The Buzz Word Anti-fragile is tossed around lately by #NoEstimates advocates claiming that making estimate creates fragility to the work. Let's start with a definition of anti-fragile ...
Some things benefit from shocks; they thrive and grow when exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder, and stressors and love adventure, risk, and uncertainty. Yet, in spite of the ubiquity of the phenomenon, there is no word for the exact opposite of fragile. Let us call it antifragile. Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better. — from the prologue of Fooled by Randomness
The books of Taleb are focused on the Macroeconomics of public finance and the institutions that serve them. Taleb writes books about how unexpected things happen sometimes and how he’s much smarter than everyone else. [1] The agile community that uses Taleb's work in their advocacy of software development techniques appears to have confused macroeconomics with microeconomics.
Let's clarify that now:
- Macroeconomics is concerned with large-scale or general economic factors, such as interest rates and national productivity. Macroeconomics is the branch of economics that studies the behavior and performance of an economy as a whole. It focuses on the aggregate changes in the economy such as unemployment, growth rate, gross domestic product, and inflation. Macroeconomics analyzes all aggregate indicators and the microeconomic factors that influence the economy. Government and corporations use macroeconomic models to help in formulating of economic policies and strategies. [2]
- Microeconomics is concerned with single factors and the effects of individual decisions. Microeconomics is the study of the economic behavior of individual units of an economy (a person, household, firm, or industry) and not of the aggregate economy (the domain of macroeconomics). Microeconomics is primarily concerned with the factors that affect individual economic choices, the effect of changes in these factors on the individual decision makers, how their choices are coordinated by markets, and how prices and demand are determined in individual markets.[3] Microeconomics studies the implications of individual human action, specifically about how those decisions affect the utilization and distribution of scarce resources in the presence of uncertainties - reducible and irreducible that affect the decision making about choices from alternatives that can be selected and put to work to change the outcome.
It is Microeconomics that is the paradigm of software development in the presence of uncertainty and scarce resources.
The Punch Line
When we hear about ideas coming from Taleb - skin in the game, fragility, and antifragility, and those ideas are not translated from Macroeconomics to the Microeconomics of decision making in the presence of uncertainty with scarce resources (time, money), then you'll know the persons making those claims doesn't know the difference between Macro and Micro
- Developing software for money - other people's money - in the presence of uncertainty (reducible and irreducible) - and the risk that creates - which CANNOT be eliminated without eliminating the uncertainty - is a Microeconomics process
- Managing nations, banks, sovereign funds, currency and other large-scale economic processes - like of steel tariffs this week is a Macroeconomics process.
When these two paradigms get mixed up in an attempt to re-use words without understanding their definition, it undermines the credibility of the speakers. If you can't keep the difference between macro and micro straight, what else can't you keep straight? This is one example of the Dunning-Kruger Effect [4]
So always ask for evidence, ask for references, ask for principles, and never accept personal anecdotes without those things first and a clear and concise description of how those anecdotes are mapped to those principles. And how that mapping can be tested in your domain, against your own principles.
When there is disagreement between principles, then a conversation can be based in facts, evidence, and experience applying those principles using those facts. When it's just anecdotes there is not the basis for a comparative conversation, it's just an opinion, and many times an unsubstantiated opinion at that.
[1] Karl Whelan's critique of Taleb in Forbes
[2] The Economics Economy-Budget Dictionary
[3] Business Dictionary
[4] "Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments," Justin Kruger and David Dunning, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 199, Vol. 77, No. 6, pp. 1123-1134
