Why Schools Are Failing Students? Antifragile

2,114 views Wait, is this logic right? • Jul 01, 2023

Slog Reference: Antifragile: Why are schools teaching children the exact wrong things

Description

Are schools making us dumber? Nassim Taleb coined a famous term a few years ago: Antifragile. This encapsulates many concepts in nature and other parts of our growth. The term syggests building systems that can not only withstand the current problems, but get better with each new problem. Hence, facing more problems improves the system.

To make our children antifragile, they need to face more difficult situations. But schools do exactly opposite. Children get punished for failing if they face difficult situations. Hence it encourages avoiding such situations. Which in turn is making our children less antifragile. The video covers various aspects of antifragile with interesting examples and information. Learn it all now.

Hope you enjoyed FutureIQ by Navin Kabra and Shrikant Joshi. Do hit us up on Twitter:
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Watch other episodes of The FutureIQ podcast: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAppTB0r5_TaYueZ0adD42Wiw5X-wTE4v

More videos for you:
Moving out at 18: https://youtu.be/esm39hwG1sk
Should you go abroad for studies: https://youtu.be/rL74DXfvYJY

Books mentioned in the video:
Antifragile by N. N. Taleb: https://tapthe.link/AntifragileBook
Guns Germs & Steel by Jared Diamond: https://tapthe.link/GunsGermsSteelBook

Chapters:
00:00 The problem
00:48 Antifagile
03:14 Example 1
04:13 Data
05:16 Example 2
06:36 Levels
07:08 Children & schools
08:30 Parenting
09:45 Real-life examples
11:30 Dictatorship vs democracy
13:50 Communism vs capitalism
16:00 Should everything be antifragile?

#futureiq #antifragile

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Antifragile: Why are schools teaching children the exact wrong things

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Transcript

- about every little mistake is going to cost marks that's the opposite of learning to be anti-fragile I don't like this anymore I thought he was going to blame the schools instead he's blaming me as a parent I thought he was going to tell me that the schools are doing it wrong he's telling me I am doing it wrong as a parent hi shrikanth hi Naveen did you know that our schools are teaching our children exactly the wrong thing exactly the wrong approach to learning I knew it I knew I wasn't wrong I knew my teachers were wrong I knew that I was born intelligent but education ruined me yeah except that you are not allowed to have

0m 36s such views unless you are able to explain what is wrong and what is the correct method and that I will talk about in this episode I have him to explain so I'm not going to attempt experience explain so uh the basic idea I want to talk about today is something called antifragile it is a word coined by uh author philosopher NN Talib in a book of the same name anti-fragile that's Nasim Nicholas so let's understand the basic thing about any system right and how it deals with failures uh the the thing that we most think about or worry about is that we want to our systems to be robust true right true if every little failure every

1m 20s little shock causes the system to break then that is a fragile system correct correct what you want is something that is robust so when a shock hits it uh it doesn't uh I mean you know it just withstands the stocks correct you can't ride a bike if it is going to break at every pothole that it meets not in Pune definitely in fact uh I mean robust isn't also uh as good okay I mean the word that is used for Bombay after every flood is resilient right resilient is that it Springs back from shocks but Talib points out that one of the most important Concepts in nature anywhere is more than robust or resilient in fact it

2m 07s is a very non-intuitive concept it says that A system that exists systems which actually grow stronger with every shock with every failure oh like non-Newtonian fluids yeah so actually that doesn't make sense initially when you first hear it right but uh think about it that every time there is a minor failure you learn from the failure you change your systems you change your processes you add some new rules and now you have a system that is better able to deal with that failure right true now there are some other small failure and you again adjust so A system that keeps hitting different shocks keep hitting different failures and then learns from that that it's an

2m 56s antipragile system all of evolution in general and all of our biology in particular is based on this concept of antifragile and that's why we have bodies which Thrive under uh such adverse condition worse conditions yeah very interesting uh can you point out to an example in evolution where anti-fragility can be observed or probably an example people in in the body as you said where artificiality is observed so let's take the example of our immune system okay every infection that comes into our body our immune system first tries to fight it using the simple tools it has called the innate immune system correct uh if that works great if that doesn't work then our adaptive immune system takes

