Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Shares insights into how adversity can bring out the best in individuals and communities, drawing on multiple disciplines to consider such topics as the superiority of city states over nation states and the drawbacks of debt.

Things that Gain from Disorder

Antifragile

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.

Things That Gain from Disorder

Sebastian Stockmarr

When constrained systems, those hungry for natural disorder, collapse, as they are eventually bound to, since they are fragile, failure is never seen as the result of fragility. Rather, such failure is interpreted as the product of poor forecasting. As with a crumbling sand pile, it would be unintelligent to attribute the collapse of a fragile bridge to the last truck that crossed it, and even more foolish to try to predict in advance which truck might bring it down. Yet it is done all too often.

To summarize, the problem with artificially suppressed volatility is not just that the system tends to become extremely fragile; it is that, at the same time, it exhibits no visible risks. Also remember that volatility is information. In fact, these systems tend to be too calm and exhibit minimal variability as silent risks accumulate beneath the surface. Although the stated intention of political leaders and economic policy makers is to stabilize the system by inhibiting fluctuations, the result tends to be the opposite. These artificially constrained systems become prone to Black Swans. Such environments eventually experience massive blowups, of the type seen in Figure 3, catching everyone off guard and undoing years of stability or, in almost all cases, ending up far worse than they were in their initial volatile state. Indeed, the longer it takes for the blowup to occur, the worse the resulting harm to both economic and political systems.

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, 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. 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. 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" 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 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, drawing on modern street wisdom and ancient sources. 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 ceremonialism debase knowledge by turning it into a spectator sport.

Daniela Velez

The best-selling author of The Black Swan shares philosophical insights into how adversity and chaos can bring out the best in individuals and communities, drawing on multiple disciplines to consider such topics as the superiority of city states over nation states, the drawbacks of debt and why modern developments usually fail. 125,000 first printing.

Gavin

(c) 'Accidental Fish', 2013
  



  "Nothing convinces us of our capacity to make choices — nothing sustains our illusion of freedom — more than our ability to regularise our behaviour. nothing is more capable of destroying our interest and our pleasure in what we do.

If it is the predictable that stupifies us and the unpredictable that terrorises us, what should we do? If we are always caught between risk and resignation, between confidence and catastrophe, how can we decide what to do next?"— Adam Phillips


My problem is what my mother kept telling me: I'm too messianic in my views.
— Taleb



The most ambitious and messy book in his idiosyncratic four-volume work of evolutionary epistemology, the 'Incerto'. (It is 
  Fooled By Randomness
, 
  Black Swan
, 
  Bed of Procrustes
, and yonder.) The former three books are largely critical, hacking away at theory-blindness, model error, and the many kinds of people he sees as possessing unearned status (economists, journalists, consultants, business-book writers): this is the upswing, a chaotic attempt to give general positive advice in a world that dooms general positive advice.

Every other page has something worth hearing, for its iconoclasm, or a Latin gobbet, or catty anecdote, if not something globally and evidently true. I think he is right about 30% of the time, which is among the highest credences I have for anyone. I only think I am 35% right, for instance.* But a core point of his system is that his approach should work even given our huge and partially intractable ignorance.

The core point, repeated a hundred times for various domains: 

  

  In real life, many systems deteriorate without an irregular supply of 
stressors (non-fatal negative events), and actually benefit from them by constructively overreacting. By robbing such 'antifragile' systems of stressors, modern approaches to managing 
them do damage in the guise of helping out.**

This observation leads to his grand theory of everything: every system is either fragile (damaged by volatility), robust (resistant to damage from volatility), or antifragile. This isn't a trivial distinction, because each has formal properties that allow us to change arrangements to, firstly, prevent explosions, and then to gain from chance volatility. 

Biology is definitely one of these antifragile systems***; his case that, absent gross financialisation, the global economy would be one is convincing too; and the idea's at least plausible when applied to the cultivation of virtue or existential strength in a single person. The danger with this - an indissoluble danger because there can be no general strategy to avoid it - is that in welcoming constructive stress we'll miss the point at which the welcomed dose turns destructive (where fasting starts to atrophy, where training becomes masochism, where critique becomes pogrom, where sink-or-swim encouragement turns abuse). 



* This claim is remarkable for both its extreme vagueness and apparent arrogance. Here is a post to handle the former fact. And the latter:

It might strike you as beyond arrogant to assume that you just so happen to be the most reliable inference device in the world, but that doesn't (have to) follow from my claim above, which results from the trivial thought “I believe my own beliefs most”, instead.

(Consider the converse: if I came to view anyone as more reliable than me, the rational thing to do would be to incorporate their truer views (and, better, their methods) until I again thought of myself as at least their equal. So, either one believes the superficially arrogant position “I believe my beliefs most” – or else one must believe that one is incapable of adapting enough to superior methods when faced with them, or else one must believe that one cannot know which methods are best. So the above assumption is more about having a high opinion of rational adjustment than impossible egotism, I think. 

Good news! We can now calibrate ourselves, at least for the most sensational and available predictions using this cool thing.^


Finally!: The fully-unpacked, properly defensible assumption might be something more like: “I am the agent that I know to be most transparently reliable or unreliable; I assume I’m adjusting properly to better methods; as such I have at least equal confidence in my own belief set, compared to the best known alternative agent's.”)

