Publishing House: CITIC Publishing House

Have we found that the world is becoming more and more fragile? A heavy rain in Beijing may cause traffic paralysis in the whole city. In 20 18, hurricane "Michael" landed in Florida, USA, causing power outages in several neighboring States. It seems that the whole society has become a domino, and the collapse of any point will cause the collapse of the whole system.

At the same time, some things that are particularly stable and long-lasting in our eyes have vanished overnight. Kodak used to be synonymous with image, and its market value reached 3 1 100 million dollars at the highest. At the most glorious time, there was only one kind of film in China, and that was Kodak.

However, such a giant filed for bankruptcy in 20 12, and the liquidation was less than 10 billion dollars. Tens of billions of dollars in stocks evaporated. Similarly, Nokia, a huge mobile phone, dominated the mobile phone market in 14, and finally fell on the eve of the era of smart phones. They are like Goliath, the giant in the Bible, with infinite strength and no one can beat them. Finally, David the shepherd boy hit him in the head with a slingshot and killed him.

This book will tell us how the world has become fragile and how we can improve our anti-vulnerability ability to benefit from the uncertain future.

The author of this book is nassim nicholas taleb. He used to be an investor in venture capital funds. During his investment career, he made a lot of money by shorting the stock market twice. Less than 30 has been financially free. Later, he wrote his successful experience and understanding of the world into a book called Black Swan.

What is the black swan event? It refers to extremely rare and unexpected things. It is called black swan because there is such an allusion. /kloc-before the 0/7th century, people thought that swans were white, but later, black swans were discovered in Australia, which completely subverted the perception that swans were black. Therefore, this kind of event with small probability but far-reaching influence is called the black swan event.

In that book, he thinks that the world is unpredictable and full of all kinds of black swan events. For example, in the book, he successfully warned the subprime mortgage crisis in 2008. Although wall street managers turned a deaf ear to his advice, when the crisis broke out, Taleb made another big profit by using his foresight. Not only that, Black Swan also became a phenomenal bestseller with this prediction. Now the book "Anti-Fragility" is based on the book "Black Swan", which shows us how to benefit from a random and uncertain world.

Let's talk about it according to three key points. First of all, we will understand what anti-vulnerability is and what its characteristics are. Then we will continue to understand why we need to improve our vulnerability resistance. How can anti-vulnerability ability help us improve our future viability? Finally, we will know how to improve our anti-vulnerability ability so that we can benefit in the uncertain future.

Before answering this question, let's think about it. What is the antonym of vulnerability? Many people will find it strong and tough. Fragility is easy to understand, that is, it is fragile, just like a glass falling on the concrete floor and falling apart. Strong, strong, like an iron box, fell to the ground unharmed. However, have we found a problem that if the glass falls to the ground, it will fall apart, which is a loss. The iron box fell to the ground, although it was safe and sound, but nothing changed. A loss, a no change, how can the two be opposite? Therefore, strength or toughness is only an intermediate state, fragility is a loss state, and its antonym should be a profit state.

Therefore, the antonym of vulnerability is never strong or tough. Taleb invented a word called "anti-fragility", which is the antonym of fragility. Refers to such a state, which is both firm under pressure and beneficial under pressure. The typical anti-fragile thing is tennis. It fell to the ground, neither broken nor moved. After it landed, it gained the reaction force of the ground and continued to bounce. This is the state of benefiting from pressure.

So in this book, the author is discussing with us such a problem, that is, how to benefit from future risks. What can do this is to be anti-fragile.

Taleb himself is an anti-vulnerability person, and he benefits from risks. He wrote the book Black Swan, which offended many Wall Street financial executives. He thinks these so-called elites on Wall Street are a group of extremely shameless people. Because they always reap the rewards of risk, but let others bear the losses. For example, in the subprime mortgage crisis, they designed a set of real estate loan financial projects. Pack good projects and bad projects and sell them to others. They made a lot of commissions from it, but when the subprime mortgage system crashed, they just walked away and left all the losses to others.

These people on Wall Street base their safety on the sacrifices of a large number of ordinary people. So Taleb wrote a lot of rules of the Wall Street game in his book, which naturally offended these Wall Street executives. They threatened Taleb to make him look good. Later, Taleb wanted to hire bodyguards. Later, he thought, bodyguards can't always guard themselves, so it's better to practice themselves as bodyguards. As a result, he went crazy for fitness and became a particularly stout intellectual. Later, I participated in the signing activities. No one expected that this man with five big and three thick was actually a writer.

