Academics find it “irrational” that one can prefer apples to oranges, oranges to pears, but pears to apples (something called intransitivity of preferences). I leave aside the problem that in real life choices have synchronies: I am not (dynamically) inconsistent if I prefer soup to grapes at the beginning of dinner, but grapes to soup at the end. Things never presents themselves to us in a textbook way, but over time and in different contexts. But there there is a deeper logic for such inconsistency –even in the *static* case.
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Recall that the antifragile is what likes a bit of randomness.
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It may be very efficient, in the long run, to inject some randomness in one’s choices in order to span a broader set of objects, and intransitivity is one way to do so. Break the routine of choices. This is similar to gift giving: a gift is something that you would not buy otherwise; it too breaks your routine of choices — like a book you would have never thought of buying.
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Mother nature may have a way to force you to make “mistakes” of small consequence may reveal deeper preferences or more interesting attributes of the world. This is optionality.

via Academics find it “irrational” that one can… – Nassim Nicholas Taleb.