Future Studies & Forecasting, Business - General & Miscellaneous, Mathematics, Mathematics

Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder

Name: Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder
Author: Nassim Nicholas Taleb
ISBN: 9781400067824

by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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Overview

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the 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

“Taleb takes on everything from the mistakes of modern architecture to the dangers of meddlesome doctors and how overrated formal education is. . . . An ambitious and thought-provoking read . . . highly entertaining.”—The Economist

“This is a bold, entertaining, clever book, richly crammed with insights, stories, fine phrases and intriguing asides. . . . I will have to read it again. And again.”—The Wall Street Journal

“[Taleb] writes as if he were the illegitimate spawn of David Hume and Rev. Bayes, with some DNA mixed in from Norbert Weiner and Laurence Sterne. . . . Taleb is writing original stuff—not only within the management space but for readers of any literature—and . . . you will learn more about more things from this book and be challenged in more ways than by any other book you have read this year. Trust me on this.”—Harvard Business Review

“By far my favorite book among several good ones published in 2012. In addition to being an enjoyable and interesting read, Taleb’s new book advances general understanding of how different systems operate, the great variation in how they respond to unthinkables, and how to make them more adaptable and agile. His systemic insights extend very well to company-specific operational issues—from ensuring that mistakes provide a learning process to the importance of ensuring sufficient transparency to the myriad of specific risk issues.”—Mohamed El-Erian, CEO of PIMCO, Bloomberg

About the Author, Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Nassim Nicholas Taleb has devoted his life to problems of uncertainty, probability, and knowledge. He spent nearly two decades as a businessman and quantitative trader before becoming a full-time philosophical essayist and academic researcher in 2006. Although he spends most of his time in the intense seclusion of his study, or as a flâneur meditating in cafés, he is currently Distinguished Professor of Risk Engineering at New York University’s Polytechnic Institute. His main subject matter is “decision making under opacity”—that is, a map and a protocol on how we should live in a world we don’t understand.

Taleb’s books have been published in thirty-three languages.

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Editorials

From Barnes & Noble

Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman credit Nassim Nicholas Taleb with having "changed the way I view the world." For those of common readers, his bestsellers The Black Swan and Fooled by Randomness have had a similar effect. This new release, however, might be Taleb's most ambitious book yet. Antifragile proposes nothing less than to instruct us on how to respond to our palpably unpredictable world; how to prepare, as it were, for the black swan of chaos. As in his previous books, this distinguished New York University professor draws on examples from economics, biology, politics, war, politics, and personal finance to make his points. A fascinating inquiry into how to prepare for the unexpected.

Publishers Weekly

In this overstuffed, idiosyncratic theory of everything we don’t know, financial adviser and epistemologist Taleb amplifies his megaselling The Black Swan with further musings on the upside of unpredictable upheavals. Ranging haphazardly across probability theory, classical philosophy, government, medicine, and other topics, he contrasts large, complex, “fragile” systems that try to minimize risk but collapse under unforeseen volatility with small, untethered, “antifragile” systems structured to reap advantages from disorder. Taleb’s accessible, stimulating exposition of these ideas yields cogent insights, particularly in finance—his specialty. (He essentially inflates a hedging strategy into a philosophy of life.) Often, however, his far-flung polymathic digressions on everything from weight-lifting regimens to the Fukushima meltdown or the unnaturalness of toothpaste feel tossed-off and unconvincing, given his dilettantish contempt for expert “knowledge-shknowledge.” Taleb’s vigorous, blustery prose drips with Nietzschean scorn for academics, bankers, and bourgeois “sissies” who crave comfort and moderation: “If you take risks and face your fate with dignity,” he intones, “insults by half-men (small men, those who don’t risk)” are no more rankling than “barks by non-human animals.” More worldview than rigorous argument, Taleb’s ramblings may strike readers with knowledge-shknowledge as ill-considered; still, he presents a rich—and often telling—critique of modern civilization’s obsession with security. Illus. Agent: John Brockman, Brockman Inc. (Nov. 27)

