It starts with an interesting idea: That an overprotective system of any kind, in trying to immunize itself to risks, loses its adaptability and when an unforeseen event occurs (and that is a matter of when, not if), its destruction is higher that if the system had been allowed to take small hits and adapted slowly.

And that's it.

After stating the case clearly in the beginning, the rest 500 pages are an unedited mess of notes and graphs writen in napkins ranting against any kind of intellectualism. To do so Taleb jumps from unrelated anecdotes to stretched metaphores building two main arguments:

- That he is a philosopher in the shape of a bodyguard (really. I do not make that up). Only Seneca is his equal and only himself may understand Seneca's texts.

- That formal learning and analysis are not only useless but harmful. From Economics to Medicine.

This book is written quite poorly. It lacks structure and in most of the "napkin's notes", the logic is puerile. I found very odd that the author uses standard "name dropping", but the names used are classical Greek and Roman characters. Taleb likes to put his opinions as proof without any reasoning behind (which is actually the message of the book: go with your guts and do not second-guess yourself). He also likes to invent words to convince that it is a new concept never thought before.

However, there have been several ideas that I have liked. His main point is just Darwinism: the goal is not to be strong, it is to be adaptable.

He makes a very good point on noise. The huge amount of useless information and that the deeper you get on anything, the exponentially higher level of noise you get.

I agree on his view that to be healthy the way is to make the body strong by activity and avoid tampering with it artificially as much as possible. He takes the case to levels I am not comfortable, such as advocating against cancer treatment.

I have liked very much his respect and defence of the small business and of the individual entrepeneur.

But I have not found the book thought-provocative in any sense. After an exciting beginning I had 500 pages of "meh". So if you want the good and avoid the bad of this book, I suggest that you go to any bookshop, grab it and read the first 20 pages. Put the book back to the shelf, and leave. You got all you needed from this tome.

( )

Great book! I listened to the audio and now I'll probably buy a hard copy to go back through and take notes. ( )

Leather cowhide, Castalia Library, limited edition of 900 ( )

Per chi lo conosce, è il solito Taleb: alcune idee ottime, altre idee discutibili, tanto "machismo intellettuale", grande facilità di lettura, accompagnata tuttavia alla tendenza alla prolissità. A ogni modo, l'idea di antifragilità vale una lettura del libro. ( )

Taleb’s fractal exposition of the unreasonable, “unscientific overreach of science.” ( )

"The hottest thinker in the world". (Bryan Appleyard, "Sunday Times"). In "The Black Swan", Taleb showed us that highly improbable and unpredictable events underlie almost everything about our world. Here Taleb stands uncertainty on its head, making it desirable, even necessary. The antifragile is beyond the resilient or robust. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better and better. Just as human bones get stronger when subjected to stress and tension, many things in life benefit from stress, disorder, volatility, and turmoil. What Taleb has identified and calls antifragile are things that not only gain from chaos but need it in order to survive and flourish. What's more, 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" is not efficient at all? Why should you write your resignation letter before starting on the job? How did the sinking of the Titanic save lives? "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. Nassim Nicholas Taleb has devoted his life to problems of uncertainty, probability, and knowledge and has led three careers around this focus, as a businessman-trader, a philosophical essayist, and an academic researcher. Although he now spends most of his time working in intense seclusion in his study, in the manner of independent scholars, 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. His books "Fooled by Randomness" and "The Black Swan" have been published in thirty-three languages. Taleb believes that prizes, honorary degrees, awards, and cer

Ágætis kenning sem Taleb setur fram og útskýrir í þessari bók. Antifragile þýðir í raun að hagnast á hörmungum þar sem þú ert viðbúinn slæmum uppákomum og getur unnið úr þeim á hagkvæman máta. Taleb ver bókinni í að útskýra hugtakið aftur og aftur við mismunandi aðstæður í samfélaginu og efnahag. Dálítið þreytandi tugga er líður á lesturinn. ( )

