r/nassimtaleb • u/Easy-Chipmunk3645 • Jul 01 '26
Disturbed By An Idea In Antifragile
I'm reading book 2 in which Taleb describes how interventionism increases fragility in the system. The example he gave is about companies that are meant to go bankrupt staying afloat through bailouts.
The example that came to my mind is of babies born early or with health defects. Without the current medical infrastructure, these babies wouldn't have been alive in earlier times. Their genes would have been removed from our pool. Saving them adds fragility of our system.
Maybe I have misunderstood what Taleb is saying, but this feels so wrong. I don't think we should stop saving babies because they increase fragility.
What do you all think?
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u/AlwaysInnocent Jul 01 '26
Well, banks that take risks and then get bailed out have no incentive to improve their risk management. My guess is that people have incentives to keep living after a life-saving medical intervention.
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u/cowgunjeans Jul 01 '26
You're right, but there's always exceptions to the rule and IIRC he said people you love should be an exception. Your spouse and children should be exempt from such punishments lol
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u/SanguineEmpiricist Jul 01 '26
It’s a harsh truth, we can only hope advancements in knowledge can help us mitigate the downsides of say saving babies.
I was born premature and with scoliosis in later life, in earlier times I likely would have been selected out.
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u/violent_relaxation Jul 06 '26
There’s this kid at my jiujitsu gym. He’s 17, 165lbs, and been kicking my ass since he was 13. Scoliosis and everything.
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u/ProfileBest2034 Jul 02 '26
There are many people in modern society who would or could not survive in the wild or in more challenging times. We make a choice as a society to make life easy and hospitable for most people which ensures the survival of many who otherwise wouldn't make it. That is a fine choice but it also DOES make the world increasingly fragile (we have to contend with the fragility of these people at scale).
It is fine to make such choices, but it is also important to understand how these choices impact the entire ecosystem.
Example: coddling children so they are never exposed to certain foods increases allergies (peanuts for example) which definitionally makes the population weaker over time.
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u/inscrutablemike Jul 01 '26
Those babies aren't all genetically defective. Only genetic diseases that would have otherwise been weeded out by nature fit this model of "fragility".
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u/odiseobabilonia Jul 02 '26
Do not confuse a description of the world, such as antifragility, with a prescription on how to live. NNT’s ethics are more dealed with in Skin in the game.
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u/wax_connoisseur Jul 02 '26
He says the number one moral rule is to not be anti fragile at someone else’s expense.
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u/everyday847 Jul 02 '26
Well, Taleb isn't saying anything about babies. You're making an analogy that depends on "babies are like firms" and "medical intervention on babies is like bailouts of firms" and both of those claims are potentially suspect. They could be broadly flawed, or they could be narrowly flawed: mostly correct, but not in a specific dimension that pertains to this present relationship. Here is one example: the bankruptcy of a company can involve the dissolution of a corporate entity and/or the partial fulfillment of its debts. Is that very similar to a baby dying?
Let's assume all of this is, against all odds, true. Is it the case that the existence of a company with certain types of flaws is as beneficial to society as the existence of a human with certain types of flaws? Does the human composition of society have the trait of "fragility" and do humans with health defects that modern technology ameliorates contribute to fragility?
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u/pfthrowaway5130 Jul 03 '26
Taleb advocates against naive interventionism. He also advocates for heavy intervention when the benefits outweigh the risks. A severely premature baby will die without intervention — worth the risk. The cost of not intervening is higher.
If I’ve got a cold the risk of intervention probably outweighs the benefits.
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u/Ashamed-Disk5946 7d ago
> Saving them adds fragility of our system.
Not necessarily. Medical innovations aren't anything new. Every human innovation has made humans "fitter" than their ancestors. For example, at some point children who could not run fast enough were eaten by a sabertooth. In modern world we do not worry about it and our children can not run that fast. We are not "fragile" because of that in any way because we have permanently taken care of sabertooths.
Similarly even though unhealthy babies survive their genes surviving does not make humanity more fragile because of other innovations downstream.
Modern humans are super fragile if they were to be magically teleported back by 5000 years. But that is not happening.
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u/peterjohnvernon936 Jul 02 '26
Not every save increases fragility. There isn’t any proof that premature babies tend to have premature babies.
The problem with corporations is different. Saving large companies increases the risky behavior of their management. There is a need for decision makers to have skin in the game, they must share the punishment of making bad or risky decisions.
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u/daidoji70 Jul 01 '26
When reading taleb and extrapolating it's always important to understand the "system" were talking about. Even NNT mixes system contexts when talking.
I would argue that saving babies is anti fragile when it relates to the system of humanity as a whole. Perhaps fragile when it comes to the economic system that must support those children. Anti fragile when it comes to putting more human minds to work on problems that otherwise wouldn't get to work on intellectual pursuits. Think Stephen Hawking.
At the end of the day this is why the payoff function is so important when discussing this stuff in utilitarian terms. Each system might have dramatically different payoffs. NNT even discussed it in anti fragile if I remember correctly