On Becoming Antifragile

James,

We have discussed offline Nassim Taleb's concept of antifragility, detailed in his book "Antifragile." Briefly the concept is that things may be fragile, that is, easily damaged; or they may be robust, that is, not easily damaged; but it is also possible to take the spectrum further, and look for things that are antifragile, that benefit from stress, attacks, or the passage of time. Taleb gives the example from Greek myth of the Hydra, which grows two new heads each time one is cut off. What are your thoughts on this characteristic?

Lynn

Lynn, thanks for stretching my brain space again.

What would my boxing coaches say about Taleb’s antifragile concept? In other words, if I had summarized the anti-fragile concept to them in a training session, what might they have said:

Reds Foley: “If you don’t learn to move that head they’ll soon be no room in there for those big ideas.”

Big Rich: “No shit, Sherlock—give me another round!”

Raphael: “Steel sharpens steel. We don’t sharpen our knives with silk pillows.”

Mister Jimmy: “Some genius got paid for saying that? I wonder if he’ll by my car. The transmission is shot.”

Mister Frank: “That’s the foundation of what we do here. I’d like to speak to this man. I’m sure I could learn something from someone smart enough to figure that out without stepping in the ring.”

In other words Lynn, this is clearly known to anyone who has fought and who trains to fight or trains others to fight. There is all the equipment and technique to learn, the hundreds of rounds spent shadow boxing and meditating on method. However, one is not made fight ready until he is set to sparring with a partner.

That partner, if inept, and posing no danger to the fighter, will make this fighter weaker, will leach from him the essence he is trying to increase.

There are also numerous pitfalls to sparring, as many unproductive things that can crop up as productive. If sparring is mistaken for fighting, for instance, retardation and fixing of an incomplete skill set may occur. If conducted sensibly, sparring, with the right sparring partner, which means a partner who poses some level of threat, is the only way one progresses in the training environment in such a way as to translate to the fight venue. But even this, since there are various takes on the behavior that fall short of the actual fight, only achieves a portion of a fighter’s evolution.

Where the fighter gains mastery—the only place this occurs—is in that most dangerous setting where he can be stopped, injured, maimed or killed. Being stopped may cause a type of spiritual damage that is essential an injuring, maiming or killing of the fighting spirit.

The fighter is brought along in evolutionary steps to prepare him first for an “antifragile” immersion in sparring and then finally in competition where the nature of the more lethal environment will greatly increase his adaptive quality.

This antifragile notion is, perhaps tied to Nietzsche’s dictum, “That which does not kill us makes us stronger.”

Admittedly, in the case of boxing, the coach is pre-selecting an antifragile—let’s call him hyper-adaptive, though “robust” is really perfect, to be cultivated as an evolving combatant in progressively more stressful training session and then fights, in such a way that the fighter literally ascends a transformative field of experience, a field of experience ritually and perilously far beyond the domesticated norms of the civilized experience.

LL:  James, you quote Nietzche, whom Taleb discusses at length in the book, and in your last paragraph you note the importance of pre-selection on the part of the coach, another topic he covers extensively.  It fascinates me to see intersections between seemingly disparate intellects, your insights particularly so, since you seamlessly combine both modes of inquiry, that of the intellect and that of the physical.

(c) 2017 James LaFond