Vor langer Zeit begann ich schon mal damit, das Buch in englischer Sprache zu lesen, nachdem ich vom schwarzen Schwan recht begeistert war. Allerdings stellte sich dies dann doch anspruchsvoller dar, als erwartet und so ließ ich die Aufgabe sausen, und das Wissen um die geplante Lektüre Buches segelte dank Nutzung der Kindle-Ausgabe völlig unproblematisch ins digitale Nirwana....
Vor kurzem erinnerte ich mich daran, dass "Antifragile" zwischenzeitlich auch auf deutscher Sprache vorhanden sein müsste und erwarb ein Exemplar, um es letztlich doch komplett zu lesen. Das ging auf Deutsch wesentlich leichter und zudem recht kurzweilig.
Kernaussage des Buches ist, dass manche Dinge davon profitieren, dass sie zufälligen, ungeplanten Schocks ausgesetzt werden. Da unsere Welt und damit unser Leben massiv von unvorhersagbaren Ereignissen beeinflusst werden (das ist quasi der Inhalt des "Schwarzen Schwans"), sollten wir darauf achten, unsere Umwelt und Systeme so zu gestalten, dass sie davon profitieren, wenn nicht alles nach Plan läuft.
Klingt einleuchtend und überzeugend und so lesen sich die knapp 700 Seiten gut weg. Was mich mit fortschreitender Lesedauer jedoch etwas irritierte, war der flapsige Ton des Autors: Ein bißchen weniger Singsang des Hohelieds der eigenen Fähigkeiten und nicht ganz so viele fiktiven Fat Tony-Anekdoten hätten dem Buch in meinen Augen keinen Abbruch getan. ( )

He has some legitimately interesting ideas, I highlighted plenty of paragraphs, but he also comes off like an arrogant asshole. It was hard to make it through his writing style, which has dissuaded me from reading any of his other books. ( )

first taleb book i read, fascinating stuff. lots of nuggets of interesting/useful knowledge, "chapters" are short af for adhd minds but it gets a bit abstract at times. taleb seems like a pretty funny guy

Given to Peter on 11 February 2022

Given to Peter
Fragile = tranquility
Anti fragile = disorder
Robust doesn't care
Unpredictability
Skin in the game: people voting for war need to have 1 descendant in the war, English made the bridge builder's family leave underneath until completed.
Privilege came with obligations
Status implied you take physical risks
Reagan & Bush vs Churchill who showed courage

This book (and its author) is an enigma to me. I can't say whether I loved it or hated it, because it was really some of each. Sometimes the tone was incredibly condescending, and at other times subdued, open and conciliatory. Sometime the content was very opaque to me, and other times it was clear. It could be an uncomfortable read at times, but that may be the book's greatest contribution. There's a lot here for me to digest and reflect upon, and that may be what tips the balance in its favor. It probably requires multiple readings to really comprehend the message(s). ( )

Talib's book is not an easy read. His writing style is not pleasant. But ideas he presents are amazing.
There are lots of insights on the importance of randomness and the risks associated with this in our lives. I hope this will help me make better decisions in future.

There is a lot learn on 'How to live in this world which we don't understand' from this book. I need to re-read this some day. ( )

Cutting my losses at page 90. Dear god. The posturing. The name dropping. The "I'm big and scary" bullshit. I used to look forward to Kindle time every day. Not so for the last four weeks. Screw this, life is short. ( )

This one had interesting points, but as someone who focuses around systems and order, it was hard for me to imagine structuring systems in this way. The examples were interesting -- things like the human body and vaccines as an example of a system that grows stronger after trauma. ( )

Interesting perspective, really got me thinking. ( )

Let me start by saying that I wholeheartedly agree with the concept and practice of antifragility. I think it's too important of an idea to allow it to be dismissed in our modern era of globalization and interconnectedness. Today's world is both immensely larger and noticeably smaller than ever before. Arming your soul with an antifragility framework is a necessary skill to cultivate.

But this idea needs a better messenger. The author writes like he has a chip on his shoulder, like he's got something more than his point to prove. I don't know. Maybe there's a language and/or cultural barrier. I know this author, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, wrote Fooled by Randomness and the even more popular Black Swan, but apart from that I don't know anything about him. There might be more to the story. ( )

Made it about 2.5 hours in (15%). Perhaps audiobook is not the best format for Antifragile; despite recommendations from multiple people that this was a good book, I just couldn't get into it. It seemed like Taleb was spending a crazy amount of time shitting on "intelligentsia" and others that don't agree with him, to the point where there would be multiple minutes in which he'd fail to put forth any idea. It just became a poor use of time. ( )

Actually quite a good book. I liked Black Swan and Fooled by Randomness except for the "ok i mostly agree - stop being so arrogant" feeling one gets when reading. Antifragile does answer the "and now what do you suggest" question which arises after his other books. Thats nice!

In a nutshell: the first third is worth reading, the second third is boring, the third third - especially the ethics part - is fragile with respect to evolution. ( )

I first heard of the concept of antifragile in an Econtalk podcast interview with the author Nassim Nicholas Taleb before the book was published. I found the concept really fascinating, and now that I have (at last) read the book, the subject turned out to be even more interesting than I imagined.

