@GandK:
Sorry if I came off
a bit Sheldon in
my prior response.
My other likely response would have been something like "At this moment in time, I wish I had
the luxury
of fretting about events beyond
my personal sphere." I was kind
of in distracted mode trying to job
my own memory or stretch
my own comprehension in this realm for
the definition because I am trying or hoping to figure out what I can do to avoid
the repetition
of the collapse
of my personal house
of cards over
the past 9 months.
I believe (might be wrong) that in "anti-fragility" Taleb suggests
the barbell strategy as possible way to lower exposure to black swans.
The analogy I remember went something like "Pick
the accountant for your husband and pick
the rock star for your lover.", with
the implication that this
is actually
a safer and more likely to result in "profit" strategy than going with Joe Average across both roles. Because
of the defective way
my brain works, when I read that,
my immediate thought was "Hmm...I wonder what would happen if you had an affair with an accountant while married to
a rock star?" I think
the problem with
my recent lifestyle design
is that it was kind
of an attempt to achieve resilience
my marrying 5 different rock stars at
the same time.
Something
is "anti-fragile" if it
is likely to benefit from chaos or
the unknown or
the unknown-unknown (category "black swans" best fit into.) Robust and resilient are strategies for at least increasing likelihood
of surviving chaos. Most
of the suggestions above fall into
the category
of either robust or resilient insurance. I think
the reason why more anti-fragile solutions are avoided
is that they may tend towards stink
of benefiting from tragedy
of other. For instance, if you are fretting about whether your stock portfolio
is resilient and/or robust enough to take some kind
of unknown hit if/when
the ice sheet melts off
of Greenland, you could choose to liquidate your index fund and buy 80% treasury bonds or stuff-in-mattress-solution and 20% high-risk short-position on shoreline real estate. I mean, do any
of us even want to attempt
the exercise
of "How can I profit if cultural tendency towards persecution
of people based on some superficial quality increases?" As in, "Howdy, Mr. Japanese-Heritage Property Owner
of 1942. I'll give you 10 cents on
the dollar for that grocery store and maybe 20% for your house. Sucks to be you."*
Otherwise, I like Carol Deppe's philosophy in "
The Resilient Gardener" which
is to choose strategies which might cover your butt when things get really tough, but also add benefit during very good times. Choosing to learn how to grow heirloom vegetables in your own back yard fits this formula.
I think both "following
the herd" and erring too much on
the side
of "efficiency" will tend towards increasing exposure to black swans. However, efficiency
is obviously
the fastest path to "robust" solution, so maybe there has to be some kind
of zig-zag in overall optimum path. For example, if you are selling your top skill for top dollar 60 hours/week, you aren't just losing
the resilience you would gain by developing or maintaining other skills, you are over-exposing yourself to
the Joe Average market solution for all your other problems. Therefore, if some unknown cog in
the system breaks, you will find yourself experiencing
the exact same problem as 90-something %
of the population. IOW, you can to some extent avoid your exposure to black swans just by purposefully making different choices towards
the same solution than most people. For instance, you could avoid exposure to
the killer pooch-to-person virus I imagined, if you chose to achieve
the benefits
of interaction with animals by spending $100/month on
a goldfish and
a time-share in
a riding stable rather than keeping
a dog for $100/month.
*“To prove legal title to land, one must trace it back to
the man who stole it.” -David Lloyd George