3m 46s over we end up creating T cells and B cells and basically we try various things until one particular attack works against this particular germ and then we remember it in case of chickenpox we remember it for the rest of our life that is why you get chicken pox only once in your life right correct in case of tetanus we remember it for 10 years that's why you have to take tetanus shots every 10 years right right that reminds me I need to go and get a technician but if you were to draw a curve okay of uh I mean you know you draw a curve where on the x axis it is how many germs are how strong the attack

4m 28s on U was right and on the y-axis how well you are doing and now and in the future right you will notice is that initially for some number of attacks for weaker attacks your body actually goes stronger with every attack because you are learning to uh deal with and Destroy newer and newer types of jumps okay okay of course when the attack goes after Beyond a certain point now your body is no longer able to learn from that or deal with that and you will die or something bad will happen right so I mean after a while it goes negative correct but the first part where it goes positive for a while what doesn't kill

5m 11s you makes you stronger ah right to take a different illustrative interesting example right our Bones the more you use your body and your bones the stronger they grow because we have two kinds of cells in our bone cells in our body right right osteoblasts and osteoclasts okay one of them goes and removes cells in places where they are not needed okay and in places where the Bones have been exposed to stress you go and create new cells right okay so reinforce so that is why people who run regularly will have stronger bones ah most interesting most interesting result of this is that astronauts who spend a month or more in the space station they lose one to two percent of

6m 10s their bone density for every month they spend in space why because no gravity their bones are not getting stressed they are not getting you know jerks and gems that is why interestingness also means a lot of things for space travel but will not go into that right now maybe a different video so yeah interesting so that's how the body's immune system and the all of the body systems are in a way so to speak anti-fragile but from what what you've described it seems to be like there is fragile there is robust there is resilient and then there is anti-fragile correct yeah so uh and you want to be at antifragile right correct a lot of modern systems are trying to be

6m 56s robust right as in just they're trying to avoid failures entirely they're trying to absorb the shocks and that's about it well actually most of them aren't even trying to absorb shocks they're trying to avoid shocks entirely right think about it as in for a child you spend way too much time uh trying to protect them from falling protect them from going outside protect them from uh you know the mud on the ground and infections in the park you're making me feel bad as a parent Naveen yes that's the whole point our schools our schools I mean what did we say right that antifragile is when you are exposed to lots of little failures and lots of

7m 40s little shocks and you learn from them you grow stronger you don't want uh uh I mean to be exposed to a big shock because that will kill you right remember the curve small yeah hermesis Zone all of school is trying to teach student to be extremely careful with every problem think three times and not make a single mistake and every mistake you cut marks and make the student feel bad whereas in reality what you want to be doing is let them experiment let them make lots of mistake and let them learn from their own mistakes instead children become anxious about every little mistake is going to cost marks that's the opposite of learning to be

8m 21s anti-fragile I don't like this anymore I thought he was going to blame the schools instead he's blaming me as a parent I thought he was going to tell me that the schools are doing it wrong he's telling me I am doing it wrong as a parent so I do believe that too much of modern parenting is trying to protect children from minor harms whereas those minor harms are actually necessary to build stronger children but kids little kids you need to protect them you need to no you don't our little kids are extremely anti-fragile they are very very capable of learning so there is for example an entire tribe I don't know somewhere you know we'll find out later

9m 01s but they have no concept of telling children to stay away from fire studied by anthropologists okay and all they do is the children are allowed to do what they want with fire every once in a while they burn their fingers a little bit after that they learn a lesson which is never forgotten right and their children are not dying at a higher rate of fire than our children do you see me sweating the very mention of that has me sweating all over yeah all right so uh interesting uh example there of course but uh what else what what other examples other than once you understand the concept of antipragile and you start looking around you will

9m 51s see examples each and everywhere right like I said uh I mean in evolution we just talked about immune system and biology but it applies even to entire tribes and cultures right right now imagine there is one popular relation which is exposed to lots of shocks lots of small skirmishes with their neighbor small battles and so on whereas another set of tribes are like completely peaceful for 300 years they have not had any War they have not had famines they have not had any problems instantly thinking of two specific countries aren't we but think about it when suddenly an unexpected disaster strikes or suddenly a colonial power from far away comes which tribe is going to survive the one that

10m 40s has had practice with war and battles exactly so in fact if you read the book Guns Germs and Steel their Jared Diamond makes the argument that the reason Europe was able to just so easily take over all of Southern North America is because European countries spent 100 centuries fighting each other and becoming good at fighting whereas the North and South American huge civilizations kingdoms but they just didn't have that much practice with fighting and that's why so Europe was anti-fragile and these guys were just robust any world leaders watching this video please do not take this as an invitation or a justification of the starting worse it is not the justification was starting worse please