Kirkus Reviews

Engineer and trend-watcher Taleb builds on his best-selling hit The Black Swan (2007) to limn a world of uncertainty and chaos. The world is a fragile place, full of surprises. Humans--and especially their markets--hate surprises in general. Small wonder, then, that we spend so much effort trying to make our buildings earthquake-proof and our computers virus-proof, that things prophylactic (no, not that) occupy so much of our thoughts. Taleb calls this "antifragility," writing, "Just as we cannot improve health without reducing disease, or increase wealth without first decreasing losses, antifragility and fragility are degrees on a spectrum." This being a book meant to solve big-picture problems that may or may not be real for most readers, Taleb urges that many of our efforts are misguided, if understandable. He scorns the "fragilistas" so afraid of their own shadows that they put systems into place "in which the benefits are small and visible, and the side effects potentially severe and invisible." His current tract is meant as a corrective, and it's mostly successful at what it aims to do, if sometimes a little daunting--readers are asked, for instance, to grapple with terms such as "apophatic," "hormesis" and "Mithridatization," all useful but thorny all the same. In what a college comp instructor might mark as a shift in diction, however, he throws in more familiar language: "Redundancy is not necessarily wussy; it can be extremely aggressive." And good thing, too. Touring the landscape of uncertainty, Taleb conjures up a few first principles and praises a few models, not least of them Seneca, the great Stoic philosopher who also "happened to be the wealthiest person in the Roman Empire." Mostly, though, the book is an accumulation of small examples and counterexamples, more suggestive than prescriptive. A stimulating modern rejoinder to Joseph Schumpeter's notion of creative destruction.

Harvard Business Review

Is there anyone like Nassim Taleb? The author famous for The Black Swan is a bit of a black swan himself — an unexpected phenomenon arising from the collision of several arcane disciplines and varied experiences to startle us and alter our expectations forever after. He writes as if he were the illegitimate spawn of David Hume and Rev. Bayes, with some DNA mixed in from Norbert Weiner and Laurence Sterne. His ideas are novel, but backed up by a huge store of history and scholarship...Taleb is writing original stuff—not only within the management space but for readers of any literature—and that you will learn more about more things from this book and be challenged in more ways than by any other book you have read this year. Trust me on this...Taleb's level of originality is astoundingly rare. Just reflect for a moment: How many books have you read that took you into new territory, not only in their conception but in the ideas at their hearts and the worldly experiences of their authors? Hundreds if not thousands of management books have been published in the past few years, but as someone who reads far too many of them, I can't think of five that have deserved that description. Taleb actually has something new to say that is worth pondering. And in a world where large-scale, unpredictable events are the norm, pondering it is important. You can count on chaos, and work to make your organization antifragile. Or you can keep planning for the probable. If you choose the latter course, then brace yourself for the next black swan — and pray that it isn't your swan song.

Library Journal

Taleb's (risk engineering, New York Univ.; Black Swans) unorthodox thinking and luminescent style manifest themselves in a fusillade of neologisms, creative phraseology, and quirky illustrations. In his previous work, the author outlined the impact of rare, unpredictable events and foretold the impending financial crisis. Here he uses the concept of "antifragility" to show how we can protect ourselves from inevitable personal and societal calamities. The global financial crisis of 2008 is the watershed event of the narrative. Yet Taleb adroitly weaves in strands of psychology, child development, medicine, biology, civics, philosophy, education, military strategy, and the classics to explain how antifragility can make people and systems stronger in the same way that bones need stress to grow denser. VERDICT Taleb's tome is by turns entertaining, thought-provoking, silly, brilliant, and irreverent, yet his logic remains cogent and his message clear throughout. His wit and substance have already found him a worldwide audience; this book is likely to create him an even more robust fan base.—Carol Elsen, Univ. of Wisconsin, Whitewater, Libs.