Redundancy is a feature of anti-vulnerability. It is in a system that there are many so-called unnecessary things to help it cope with different environments. For example, we humans have two kidneys. But in fact, people only need one kidney. The extra kidney is to improve anti-vulnerability.

For another example, in our spare time, we learn more skills that seem useless now, but this is actually enhancing our vulnerability. For example, Jobs was particularly obsessed with font design when he was in college, which was considered unprofessional at that time. But when Jobs designed Apple, he used redundant skills in the past to enhance the beauty of Apple's mobile phone fonts.

All right, that's it. In this part, we introduce that the state of anti-vulnerability is to gain benefits from uncertain risks. Anti-vulnerability is characterized by a lot of redundancy, which ensures that things can survive in a changing environment.

The author Taleb's answer to this is one sentence. Modernization breeds fragility. How to understand this sentence? He thinks that the era we live in now is a modern era. What is modernization? It does not refer to the historical period after the end of feudal society as defined in sociology textbooks. It refers to such an era of thought. In this era, people think that the world is understandable and human beings can design the life we want.

For example, when we think that mule and horse transport materials too slowly, we can make up for this defect by discovering the laws of nature and creating trains. When we regret that human communication was cut off by Qianshan, we can solve our lovesickness by discovering the laws of nature and inventing telegrams. Therefore, modernization is an era marked by rationality.

But the two core elements of modernization, intervention and scientific prediction, just make the world more and more fragile.

People have the impulse to intervene in the world. There is no doubt about it. When faced with dangers and problems, we always hope to do something to get out of trouble. In the face of drought, the ancients would not resign themselves to fate. Even in difficulties, they will raise sacrifices and pray for rain from heaven, which can comfort their fearful hearts. But in ancient times, intervention was just an impulse. In modern society, it has become a real behavior. Our intervention in economy, environment and urban governance. Everything is designed and arranged according to our human rationality. However, this kind of intervention is considered as naive by the author Taleb.

He believes that this kind of human intervention will cause so-called "iatrogenic injury" in medicine. Iatrogenic injury means that doctors will do more harm to patients because they treat diseases. A typical example of iatrogenic injury is George Washington, the founding president of the United States. He died of a sore throat. Now there is enough evidence to prove that doctors at that time used "bloodletting therapy" to Washington. They injected 5-9 pounds of blood into Washington one after another, about as much as a washbasin. The doctor's intervention ruined Washington's life.

Before the invention of penicillin, taking medicine to see a doctor basically did more harm than good. Leibniz called19th century hospitals "hotbeds of death". People who went to the hospital died one after another, and those who didn't go to the hospital survived. At that time, ignaz Semel Weiss, a doctor in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, observed that the number of women who died in hospital delivery was even more than that in the street. Therefore, he called professional doctors criminals. Later, we knew the reason. At that time, doctors often didn't wash their hands, and the environment in the delivery room was very poor, which led to the growth of bacteria and the death of pregnant women after operation.

Modernization has also strengthened human's ability to over-trust scientific prediction. Taleb hates that some scholars predict the future confidently at some meetings. Once, he went to South Korea to attend an international conference. At the meeting, a scholar authoritatively predicted the economic situation in the next five years to the people present. Taleb flew into a rage after hearing this. He rushed to the podium and asked the scholar, "How can you predict the outbreak of the financial crisis?" No one can predict the future, let alone some "black swan" events in the future.

However, because of their ignorance and arrogance, human beings think that they have mastered the truth, especially under the blind belief in science, they have constructed various complex theories and models and believe that the world has been firmly grasped by them. The author calls these people "pushers of world fragility". Among these people, I think the first one is Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan. Taleb believes that it was Greenspan who wanted to eliminate the cycle of economic ups and downs and took various measures, which led to all risks hidden underground and accumulated, and finally destroyed the economy.

Because economic fluctuation is a good indicator for the economic system, people can correct their wrong behavior according to the amplitude. But now the financial market has been over-intervened, and it has lost its correct response to the economic situation. At this time, more and more mistakes in the past accumulated over time, and finally broke out in a place that no one expected. It's like an occasional small fire in the forest is actually a good thing. Because it burns the combustible materials in the forest. However, if a forest is not protected at all, with the accumulation of time, there will be more and more dead branches in the forest, and finally there will be a fire that will destroy the whole forest.