So antifragile is the opposite of fragile. What exactly does that mean? Isn't it the same thing as robust? No, there is a triple (or triad) like this:

FRAGILE - ROBUST - ANTIFRAGILE

The fragile is harmed by volatility, stressors and disorder, the robust doesn't care, and the antifragile benefits from volatility, stressors and disorder. An illustration early in the book is when you send a package in the mail. If you send for example wine glasses, you could put a sticker on it saying "fragile", and hope that it would be handled carefully. If you send something robust (say a book), it wouldn't matter too much how the package was handled, since it is hard to harm a book. But in what case would you put a sticker on that says "antifragile - place mishandle"? What is there that gains from disorder?

Well, quite a lot as it turns out (although I don't have an example of something that would be sent in the mail). A good example is the human body. If it isn't used, the muscles wither and the bones get weak. It is antifragile, because it gains from the volatility of being used. The disorder is good up to a point - the variations cannot be too big. Too much stress, for example falling from a building, will harm it, but in small doses random variations are not only not harmful, but actually helpful. Throughout the book, Taleb gives many more examples of antifragile systems. For me, one of the benefits of this book is that I have started to look at systems and concepts through the lens of antifragility.

Fragile/antifragile can also exist on different levels. The whole can be antifragile because the parts are fragile. An example used in the book is restaurants. Individual local restaurants compete with each other, and are therefore fragile to a degree. But because of this competition, the collective of local restaurants is antifragile. Some restaurants close down, and new ones open instead, so there are always interesting restaurants to go to. If the restaurants where individually robust, and therefore would never fail, the overall restaurant scene would be stagnant.

A problem Taleb sees with modern life is that there is a strong tendency to remove variability and randomness in order to get stability. Trying to control the economy and smooth out the peaks and valleys may create more stability in the short run. But firms become weak during long periods of no setbacks, and hidden vulnerabilities accumulate. Eventually this may lead to a big crisis. So the price of suppressing many small crises is having a really big one instead. This is analogous trying to prevent all forest fires. If all small fires are put out, eventually there may be a really big one, because there has been such a build-up of burnable material.

A related concept is iatrogenics - damage caused by the healer. People often like to think that they understand complex systems, and want to control them (for example stabilize them). However, with complex systems, interventions often have unintended consequences that end up causing problems of their own. It is also very tempting to intervene, even though the best course of action may be to do nothing. If you intervene successfully, you can become a hero, but hardly anybody is considered a hero for abstaining from doing something. Taleb also gives several examples from medicine, where medical procedures may give a small benefit, but can sometimes cause big problems (even the death of the patient).

Another way to look at antifragility is that there is more upside than downside. That which is antifragile has the option of using variations to its advantage. Take companies. A big company is more fragile, and a small startup is more antifragile. The big company is set in its ways, whereas the startup can more easily adapt to changing circumstances. Furthermore, when you have a situation where you are able to profit from volatility (when you have more potential upside than downside), you are less dependent on forecasts and predictions. This is good, since there will always be some errors in the forecasts.

There is also a section on universities and technological development. Do universities cause technical progress. Not according to Taleb. There is a tension between education, which loves order, and innovation, which loves disorder. A lot of technical innovations come from luck, tinkering, and trial and error. Often, theory comes after, but when a discovery or innovation is described afterwards, it seems more planned and ordered than it really was.

At the end of the book there is a section on the ethics of upsides and downsides and the concept of "skin in the game". For example, an executive that gets a large bonus when things go well at a company, but still receives the regular salary if things go poorly has only upside, but no downside. Since there is no downside, there is no "skin in the game". To have "skin in the game", you have to also share in the downside, for example if you run your own company. There is also the reverse situation - downside, but no upside. This applies to for example soldiers. They run the risk of dying (downside), but there is no particular upside.

These were the main themes that stood out for me from the book. There were many other concepts in it that I liked as well, so I will just list a few of them (without a lot of explanations):

Black swan event - the odds of rare events are not computable.

The ludic fallacy - probabilities in real life are not like probabilities at a casino. In real life it is never as clean-cut, you always have to estimate, but you may forget to account for something (for example a black swan event).

The turkey problem - for the turkey, life looks really good, until Thanksgiving occurs.

The Lindy effect - the longer a phenomenon has been around, the longer it can be expected to continue to be around.

Touristification - the systematic removal of uncertainty and randomness in how we live our lives.

