High Risk, high reward! You know you will lose, but if you win, you win Big! It helps if you take risks with a domain that you have deep expertise in.

Taleb suggests that the best and safest way, to make decisions that propel your forward with minimal risk, is to ignore point 2 altogether.
Most of your daily life decisions ought to be with point 1.
Some of your decisions you, go to point 3.

Your strategy is to be as hyper-conservative and hyper-aggressive as you can be, instead of being mildly aggressive or conservative.
— Taleb, The Black Swan

And that is the barbell strategy.
It looks like an unbalanced barbell actually, like the one on the cover of his next book, Skin in the Game.

This is what will give you maximum peace of mind.

Risk taking also becomes easier, if you have options like I pointed out last week.
The best worst case scenario, is one that you have the option to reverse. (like buying something you need, but uncertain about how it’ll be? Easy to buy it, if the thing comes with an option to return it if you don’t like it.)

Three personal life cases,

Money
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I don’t understand investing.
I do know, that I need a nest egg for when Abby & I are old :)
Ergo, barbell strategy.
Most of our money is parked in safe investments like the Provident Fund and fixed deposits.
And some of it, in risky stuff like stocks and equity mutual funds. (since this is not my domain of expertise, I pay someone trustworthy to help me out.)
So if the market crashes like it did earlier this year, I was not as worried as other folk.
I did not lose my shirt.
I could follow, what the given advice at the time was (Stay Invested) with a clear, calm mind.
And I am confident, compounding will work its magic over time over both sets of investments.

Work
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Let’s put the barbell, to work here too.
Your safe, boring job is one end of the spectrum.
Your risky side projects, hustles, are the other.
You need both.

You could either do both together, or serially.
Work a safe job for a few years, then take up a risky moonshot, and if it doesn’t pan out, go back to another safe job.

While right now, I am in between jobs, due to health reasons, in my earlier lives, I had pretty boring jobs.
But, I write a lot. I teach a lot.
And that brought me a lot of opportunities that helped me through really trying times in the past two decades.

Health
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This is relevant to me, because it helped me get fit over the past year.
I have three slipped discs.
Do I have surgery?
The docs are undecided. Or rather they are, but are unwilling to guarantee, how long the surgery would help me.
And I had bloated to 98 odd kgs at my worst.
What do I do?

So, the safe thing to do was to lose weight.
And the hard thing to do was to get strong.
Both of which, are progressing along nicely.
I lost 30 kgs and am doing aggressive physio to build up my back muscles, so that my poor vertebrae don’t have to do all the heavy lifting by themselves.
I feel much better today, better than I did in my twenties!

And that about does it for using barbells to help make decisions.
That’s all we have for you this week :)
I really do hope, this little heuristic, changes your life as much as it did mine :)

What I Learnt from Antifragile (I)

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Sun, 18 Oct 2020 05:45:00 +0530

There seems never to be the right time to write or the right amount that I could learn from Antifragile, so I’m just going to take a long, rambling stab at it this morning.

It will be a living document that I’ll keep adding to on the blog, sooner or later, but for now, this is just for you, my dear newsletter¹ family.

Here goes …

While I love the way he writes, I don’t have that much a familiarity with English that, I can easily process stuff like this, every time I just want to grab a principle quickly.

“what physicists call the phenomenology of the process is the empirical manifestation, without looking at how it glues to existing general theories.”

“In Peri mystikes theologias, Pseudo-Dionysos did not use these exact words, nor did he discuss disconfirmation, nor did he get the idea with clarity, but in my view he figured out this subtractive epistemology and asymmetries in knowledge.”

Drives me bonkers every time.
Hence this little screed for me to look at, whenever I want to.

Antifragile
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I got lucky when I stumbled on Antifragile in early 2013.

I was slogging at the end of nearly a decade long effort of digging my sorry ass out of debt.

And while I was doing that, I was trying to learn how to handle money better.

How to invest it well or at least the general principles, of how not to lose money, forget about growing it.

And more importantly, how be resilient enough, to handle stuff that life threw at me.

How not to stress.

I had it upto here, stressing about every bad thing that came along.

I was thinking about the same thing that Taleb espoused in this book.

It was not the title, Antifragile, that grabbed me, but the subtitle:

How to Live in a World We Don’t Understand

And the Prologue sucked me in totally,

Wind extinguishes a candle and energizes fire.

Likewise with randomness, uncertainty, chaos: you want to use them, not hide from them. You want to be the fire and wish for the wind. This summarizes this author’s nonmeek attitude to randomness and uncertainty.

We just don’t want to just survive uncertainty, to just about make it. We want to survive uncertainty and, in addition—like a certain class of aggressive Roman Stoics—have the last word. The mission is how to domesticate, even dominate, even conquer, the unseen, the opaque, and the inexplicable.

How?

He then takes nearly 500 pages of dense prose like the two quotes up above to explain the how.

Make no mistake, I loved it. I enjoyed it.

I re-read this book every 8–12 months.

But I am definitely not smart enough to extract the principles I need, at a moments notice.

Hence this post(s).

Everything below, is now what I understand, (or think I understand) from Antifragile.

And why am I doing this?

Because the book changed my life for the better.

It gave me what Zig Ziglar called a new pair of glasses, to look at life with.

Or what Charles T Munger and Shane Parrish would call, a latticework of mental models.

Reading Order
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If you get into Taleb zealotry like I have, and want to read the entire Incerto, then this is the order I suggest you do it.

Antifragile
Antifragile
Antifragile
The Bed of Procrustes
Skin in the Game
Fooled by Randomness / The Black Swan

Antifragile is the main work.

Even though it is the fourth chronologically. Every other book can be looked at as offshoots of some chapter in Antifragile.

Optionality
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It is always good to have options. It is always good to check alternatives.

You gain a lot of freedom that way.

Options might be free, or you might have to pay for them.

But unless they are really expensive (which it really is not in most of life), it is always good to have options.

Case in point, after one case too many of being burnt over non refundable tickets, I started buying my air tickets, directly from the airline with the option to get a full refund.

Twice now, paying a bit more for this option has saved my hind quarters. Once I had to reschedule an entire multi city trip and the other was full refund, just as Covid hit.

Lesson learnt.

Now I look for options and alternatives even more in other areas of my life.

Domain Blindness
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Some principle you use / do / see in one area of your life, can just as easily exist in others.

You can either diet and go to the gym and lift weights or become a manual labourer who hasn’t enough to eat and carries loaded bags.

The principle is the same. And the end result is the same. You drop fat and gain a six pack.

If you we can’t see the principle at work, we have a case of domain blindness.

I knew I could do a little bit every day on a certain task at work and get it done.

It never struck me to do the same to develop my skills.

Now that I see and am no longer domain blind, I use the same principle (steady, slow iteration) to lose weight, to complete my 12th standard and learn programming.

This is all I remember for now.
I’ll write more, as I realise more.

This was sent to my newsletter subscribers on Oct 4th, 2020. If you are reading this on the blog, you really should subscribe, if you want to read my stuff as soon as I put it out. ↩︎

Antifragile on Janusworx

What I Learnt from Antifragile (V)

Teaching Birds How to Fly, & Skin in the Game! #

What I Learnt from Antifragile (IV)

What I Learnt from Antifragile (IV) #

In a world with too much choice … Lindy is the cure #

How do I use this myself? #

What I Learnt from Antifragile (III)

What I Learnt from Antifragile (III) #

What Does Not Kill Me … Antifragility for the Collective #

What I Learnt from Antifragile (II)

What I Learnt from Antifragile (II) #

The Barbell Heuristic to Taking Risks #

Money #

Work #

Health #