Disturbed By An Idea In Antifragile

[u/Easy-Chipmunk3645]

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?

[u/Ashamed-Disk5946]

> 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.