Antifragile is a standalone book in Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s landmark Incerto series, an investigation of opacity, luck, uncertainty, probability, human error, risk, and decision-making in a world we don’t understand. The other books in the series are Fooled by Randomness, The Black Swan, Skin in the Game, and The Bed of Procrustes.Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the bestselling author of The Black Swan … bestselling author of The Black Swan and one of the foremost thinkers of our time, reveals how to thrive in an uncertain world.
Just as human bones get stronger when subjected to stress and tension, and rumors or riots intensify when someone tries to repress them, many things in life benefit from stress, disorder, volatility, and turmoil. What Taleb has identified and calls “antifragile” is that category of things that not only gain from chaos but need it in order to survive and flourish.
In The Black Swan, Taleb showed us that highly improbable and unpredictable events underlie almost everything about our world. In Antifragile, Taleb stands uncertainty on its head, making it desirable, even necessary, and proposes that things be built in an antifragile manner. The antifragile is beyond the resilient or robust. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better and better.
Furthermore, the antifragile is immune to prediction errors and protected from adverse events. Why is the city-state better than the nation-state, why is debt bad for you, and why is what we call “efficient” not efficient at all? Why do government responses and social policies protect the strong and hurt the weak? Why should you write your resignation letter before even starting on the job? How did the sinking of the Titanic save lives? The book spans innovation by trial and error, life decisions, politics, urban planning, war, personal finance, economic systems, and medicine. And throughout, in addition to the street wisdom of Fat Tony of Brooklyn, the voices and recipes of ancient wisdom, from Roman, Greek, Semitic, and medieval sources, are loud and clear.
Antifragile is a blueprint for living in a Black Swan world.
Erudite, witty, and iconoclastic, Taleb’s message is revolutionary: The antifragile, and only the antifragile, will make it.
Praise for Antifragile
“Ambitious and thought-provoking . . . highly entertaining.”—The Economist
“A bold book explaining how and why we should embrace uncertainty, randomness, and error . . . It may just change our lives.”—Newsweek
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This is a book I will have to read a few times to understand it all. Probably more than a few times. A lot more. A powerful book and I am so glad I read it. I will now spend more of my time reading his other books.
Read it. It will make your brain burn… in a good way.
I would have to describe this book as “mind-bending.” It is so packed full of new and challenging concepts that you literally can feel your mind being rewired as you attempt to understand Dr. Taleb’s work. I read this book twice, once in 2015 while a PhD student and again in 2016. I still believe I have more to digest in order to apply what I have learned from this book. If you want to be challenged – read Antifragile.
The author confronts the reader with more ideas than can be absorbed in one reading. Prepare to be overwhelmed with novel ideas supported with impeccable logic. This fascinating book challenged several of my ideas and confirmed a few that I already held but could not prove. Some systems, institutions, assets, etc. are fragile, meaning that variations in conditions would harm or even destroy them. Others are robust and are not affected. The Antifragile actually gain from the variations. Examples used include natural selection where adverse conditions eliminate the inferior members of a species so that the better genes survive to improve future generations. Another example is one’s own muscles: occasionally having to lift heavy objects can increase strength. In large free markets businesses survive and thrive by satisfying customers’ needs very well to the benefit of consumers.
He explains that when events such as the collapse of the housing bubble a few years ago cause the collapse of Fannie Mae and Sallie Mae, we all tend to blame someone for failing to predict the catastrophic event. He asserts that prediction is not possible and that we should rather blame the decision makers that positioned the organization to be so vulnerable. The rarer the event the more difficult it is to predict its probability or effects.
Many pages were used to explain that we naturally do not like randomness and therefore embrace the well intentioned interventions that are threatening our economy, health, political life, and educational systems. (He is critical of both political parties for different reasons.) He asserts that government interventions cause the formation of larger, more complex systems that have more interdependencies and are subject to unpredictable, cascading, runaway reactions (very fragile.) He also explains why, contrary to conventional wisdom, the larger the organization the more fragile it is. He discusses why complex projects often result in huge cost and schedule over-runs.
I learned a lot from this book and intend to reread it to absorb more of the content. The only negative is that the author uses many obscure, large words. This was my first experience reading a large book on an e-reader and found myself constantly using the dictionary feature to look up the words.
Recommended reading for all Truth-seakers in the world!