These are the direct reasons why the world is becoming more and more fragile. Mankind has entered the modern age in which reason determines the world. The more we transform the world, the more superstitious our predictions and interventions are. But that doesn't explain why neither works. Because prediction and intervention play a role in our life, a pen slips from our hands, we predict that it will fall to the ground, and then we can catch it before it falls to the ground. However, why doesn't it work for society, economy and human body, and even the more you interfere, the more you hurt?

Its answer is that society, economy and human body are a complex system. There are often many reasons behind their problems. If we only pay attention to the surface of the problem, we simply treat headaches and foot pains. Whatever the underlying reasons behind these phenomena, it is natural to make more mistakes.

So what is a system?

The system is a network. There are many nodes on this network. And these nodes have a causal relationship with each other. We exert influence on one node, and this node will have influence on other nodes. That's what the so-called "pulling one hair and moving the whole body" means.

The three characteristics of the system: complexity, dynamics and opacity lead to our intervention errors.

First of all, the first characteristic of the system, complexity. There are many interdependent variables in the system, and complexity is the general name of these variables. Take the swimming pool system as an example. There are three variables in the system: fish, soil and aquatic plants. Any one of these variables will have an impact on the other two variables. The pool is still a small system with only a few variables, and the system is not so complicated. But if it is a large system with countless variables like a city, the system is much more complicated. The more variables, the harder it is for us to predict.

The second characteristic of the system: dynamics. It means that the system will interpret the results by itself over time. The example of the forest we talked about earlier accords with dynamics. When we protect the forest from fire, we don't actually expect the forest system to be dynamic. With the accumulation of time, its dead branches will accumulate more and more, and the whole system will become more and more fragile.

The third characteristic of the system: opacity. When people observe the system, they don't always get the information directly. Just like a government official who wants to know the life satisfaction of local residents, he can only ask by visiting several citizens: Are you happy? This way can only partially and vaguely understand the satisfaction. This opacity increases the uncertainty of the problem in the system.

Therefore, when we do something, we don't know how many variables it has, how these variables will evolve in the future, and we don't know what the consequences will be if we intervene. How can the prediction and intervention in this ignorant state not become more and more wrong?

All right, that's it. At this key point, we introduced the fragility of the world, because modernization breeds fragility. Relying too much on rationality, believing in theoretical predictions and intervening in the world are the reasons why the world is becoming more and more fragile. The reason for the failure of prediction and intervention is that modern society has become an increasingly complex system. Because of the complexity, dynamics and opacity of the system, we always intervene rashly without knowing anything, making the world more and more fragile.

Here, we need to know that the ability to resist vulnerability is achievable. Because we humans have an ability called overcompensation, which means that our human body will compensate in the opposite direction under a certain degree of pressure. Just as a certain degree of bone injury can increase bone density and make bones stronger. The same example is a vaccine. The principle of vaccine is to use human overcompensation ability. Our body will form antibodies when attacked by a small dose of virus. After that, we can resist such a virus.

Therefore, people themselves have the ability to resist vulnerability, and we just need to learn how to improve it. So how to improve it? The author gives two suggestions. One is to be slow. The other is to try more opportunities with lower cost by using barbell strategy.

The first piece of advice is to keep yourself dull. Since the world is so complicated, you'd better keep yourself dull before you understand it. There is a proverb in China: "Haste makes waste". It means to be in a hurry and not reach the goal. Why didn't you achieve your goal? Because I can't tell whether a message is the right signal or the wrong noise.

The way to recognize signals from noise is to keep yourself dull, or just let yourself drag on for a while. If we delay, time will naturally help us distinguish between signal and noise. Just like muddy water, it is difficult for us to distinguish sediment from water, but if we wait for a while, the sediment will settle down by itself. Sediment and water are naturally distinguished. This is Jiang Wen's line in the movie "Let the bullets fly", "Let the bullets fly for a while." So are some so-called revelations in Weibo. We can give ourselves a break and don't take sides in a hurry. When the situation is turbid, any behavior will make the situation more complicated.

