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Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (Incerto) Paperback – January 28, 2014

by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Author)

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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 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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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Amazon Best Books of the Month, December 2012: Fragile things break under stress. But, according to Nassim Nicholas Taleb, there's an entire class of other things that don't simply resist stress but actually grow, strengthen, or otherwise gain from unforeseen and otherwise unwelcome stimuli. Taleb sees degrees of antifragility everywhere, from fasting, mythology, and urban planning to economic, technological, cultural, and biological systems. The wealth of radical thinking in this book astounds; the glossary alone offered more thought-provoking ideas than any other nonfiction book I read this year. That said, Antifragile is far from flawless. As comical as Taleb's rough handling of his favorite targets can be--academics, economists, and tourists, to name a few--his argumentative style boasts gaping holes, non sequiturs aplenty, and at times an almost willfully repugnant tone. Some readers will find Taleb's brashness off-putting; others will embrace it as a charismatic component of the ideas themselves. Either way, no one will finish this book unchanged. --Jason Kirk

From Booklist

Judging by his anecdotes, Taleb interacts with the economic masters of the universe as he jets from New York to London or attends business-politics confabs in Davos, Switzerland. Anything but awed by them, Taleb regards them as charlatans, not as credible experts. Such skepticism toward elites, which imbued Taleb’s The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (2007), continues in this work, which grapples with a concept Taleb coins as “antifragile.” Not readily reducible to a definition (Taleb takes the whole book to develop the idea), suffice to say here that antifragile’s opposites—economic, political, or medical systems that are vulnerable to sudden collapse—tend to be managed by highly educated people who think they know how systems work. But they don’t, avers Taleb. Their confidence in control is illusory; their actions harm rather than help. In contrast, Taleb views decentralized systems—the entrepreneurial business rather than the bureaucratized corporation, the local rather than the central government—as more adaptable to systemic stresses. Emphatic in his style and convictions, Taleb grabs readers given to musing how the world works. --Gilbert Taylor

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Product details

Series: Incerto (Book 3)
Paperback: 544 pages
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks; Reprint edition (January 28, 2014)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0812979680
ISBN-13: 978-0812979688
Product Dimensions: 5.1 x 1.1 x 8 inches
Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review: 1,053 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #6,321 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #2 in Books > Politics & Social Sciences > Philosophy > Movements > Phenomenology
- #6 in Books > Business & Money > Investing > Stocks
- #37 in Books > Health, Fitness & Dieting > Psychology & Counseling > Personality

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Dan Galperin

Too much of a good thing...

July 22, 2017

Format: Paperback

This is going to be a hard one to review. Antifragile is a groundbreaking work in understanding our world and the dynamics that govern it. I'm very glad I was exposed to this material and must say Mr. Taleb is quite brilliant in certain ways. I'll give it 4 stars for the ideas alone.

This book is a seven course meal. (seven "books" within it) It has everything: groundbreaking ideas, history, humor, interesting stories and quotable gems as well as wordy pomposity and eye-roll-inducing syntax.

Here are a couple of sentences from the book:

"Technology at it's best. But technology can cancel the effect of bad technologies by self-subtraction." And another "Many of the modern applications that have managed to have survived today came to disrupt the deleterious effects of the Philistinism of modernity." If that's your cup of tea, you'll love this book.

Mr., or should I say, Dr. Taleb has a PhD and an MBA yet disparages Academia mercilessly. I've got no problem taking Academia to task, however I find it interesting that he seems to suffer from the same blowhard tendencies of the Soviet-Harvard academic cabal, as he likes to call it. But he also has a unique, independent view of how the world works (or should work) that may inspire you to "get back to basics" in your own life and to disbelieve the hype.of so many established platforms and sacred cows in our society. It was both refreshing and infuriating.

The book is about 300 pages too long in my opinion. He could have made his points much more quickly and much less painlessly to the reader. I found it brazenly self-indulgent and self-satisfying in parts.

Finally, I will freely admit that I am not smart enough nor educated enough to keep up with everything that was dispensed in this book. It's not so much of a book as material to be studied. Reading it one time only gave me a sense of what he was writing about. I'm sure multiple readings would deliver a good return for those who want to understand this work more deeply.

Despite all of it's flaws, it is worth the journey if you've got the constitution for it.

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R. Blanchard

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March 4, 2013

Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase

This is an interesting book and it certainly has stimulated a lot of reviews, many extremely long and detailed. So I read the reviews (or about 90% of them) after I read the book. Most of the reviewers get it - this is a wide-ranging philosophical treatise but one that is extremely ego-driven. What I found interesting is that many of the reviews are actually as much about the reviewer, that is, the ego-driven book has brought the ego-driven reviewers out in droves. Sort of like a modestly talented kid emulating the body moves (while not being able to actually play the licks) of a guitar player they admire.

For more common readers (who perhaps have less self-awareness - not necessarily a good thing) there is one area that clearly illustrates how an interesting writer (like Taleb and his fan-boy reviewers) can miss an obvious point when one is convinced that one is special. Taleb prefers antifragility over that which is fragile but he is also contemptuous of the urge to robustness (making oneself indifferent to outlier events, i.e., the middle ground between fragile and antifragile.) This is because he sees robustness as a liability when the black swan arrives. BUT in practice a great deal of what in Taleb's view is misdirected activity (striving for robustness) has to do with the very human urge toward comfort and security. This is what government and for that matter civilization as a whole is supposed to be all about (I know we screw it up a lot but at least this is the idea behind robustness). An example from the book; in the medical realm (where Taleb spends a lot of time) robustness involves the avoidance of PAIN. A great deal of medical treatment focuses on pain (a symptom, not necessarily a disease) and how to reduce it (preferably as quickly as possible.) Most of the steps that reduce pain are not very helpful to the human body in the medium and long term (icing swelling, for example, which Taleb talks about) but are powerful motivators nonetheless and for obvious reasons. Now, make the short jump from physical pain to emotional pain caused by uncertainty and insecurity (financial for example) and you begin to have a better feel for the way the average person thinks and acts (the key phrase here is average person.) In this context, robustness is considered to be a wonderful thing, well worth it if the cost is to miss making a financial killing or advancing exponentially in some other way in the event of a black swan. Taleb doesn't seem to understand any of this. He is a great man intellectually, consumed by his own greatness and exalted position in life and therefore substantially detached from the rest of the world. I guess that is how philosophers are supposed to think and write.

I enjoyed this book and found it mentally challenging. But philosophically-speaking many parts of it had an alternate-universe feel to it that undermined its credibility. But it sure fired up the reviewers (including me.)

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