Via negativa - negative knowledge (knowing what does not work) is more robust to error than positive knowledge (knowing what works).

So, what was bad with the book? Taleb has a tendency to ramble on a bit too much, causing to the book to be unnecessarily thick. His self-confidence is also rather high, which can put some people off (not me though). But these problems only affect the style, not the substance, of what he has to say.

Antifragile is thick, and it covers a lot of ground, so it was difficult to write a review of it. But I think it is a very important book. It is by far the book that I have underlined the most in. I have also noticed that since I finished reading it (a few months ago), I have referred to it in conversations several times. So it was well worth the effort of reading, and it has given me powerful new ideas and additional ways of looking at and analysing systems.

I have also written about this book in relation to software development on my blog: https://henrikwarne.com/2014/06/08/antifragility-and-software-development/ ( )

Overall verdict: this could have been so much better

Good: Taleb presents a few original (for me) ideas that are worth pondering, specifically the central idea of anti-fragility. He also tries to follow up on the implications of this idea in several fields. He is not afraid of taking unpopular positions (or rather: he loves to), which makes you rethink those matters as a reader. In general, this is why I read: to be forced into new perspectives and widen my views. Turns out that anti-fragility is very much related to conservatism (of the Edmund Burke kind) and breeds a strong suspicion of large organisations (universities, corporations, states, soviets).

Meh: it feels that Taleb skips some parts of the discussion. Like what it would mean for society if everyone behaves anti-fragile: he does point out that free-market-capitalism as a system is anti-fragile although (because) the individual players are fragile (can go bust, leaving the stronger players in the field). So higher aggregation levels seem to have opposite values of (anti)fragility. But Taleb doesn't like to do systems-thinking. It is too complex, making any result uncertain, hence fragile. But I think we all have an intuition that if all companies would behave in a more anti-fragile way, it would have implications on society as a whole.

Bad: the style of writing and structure of the book are really not great. Taleb is clearly very content with his own persona , but has a strong need to spend half of the book telling us about that. He has a rather low opinion about many professions, among which copy-editors. Mr. Taleb feels that they are stupid comma-pushers that will always have something to nag about his work of genius. He jokes about sending a text to multiple copy editors in sequence that will always make the same number of suggestions, sometimes reverting a change of a predecessor. While that may all be true, this book would have benefitted a lot from a good copy-editor. It is repetitive, refers to things that are introduced only later. Many concepts and persons are (I assume/hope) introduced in earlier books, but never explained. I also think that sending your text to several copy-editors (and deciding for yourself if their suggestions make sense) would be very anti-fragile.
The style is very polemic, full of ad hominems and name calling to all kinds of people that are irrelevant for the narrative, but the author has apparently some bone to pick with. He also seems very eager to write strong language and then blank out the fucks to f*s. Why on earth is that? It seems very childish to use this language in a serious work and even more so to self-censor them.
Last quip: the author loves introducing new words.This can work well when referring to a subtle concept and I think that "anti-fragile" is a good one. But the author introduces a new made-up term every 10 pages. Often using and existing word with a different meaning to mean something else in his text. Words like concave, convex, non-linear, agency are given related, but different meanings that have confused me to the end. In the appendices, there is a glossary of 8 pages explaining all these terms, mostly neologisms. Please stop doing this. If you must, introduce a new term for one, two, maybe three concepts and for the rest: think of the proper English word. ( )

Wow, this is one of those books with big ideas that I'm still digesting. Taleb doesn't pull punches, or watch his language, in this one, expanding on his ideas from previous books. You won't be left neutral. ( )

On the whole, I do like the book. Nassim Nicholas Taleb has made some interesting points through the course of the book. It is clear, and he has stated this, a follow up to his earlier books.

The concept of someone, or something, being “Antifragile” is not an easy one to grasp. Is this concept beyond ‘robustness,’ as the author has stated? Or, is it the property, or ability, to be beyond shock – to be able to handle random fluctuations that exceed rational expectations.

There is one problem with the book, and it is this: Nassim makes the reader wade through paragraphs of verbiage before he gets to the point.

Nassim comes alive towards the end of the book when he unleashes his poisoned quill on the pharmaceutical industry, the corporate world, and some people whom he seems to dislike. I enjoyed these last few chapters immensely. I do not, however, want to have a conversation with him. He is brilliant. This much is clear from the book. However, I get the impression that he does not value too many thoughts and opinions outside of his own. ( )

Very much worth reading. His best book. Many non-fiction books can easily be summarized and it's more time efficient to just read the summary. This isn't one of them. May even reread this ( )