A very clever revolutionary society in Britain launched a political movement called Fabian Society. It was named after Fabian, the ancient Roman general. The general defeated Hannibal the Carthaginian star by avoiding his sharp edge, advancing slowly and formulating a strategy of later action. The main purpose of Fabian Society is to learn this idea and seize every opportunity to delay the radical revolution. Fabian Society's members include celebrities like George Bernard Shaw and Bertrand Russell. Fabian Society's strategy towards revolution is to delay time, let things develop while delaying, and solve problems at the same time. Avoid making wrong decisions in an all-round way.

The second suggestion to improve your vulnerability resistance is to use barbell strategy to try more possibilities with less cost.

What is the barbell strategy? In Taleb's view, barbell strategy is the solution to all uncertain problems. The barbell is heavy at both ends and light in the middle. Barbell strategy refers to the extreme situation of excellent and poor barbell at both ends, and the lighter one in the middle refers to the medium situation. What we need to do is to put most of our resources on excellent things with certain returns and small risks, and at the same time put a small part of our resources on extremely bad things with high risks and high returns, that is, things with medium risks and medium returns. This will not only have a stable return, but also have the opportunity to incite more possibilities in the future and enjoy excess returns.

Let's take literary writers as an example. This is the most risky profession of all. The market is changing rapidly, and no one can be confident to get ahead. Therefore, French literary writers have a tradition of finding a leisure job, such as a civil servant with the least professional pressure, without thinking too much, but with a stable job. In other words, things you don't care about.

So these writers use their spare time to write whatever they want according to their own standards after work. This kind of work that follows one's inner love will often succeed. At the same time, on the other hand, engaging in part-time writing is a quite effective mode, second only to enjoying economic independence, and even stronger than enjoying economic independence. For example, the French novelist Stendhal is a diplomat; Kafka is employed by an insurance company. More interestingly, Spinoza is a lens manufacturer. Independent economic ability, so that they do not have to flatter the market.

Liu, a science fiction writer who made a hit with Three-body, typically adopted the barbell strategy. He works in the power system every day, and his work is very easy. He spent a lot of time writing science fiction. This kind of part-time writing not only ensures a stable source of income, but also has enough time to write what you want to write. This is a bit like the slash youth we always talk about now. I just have my own job, but I also have my own hobbies to seek more possibilities.

We look at how to use barbell strategy from the perspective of investment. If 90% of our funds are held in cash, or stored in the so-called "value-preserving currency", and the remaining 65,438+00% of our funds are invested in high-risk or extremely high-risk securities, then our losses cannot exceed 65,438+00%, but there is no upper limit to our gains. And if all the funds are invested in the so-called "medium" risk securities, it is likely to bear the risk of no principal because of special circumstances.

Therefore, the essence of barbell strategy is to put most resources on a thing with visible benefits to seek stability, while putting a small part of resources on a thing with great risks to enrich the future. The most taboo is to put eggs in a basket and beat them hard. It is irrational to sell cars and houses to start a business without leaving room for yourself.

First of all, in the first key point, we introduced that the state of anti-vulnerability is to gain benefits from uncertain risks. Anti-vulnerability is characterized by a lot of redundancy, which ensures that things can survive in a changing environment.

Secondly, we introduced that in this key point, we introduced that the world is fragile because modernization breeds fragility. Relying too much on rationality, believing in theoretical predictions and intervening in the world are the reasons why the world is becoming more and more fragile. The reason for the failure of prediction and intervention is that modern society has become an increasingly complex system. Because of the complexity, dynamics and opacity of the system, we always intervene rashly without knowing anything, making the world more and more fragile.

Finally, human beings can get more benefits under certain pressure because of their overcompensation ability. The way to improve anti-vulnerability is to keep yourself dull and use barbell strategy. The former means that many times we can't tell the difference between signal and noise. At this time, we should use the power of time. Let things go their own way, just like rumors fly for a while and the truth comes out.

As time goes on, the truth of the matter will emerge from the noise. Using barbell strategy is to grasp the best situation and the worst situation of things and give up those mediocre intermediate States. This is because under the best circumstances, the most invested resources can have a predictable return. At the same time, putting a small amount of resources into the worst case, although the risk is high, the benefits are difficult to estimate. And if all resources are invested in projects with medium risk and medium income, it is easy to encounter the black swan incident and lead to blood loss.

So in the end. We must understand that real security is neither fighting in a stable environment nor struggling in an unstable environment. Instead, it is a two-pronged approach, which not only has a stable economic source, but also challenges unknown risks.