[[Deciding]] tags:: #on/decisions | #on/change | #on/projectmanagement dates:: 2022-02-26 people:: #people/naseemtaleb # Antifragility *How to always win in a chaotic world.* This reminds me of [[Fear-setting]], or Growth [[Mindset]]. These are ways of setting up situations where winning is the likely outcome even in the setting of chaos. In [[Fear-setting]] the approach is to imagine what would really happen if you failed completely. What is the true worst-case scenario. For example, if I were to quit my job and join a startup full-time, and it fully collapsed, I have enough saved that with frugality we could pay off our loans and live in our house, but would temporarily have to curtail our lifestyle. In the long-run we would be in a relatively similar situation. It's kind of like in Growth Mindset, we consider that failure is an opportunity to learn, as opposed to a failure. Post-traumatic growth is connected here. [[Antifragility]], however, is slightly different. It's the idea that certain outcomes do better in chaotic states of failure. It's like betting both the long and the short, if you have enough money you can win either way. It's like setting up conditions where you gain even when you fail. Nick Milo uses this term to support having our notes be in .txt documents which will always be available, regardless of the survival of the platforms and individual programs. We will always have our .txt documents. And when we create notes that are unique to us, and have value to us because we found *meaning* in the making, we always have the meaning we created. A piece of antifragility is the idea that we cannot predict, we are overwhelmed not by the likelihood of our predictions, but by "Black Swan Events." These are defined not by their likelihood but by their consequences. A low-likelihood high-consequences event is more important (and less predictable) than a predicted event. If this is the case, and we need to consider the nature of black swan events that are low probability, we need some heuristics that address these events. - never fly without a pilot, or a copilot - climb until you fall, unless you are in a no-fall zone, then make yourself safe and don't accept the risk - Use pre-mortems to frame-storm and identify consequences, not probabilities [[Antifragility]] matters because too often we are constrained by our circumstances, and we consider the fragility of the situation. Antifragility could be a mindset or [[cognitive frames]] of our situation, if we set it up properly in the beginning. In this way, we empower the team, distribute the decision-making and risk, and create a culture whereby even failure leads to the team being closer because everyone feels that their voice was heard through the process. The opposite argument to antifragility would be that life is fragile and that success is not guaranteed. That certain things really do matter, and that by focusing on "everything being learning" you diminish the importance of certain outcomes over other outcomes. ## Sources: [[Antifragile Book]] [[The Great Mental Models Volume 1]]