brettworks

“We know more than we think we do, a lot more than we can articulate” (35) – Nassim Nicholas Taleb

I used to resist randomly exploring some aspect of music software–an instrument, a sound, an effect, a sequencer–because I wanted to have a sense ahead of time where I was headed. (Good luck with that Tom.) But this needing to know closed off interesting options that I could not predict. Whenever I just went with whatever caught my attention though, trying things out at random, I always ended up in an interesting musical place. My push and pull experiences with chance and randomness while working with music software came to mind last year as I read Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Antifragile. Taleb, a scholar and statistician, suggests the concept of antifragility to describes things that “thrive and grow when exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder, and stressors and love adventure, risk, and uncertainty.” Reading Taleb, who is a compelling essayist, I thought anew about how my needing to know where the music was going hampered the creative process. Could I learn to embrace antifragility–to love “randomness, uncertainty, disorder, errors, stressors, etc.” when making music?

For Taleb, one only achieves a measure of control when one embraces randomness and the nonlinear. Taleb’s book (a companion to his earlier books, Fooled By Randomness and The Black Swan) aims to provide a philosophical guide to what he calls nonpredictive decision-making under uncertainty or opacity, or in other words, “how to not be afraid to work with things we patently don’t understand…” (11) One way to do this is by tinkering. Tinkering is a process of trial and error that allows one to make many small mistakes or incur small losses. The mistakes that come via tinkering are important, Taleb says, because they are rich in information yet small in harm. They also do vital work by stressing the system of which they are a part and making it stronger. And by yielding information and stressing the system to make it stronger, tinkering sets the stage for discovery–the possibility of finding “something rather significant” (236).

At one point in the book Taleb provides a list of words that describe the conditions that confront and characterize our decision-making under opacity: uncertainty, variability, imperfection, chance, chaos, volatility, disorder, entropy, randomness, dispersion, and unknowledge. The point is that there is so much more we don’t understand about the world than we do. How then can we regenerate ourselves by using, rather than suffering from, the opaque unknown? By being curious, and by making mistakes via tinkering. In my reading of Taleb’s essay, it is this strategy for embracing the unknown that is potentially so useful, especially to Makers Of Things who know well that they never fully control the sources of their creative work in the first place. “Antifragility takes time” (12), Taleb assures us. Only over time are the shapes and meanings of nonlinearity–“fractal, jagged, and rich in detail, though with a certain pattern” (325)–made apparent.