Safety in danger

In his book The Black Swan, Nassim Taleb told us that the world is a much weirder place than we can bear to believe. It is full of occult forces and strange events. If we think we can control or predict these forces and events, we’re sorely mistaken. One minute, we think we’ve mastered the business of lending money and hedging our bets; the next, the economy crashes. One minute, we invent a way to send a message on a computer; the next, porn is everywhere and the music business is finished. One minute, we’re a bit plump; the next, we’re obese, and heading for a diabetic meltdown. We always think we know what will happen next. Get real, said Taleb; the world is non-linear. It’s a stranger place than we want it to be.

The Black Swan was a brilliant book, and Taleb, who ran a hedge fund, made a lot of money by understanding that markets are more volatile than people think they are. In this new book, which is also brilliant, he takes his idea a stage further. When we try to predict things, he says, we are fragile, because the world around us is volatile. But we’re only fragile if the thing we need is certainty. If we found ways to live with uncertainty, we’d be more robust. Better still, why not try to make a virtue out of uncertainty? Why not try, as it were, to harvest randomness? If we could do that, we’d be fine. We wouldn’t just be robust — we would be antifragile.

Well, fine. So far, this has a touch of Dr Faustus to it. The idea of harvesting uncertainty — the idea of gaining from our lack of knowledge — sounds like the Devil’s work, or at the very least alchemy. But that’s because we’re so in love with linearity and certainty.