How do you kill a Hydra? On Antifragility and Health

As I write these lines, a patient in Madrid is dying of COVID-19 every three minutes. If the models are to be believed, we are only at the beginning of a pandemic that will have claimed very many lives worldwide in the coming months. For many, this is a shock. Surely no one could have foreseen something like this! The truth is, it was foreseen. Risk experts were already sounding the alarm on January 26.

When the financial markets crashed in 2008, there was one man who suddenly became filthy rich. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, who fled the Lebanese Civil War, is not only a successful stockbroker and professor of statistics in New York. Taleb is also a passionate flâneur and essayist. In The Black Swan, he warned as early as 2007 of the real possibility of a pandemic.

Yet no one listened to him. And because no one really understood his books anyway—even though they spent months on the bestseller lists—Taleb decided one day that from then on he would write only highly complex articles for an academic audience.

A “Black Swan” is an extremely unlikely event with enormous consequences. The discovery of penicillin, Google’s success, and 9/11 were Black Swans because no one could have predicted them. In the reality we know, Black Swans have no precursors. The coronavirus pandemic had numerous precursors; it was only a matter of time.

A “Black Swan” serves as a metaphor for a highly unlikely event with enormous consequences. Our world is shaped by “Black Swans,” yet we generally overlook this because, in retrospect, we explain “Black Swans” away through our “tendency to invent stories” (“narrative bias”). –

Driven by the “will to power,” the “coarser organ sees much apparent equality” (Nietzsche). In this way, we keep the frightening unpredictability of reality at bay by continually replicating the familiar and known—just like the virus. The coronavirus crisis was foreseeable; it is therefore a “White Swan.”

A fundamental distinction Taleb makes in his thinking is between “Mediocristan” and “Extremistan.” In Mediocristan, everything is more or less the same. The world’s tallest and shortest people probably differ by little more than a meter. Most people are somewhere in the middle between these two extremes; the result is—in mathematical terms—a classic bell curve, or normal/Gaussian distribution.

Gaussian bell curve on a German ten-mark banknote from the 1990s

Things are different in “Extremistan.” It is entirely possible for a single person to earn more than a million others combined. A million first-time authors sell five hundred books on average. One first-time author, by contrast, sells more than five hundred million books. In Extremistan, we are not interested in the average values of a random distribution but in its “tails,” its extreme values.

Unlike with a normal distribution (Mediocristan), in an 80/20 or Pareto distribution (Extremistan), we are interested in the “tails,” that is, the ends of the curve. Note that this graph approaches the value “infinity” in two respects. What is interesting is that such a distribution has no “ceiling”—its potential is unlimited. This is what makes the “Sacred Game” (life with “Skin in the Game”) fundamentally different from trivial board games with predetermined rules and possibilities.

Suppose your grandmother were first cooled to minus eighty degrees for twelve hours and then heated to one hundred degrees for twelve hours. On average, your grandmother would therefore have been exposed to a temperature of twenty degrees. – You can drive into a wall one hundred times at a speed of 1 km/h and nothing will happen to you. But you can drive into a wall just once at a speed of 100 km/h.

Having ten thousand pebbles thrown at your head one after another may be annoying. Having a correspondingly large boulder thrown at your head once is fatal in its effect. By definition, anything that is eliminated by contact with extreme events, that is, strong deviations from the mean, is fragile; it “dislikes” disorder.

Anything that responds to disorder with disintegration is fragile. The classic example of fragility is the teacup. Before the shock—the coronavirus crisis, etc.—the teacup contains relatively little information and relatively much meaning. In a state of fragmentation or disorder, the teacup contains relatively much information and relatively little meaning. We can currently observe the same thing on social networks. A relatively large amount of meaningless content (noise/information) mixes with a relatively small amount of meaningful content (signal/meaning).

Alongside fragile – and robust – systems, there is another category. Anything that responds to disorder and extreme deviation from the norm with benefit, learning, or growth is antifragile. Our immune system is antifragile. A living or complex system responds to stress with adaptation and growth when the necessary conditions are present. For a muscle—or a relationship—to become stronger after strain than it was before, it must be able to recover from the exertion phase (training). Paracelsus already knew: “The dose makes the poison.”

As this illustration shows, moderate stress stimuli encourage the system to transcend itself and respond to the challenge by becoming stronger. This is known as “overcompensation.” The classic example is muscle training. If the stress stimulus is too strong or the repetition interval too short, an injury or trauma occurs instead of growth. It could therefore be a good idea to systematically train—or conserve—our health in “times of peace” so that we are prepared for the “worst-case scenario.”

Taleb illustrates the three categories—fragile/robust/antifragile—with metaphorical images from Greek mythology. King Damocles is fragile because the “sword of Damocles” is always hanging over him. He can do whatever he wants; one day his hour will come—also known as the “turkey problem”. The popular “phoenix rising from the ashes,” by contrast, is robust. Throw it into the fire and it will rise again—– “You can’t keep a good weed down!” The Hydra, on the other hand, is antifragile. The Hydra benefits from damage. Cut off one of its heads and two grow back in its place.

Let us be clear about who the natural winners of randomness are: researchers, artists, and entrepreneurs. Someone searches for a medication for high blood pressure and discovers Viagra in the process. Someone repairs a satellite dish and discovers the cosmic microwave background radiation. Someone searches for a sea route to India and ends up discovering America! – Perhaps it is not a good idea at all to pursue “health” as a return to “normality,” but rather as an invitation to adventure, as an expedition to the sources of our innate vitality. – What truly makes me feel alive? What fills me with the fire of enthusiasm? It could be that, in following this trail, “health” emerges as a side effect. –

Gustave Moreau: Heracles and the Lernaean Hydra, 1876

Everything that grows exponentially comes from Extremistan, including the pathogen that causes COVID-19, SARS-COV2. How do you kill a Hydra? Ask Hercules! You must cut off its head and immediately cauterize the neck with fire. You must not give the monster time to regenerate. No one can do that—not even Hercules—alone. In the fight against a Hydra, we need rigorous determination and, above all: merciless—no, superhuman—speed!

The question of what we ourselves can influence is addressed in Self-Efficacy, Stress, and the Immune System: What We Can Influence. I describe how we can develop an inner sense of connectedness in Sense of Coherence: How We Develop Our Sense of Connectedness. You can find more about the underlying principle of hormesis in Hormesis: How Positive Stress Can Make Us Stronger. I explain what this conviction later became in practical terms in Cistus and the Immune System: The Story Behind Imun Guard. You can find the complete overview in our comprehensive overview of salutogenesis.