Anti-Fragile

*A small lesson learned today -- No matter how much you have slept for the past week, the upper-limit of your afternoon nap should not exceed an hour and half. Of course, with that being said, try to keep your sleep time for 8 hours per day (for example 7 and half in the night and 30 mins in the afternoon). In addition, keeping a healthy mind and body, should always be the priority in any circumstances.

**Disclaimer: The content below has not gone through rigorous researches by any means. Just a direction of the topics that I want to dive into in the future. Everything I wrote in here could be very wrong.

About Future Technology:

Data management seems to become a hot word along with other trending noun such as AI, Deep Learning, or Blockchain. But what does it really mean? If taking a guess, I would probably think it as a fancy way of saying, getting useful information from the sea of data that can be turned into value. But I think the ability of managing data is not the only important matter. I paraphrased the following remarks from a blogger [1] that I think is worth mentioning:

// When a big company or government wants to develop blockchain technology, they have to be de-centralized and open, in which it can attract third-party developers to enrich its applications. Most of the time big companies or governments have the impulsion of centralization and full controls. It might be efficient at first -- but the shortcomings is that the existence of a center, is the opposite side of diversification, innovativeness, and robustness. The one who will win the game, would inevitably be the one whose system has the richest ecosystem and the most developers, software applications, and end users. The greatest revolution in blockchain, is the POW (or POS) algorithm, instead of a central institution, to achieve the trustworthiness between business trading. It means that third-party institution or intermediaries will no longer be needed to assure the credibility of business transactions. //

What's really important, is not the technology itself. We are not building up technology for technology. We have enough brains for developing very sophisticated, advanced, and fancy technologies but we do not have enough talents who can see through human's nature, and predict the unprecedented products and services that are going to be created in the new ecology system that fit perfectly to our desires that we have never thought about before.

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1/5

Now I have skimmed about 1/5 of the book Antifragile. It provides me a strange, but somewhat familiar perspective to see how the complex system works -- that is, to see any systems as an organism. For instance, human body is an organism but also at the same time a complex system that is composed of countless sub-systems each serve a different function.

As a system, I have self-consciousness, which is a collective one in order to adapt and survive in the environment surrounded "me" (I doubt that "self" is an integrated one, I believe the concept of self is a delusion, or an emergent event, but I will discuss this topic later). Recently I'm doing Brazilian Jiu-jitsu, in which I will inevitably have some bruise here or there. This might be a bad news for part of the sub-body systems that is being hurt, but overall I would not stop myself from practicing martial arts because it benefits me, the collective system. I sacrifice part of my body to make myself stronger.

Now to the environment that surrounds me, I'm also an individual, just like those individual cells or sub-system in my body. The environment would not really care about the interest of the individuals (of course, it is hard to resemble the environment, or any big system such as economy as an organism. This perspective will be very strange because it is just like a molecule in your body is trying to think about the purpose of your actions. But if you imagine yourself as a molecule you will realize that the complex collective system created by the interactions between you and other molecules, has caused an emergent effect that allows the collective system to act like as if it has self-consciousness. The characteristics of this emergent phenomenon, would not be too far away from what you, the molecule wants to achieve -- that is to reproduce and spread through space-time as much as possible. How? By passing the the information containing you through a thing called gene. But this not the end. Sometimes the collective system will also act in the opposite way of the genes' goals, because they may have a higher perspective in which reproduction is no longer deemed as important.)

The market or the economy, just like human, is a collective system, it is made up by humans, the interactions with other humans, and their reactions to the stimulants from the environment. The characteristic of the market would still resembles humans' nature, goal, intention and desire. After all, the actions humans take are the basic component of the market. Borrowing the concept of fractal, a sophisticated system is always made up by the same simple structure repeated over and over again, but any small variation, fluctuation, or asymmetry in that process would produce countless differing ending patterns.

Back to the topic, when you think the market or the economy as an organism, the market wouldn't really care about the interest of individuals because sometimes sacrificing part of them would make the system stronger and more resilient. Most people who have made mistakes, took risks to innovate, went through trail and error -- would fail, miserably. But their mistakes will feedback to the system and made the system even stronger. The system prefers people to fail, because their failure would make it more antifragile. How selfish is that. But don't forget, we're selfish too. In this chaotic and uncertain world, the only way to win, is to lose less -- to increase your level of anti-fragileness.

References:

[1] goo.gl/ayD2L1

Today's Book:

Antifragile by Nassim Taleb: What's fragile, what's robust and what's anti-fragile? Are you able to categorize things you've seen in your life into these three categories? How would you be able to grow and outshine in this world of uncertainties and chaos?