Via Negativa Prophecy

FROM SIMONIDES TO JENSEN

As an exercise in the use of the distinction between fragility and antifragility, let us play prophet, with the understanding that it is not a good career choice unless you have a thick skin, a good circle of friends, little access to the Internet, a library with a good set of ancient proverbs, and, if possible, the ability to derive personal benefits from your prophecy. As shown from the track record of the prophets: before you are proven right, you will be reviled; after you are proven right, you will be hated for a while, or, what’s worse, your ideas will appear to be “trivial” thanks to retrospective distortion. This makes it far more convincing to follow the Fat Tony method of focusing on shekels more than recognition. And such treatment has continued in modern times: twentieth-century intellectuals who have embraced the wrong ideas, such as Communism or even Stalinism, have remained fashionable—and their books remain on the bookstore shelves—while those who, like the political philosopher Raymond Aron, saw the problems got short shrift both before and after being acknowledged as having seen things right.

Now close your eyes and try to imagine your future surroundings in, say, five, ten, or twenty-five years. Odds are your imagination will produce new things in it, things we call innovation, improvements, killer technologies, and other inelegant and hackneyed words from the business jargon. In my view, these common concepts concerning innovation are not just offensive aesthetically, but nonsense both empirically and philosophically.

Why? Odds are that your imagination will be adding things to the present world. I am sorry, but my argument is that this approach is exactly backward: the way to do it rigorously, according to the notions of fragility and antifragility, is to take away from the future, reduce from it, simply, things that do not belong to the coming times. Via negativa. What is fragile will eventually break; and, luckily, we can easily tell what is fragile. Positive Black Swans are more unpredictable than negative ones.

“ Time has sharp teeth that destroy everything,” declaimed the sixth-century (B.C.) poet Simonides of Ceos, perhaps starting a tradition in Western literature about the inexorable effect of time. I can trace a plethora of elegant classical expressions, from Ovid (tempus edax rerum— time devours everything) to the no less poetic twentieth-century Franco-Russian poetess Elsa Triolet (“time burns but leaves no ashes”). Naturally, this exercise triggered some poetic waxing, so I am now humming a French poem put to music titled “Avec le temps” about how time erases things, even bad memories (though it doesn’t say that it erases us as well in the process). Now, thanks to convexity effects, we can put a little bit of science in these, and produce our own taxonomy of what should be devoured the fastest by that inexorable time. The fragile will eventually break—and, luckily, we are capable of figuring out what is fragile. Even what we believe is antifragile will eventually break, but it should take much, much longer to do so (wine does well with time, but up to a point; and not if you put it in the crater of a volcano).

The verse by Simonides that started the previous paragraph continues with the stipulation “even the most solid.” So Simonides had the adumbration of the idea, quite useful, that the most solid will be swallowed with more difficulty, hence last. Naturally, he did not think that something could be antifragile, hence never swallowed.

Now, I insist on the via negativa method of prophecy as being the only valid one: there is no other way to produce a forecast without being a turkey somewhere, particularly in the complex environment in which we live today. Now, I am not saying that new technologies will not emerge—something new will rule its day, for a while. What is currently fragile will be replaced by something else, of course. But this “something else” is unpredictable. In all likelihood, the technologies you have in your mind are not the ones that will make it, no matter your perception of their fitness and applicability—with all due respect to your imagination.

Recall that the most fragile is the predictive, what is built on the basis of predictability—in other words, those who underestimate Black Swans will eventually exit the population.

An interesting apparent paradox is that, according to these principles, longer-term predictions are more reliable than short-term ones, given that one can be quite certain that what is Black Swan–prone will be eventually swallowed by history since time augments the probability of such an event. On the other hand, typical predictions (not involving the currently fragile) degrade with time; in the presence of nonlinearities, the longer the forecast the worse its accuracy. Your error rate for a ten-year forecast of, say, the sales of a computer plant or the profits of a commodity vendor can be a thousand times that of a one-year projection.