{"id":36075,"date":"2021-05-30T11:46:01","date_gmt":"2021-05-30T15:46:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.shortform.com\/blog\/?p=36075"},"modified":"2021-06-06T21:18:48","modified_gmt":"2021-06-07T01:18:48","slug":"mediocristan-and-extremistan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shortform.com\/blog\/mediocristan-and-extremistan\/","title":{"rendered":"Antifragile: Mediocristan and Extremistan"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

What are Mediocristan<\/a> and Extremistan<\/a>? How can they help you understand the ideas of antifragility? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mediocristan and Extremistan are two hypothetical countries in the book Antifragile<\/em>. The author uses them to talk about how variations in systems happen, and why those variations may or may not cause failures. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Read more about Mediocristan and Extremistan below.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

Extremistan and Mediocristan<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

We\u2019ve said repeatedly that variations and randomness lead to stability, but the key to this is that the variations are small. <\/strong>Let\u2019s consider two hypothetical countries: Extremistan and Mediocristan. In Mediocristan, there are constant, small variations in the economy, political parties, and so on. These changes might seem significant, even frightening, but over time they tend to average themselves out, and not much changes. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

You could consider various things in your own life to be \u201cfrom\u201d Mediocristan. One example might be your eating habits: While there are inevitably small (or large) variations in how many calories you eat in a day, on the whole they will average out to a reasonable number. Put another way, no one day\u2019s calories will have a significant impact on your overall average calories. Even if you vastly overindulge one day\u2014on Thanksgiving, perhaps, if you\u2019re American\u2014it\u2019ll still be a tiny fraction of the calories you eat in a year. This is the core concept of Mediocristan: small variations that have little impact in the long run. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Extremistan, on the other hand, has relatively few changes, but the changes that happen are extreme. The economy suddenly soars or plunges, or major political parties are overthrown and replaced. Between these events are periods of apparent peace and stability but, as with the bank clerk\u2019s income, that stability is an illusion. It\u2019s only a matter of time before another major event upends everything all over again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One example of something \u201cfrom\u201d Extremistan would be novel sales. Over half of all sales come from 0.1 percent of novels. Therefore, if we consider each novel to be an \u201cevent,\u201d we\u2019ll see something that looks very stable until one of these exceptionally successful novels comes along and completely skews the data. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The other problem with Extremistan is that it\u2019s unpredictable. There\u2019s no telling when an extreme event will happen, and they can be devastating when they do. Consider novels again\u2014it\u2019s often hard to say which novels will be the super-successful ones, and when such a book does come along, it pulls sales away from thousands of other books.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Therefore, when studying something that\u2019s prone to sudden, extreme jumps, one can\u2019t try to predict what will happen based on evidence\u2014by the time you have that evidence, the event has already happened. Instead, you have to look at the potential damage such an event could cause. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

For perhaps the most extreme example of this, think about the proliferation of nuclear weapons. Someone predicting the future<\/a> based on evidence might say that nuclear weapons are quite safe\u2014after all, they haven\u2019t killed a single person in the better part of a century. In fact, that\u2019s the crux of the \u201cnuclear deterrence\u201d argument: Nuclear weapons are safe because everyone has them and therefore, no one would dare to use them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

However, someone predicting the future based on potential damage will see quite a different picture: Never in history has the world been in so much danger. If those nuclear weapons are ever used, the damage would be incalculable\u2014and it\u2019s only a matter of time before they\u2019re used. It\u2019s the nature of Extremistan that the extreme events will happen sooner or later.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What are Mediocristan and Extremistan? How can they help you understand the ideas of antifragility? Mediocristan and Extremistan are two hypothetical countries in the book Antifragile. The author uses them to talk about how variations in systems happen, and why those variations may or may not cause failures. Read more about Mediocristan and Extremistan below.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":36079,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[43,24],"tags":[295],"class_list":["post-36075","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-self-improvement","category-society","tag-antifragile","","tg-column-two"],"yoast_head":"\nAntifragile: Mediocristan and Extremistan - Shortform Books<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Mediocristan and Extremistan are two hypothetical places in Nassim Nicholas Taleb's book Antifragile. 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