11m 27s we've had enough of that right but just talking about world leaders I have another interesting example right that if you I mean a lot of people huh okay really really want there to be a benign dictatorship in their country because they're very frustrated with democracy where the politicians never do the right thing they just Pander to the masses and there is like you know anything if a leader is trying to do something good the opposition attacks her even if just three months ago they were supporting that thing and there is gridlock and nothing ever gets done and then you see the example of Singapore and you're like I want that right so authoritarian regimes dictatorships move

12m 15s fast they make quick decisions and uh often you know when the decisions are good they do so much better than other countries they are more efficient correct right but when you look back at something quite complex like a war what happens is that the democracies where everybody is like just you know it's all messy it is anti-fragile whereas a dictatorship is fragile it is like you know efficient and optimized and focused and then one bad decision takes them in the wrong direction and the whole thing collapses right in the last hundred years whenever there's been a war between a democracy and an authoritarian regime the democracy has won what happens is that initially the Democracy does badly huh right

13m 05s because I mean they can't agree and they can't even decide how many troops to send and the opposition is yelling at them and all that but slowly over time what happens is that sooner or later the authoritarian regime makes a mistake and then collapses whereas the democracy ultimately gets its act together and just gets through the whole thing right same thing happened in World War II see how it went same thing is happening even now maybe I don't know what love as of this video uh there is there is a war going on in the world and uh his his point seems to be absolutely bang on in terms of that war as well yeah uh Russia

13m 43s and Ukraine interesting so uh yeah and similarly I mean dictatorship versus democracy or uh communism versus capitalism right in capitalism all kinds of companies are there and they're each one trying their own thing and different thing and they're often going in opposite directions right yeah whereas in communism the whole point was that the government would decide for the entire country what is the right thing to do and what is the right thing to produce and what are the right people to do the production and it would be more efficient but what you see one thing you have to start noticing now is that whenever I use the word efficient and optimized it's actually the wrong thing it is fragile because a

14m 27s sudden shock comes and the thing can't handle itself whereas the mess that is capitalism with so many companies being created and most of them dying but each failure you learn something from and over time only the antifragile ones I mean the whole system as a whole becomes antifragile and can deal with all kinds of adversities right I partially disagree with this point there I understand the overall capitalism Point that he's trying to make but within capitalism itself there is a lot of fragility which needs to be addressed and which also has its own problems if we go into that debate now this episode is never going to end so we are not going into that debate now yeah

15m 12s so we are we are on slightly different sides on this topic I mean uh I will admit that capitalism has all kinds of problems but the fact that there is lots of failures and there are just so many different directions it goes in that does not necessarily the failure right I can see that like I said I partially agree you know when you are thinking just in theory uh communism sounds so great no no no but it is not I think that's the important that's the point I was making not that capitalism is fair enough fair enough we will for now agree to disagree on that point disagree being air quotes right so uh that brings

15m 55s us to the most important question I think uh regarding this principle this uh episode should everything then be anti-fragile like should we aspire to be anti-fragile in every aspect of our life no uh I mean in general what we would have noticed is that antifragile is not efficient right okay yeah uh so antifragile things will have uh extra slack built into the system it will do things a little more slowly it will take decisions slowly so um you know for anything that needs to live for a long time and where you don't know how how the future is going to change that should be anti-fragile right for smaller things short-term things uh things where you don't expect any sudden changes for

16m 44s all of those use modern principles of you know efficiency and optimization and so so again The Best of Both Worlds in this case applies always always fascinating fascinating because I realized that if if you put if you built in an anti-fragility into the system like you said there will be a lot more slack there is a there'd be a lot more space for things to happen and a lot of capitalist economies would suddenly realize that their input costs are inflated so that would I I don't know how that would mesh with capitalism but I guess it's another interesting debate for us to have in a future episode or in another episode yeah and these ideas

17m 25s came from a book anti-fragile by Nicholas Nasim Nicholas Talib uh it's a good book to read not unless sorry to read the whole book you just read the first two three chapters you will still get an important idea which can change how you think about lots of aspects of your life nice so that is anti-fragile and that is anti-fragility with two very fragile people my name is srikanth this is Naveen thank you for watching till the end if you liked this episode check out these others you might like them also and please share with your friends I'm sure they will also like these thank you