^ You might wonder if this argument suggests that I should have 100% confidence in my beliefs. No; even if I was the best inferrer, I would suffer uncertainty because of the opacity of my errors: that is, I know I'm often not right but don't know exactly whereabouts I'm not right. Also from the unsystematic internal PredictionBook every non-psychopath has ("wisdom is knowing you'll be an idiot in the future"). And another source of uncertainty is down to the unknowable (like what stocks will crash next week).

I do worry that, whatever my particular self-credence estimate is, the whole approach is subtly wrong somewhere – since "40%" gives the impression that I think of myself as a worse guide to the world than dumb chance^^ – but I think it works. Particularly if much of the missing 60% is made of safe scepticism rather than errors.

^^ For binary event spaces – but, really, how many of those are there in real life?




** He credits the formal basis of all this to Jensen's inequality, in a chapter which might be the clearest expression of the idea there is.

*** (In particular species-level evolution, but also organism-level health.) 






************************************************************* 

Some pigeonholes you might think to put all this in:

 *  Conservative? Yes; but a good-hearted Burkean (“Antifragility implies that the old is superior to the new… What survives must be good at serving some purpose that time can see but our eyes and logical faculties can’t capture…”). Most people are conservative over some things (e.g. the natural world; we just happen to call that conservationism instead). Also approves of any high technology that removes anything he views as a disease of civilisation, like these things were supposed to be. So, in general, conservative only in the sense that existential risk people are.* 

*  Economic conservatism. Only sort of; he's a trader, and would have speculation free to flow provided that deposit banks were nationalised first, and prioritises deficit reduction in a way we associate with conservatives but which e.g. Sweden pulled off without any lasting social justice sting. More formally he is against centralisation on both moral and technical grounds; that is likely a principle with some conservative effects, justified, in theory, by its keeping us alive. (Life-critical politics.) 
 Laissez faire? No: he recommends radical change to e.g. science funding, but no decrease. Big fan of Switzerland’s government, read into that what you will. He sees “optionality”, an originally financial concept, as the solution to fragility risks and the key to success in every domain there is. This isn’t at all as economistic as it sounds; the sacred and the humane somehow fit perfectly into his core rationalist agenda, persistence through change. 

*  Social conservatism? No sign; no discussion of discrimination. Some people think such abstention is oppressive, but they are probably wrong. 
*  Social Darwinist? Nah. 
*  Bioconservative? Absolutely; he describes himself as the ‘diametric’ opposite of Ray Kurzweil, and he’s in full uproar over the global risk posed by synthetic biology (and recently fleshed out this horror in highly rigorous terms). 
*  Anti-intellectual? Not at all! Only anti-academia, and they still do not represent the whole of quality intellectual life. Hates irresponsible ‘canned methods of inference’ too (statistical significance, etc). 
*  Lacrimist? (That is, does he glorify suffering?) Not quite. He certainly views comfort as vitiating. His opposition to transhumanism is too quick and doesn't take the moral challenge of a world of pained beings seriously enough, for me. 
*  Macho? Hm. Well, nature has made certain challenging actions optimal. Amusing proto-paleo attitude, too: 
* I, for my part, resist eating fruits not found in the ancient Eastern Mediterranean (I use “I” here in order to show that I am not narrowly generalizing to the rest of humanity). I avoid any fruit that does not have an ancient Greek or Hebrew name, such as mangoes, papayas, even oranges. Oranges seem to be the postmedieval equivalent of candy; they did not exist in the ancient Mediterranean. 
 


* His work fits the x-risk paradigm very well, but he developed his edifice in complete isolation from them, and has an uncompromising scepticism about expected value that might not make cross-overs all that fruitful.


************************************************************* 
How original is the core point, really?

Well, who cares? His claim is that he had to invent the word 'antifragile', not the idea. He says, idiosyncratically, that Seneca and Nietzsche had the nub of the idea, and Jensen the formal essence; Darwin certainly did too. "Resilience engineering" and in computing, 'defensive programming' (b. 1998) and 'self-healing systems' (b. 2001) are at least on the same track, though not getting beyond a lively sort of robustness. But I doubt that most systems can become antifragile - e.g. it's hard to imagine an antifragile jet engine (one that harvests bird strikes for fuel, or soot cleaning)? So maybe it's only the grand generalisation to all design that's new.



************************************************************* 

Gripes: His footnotes are collected by theme rather than linked to his claims directly, which makes it so difficult to follow up his sources that his credibility suffers. He namedrops, which is not the same as showing his working. I would really like to see his backing for his cool claims (about e.g. an irregular sleep pattern as a good thing, or things like ‘I suspect that thermal comfort ages people’), but it’s hidden away and often one-study. (Again: apparently one-study, since his working is not easily on show.)

He has a surprisingly high opinion of Steve Jobs – who I view as a grand example of an empty suit: there are 9 references to Jobs’ hokey shark-wisdom, (where Gigerenzer and Mandelbrot get 8, Jensen gets 7, Marx 7). Does Jobs really count as a ‘practitioner’ with ‘skin in the game’? Eh.

His homebrew jargon starts to drag – some sentences are wholly composed of his neologisms plus a barrel of articles and prepositions. (I used the glossary early and often.) Repetitive: tells what he’ll tell you, tells you he’s told you. Some passages really suffer from his wholesale hostility to copy-editing; there are some flatly bad sentences here. And he namedrops a lot, more than fair attribution of ideas – there are several passages that are just lists of people he likes (e.g. p.257-8). 

I don't see that it's worthwhile to criticise his arrogant style; it's what animates his points, and he never uses it on weak targets.

Lastly, he sometimes makes of a system’s persistence the highest good. (Where its persistence is to be contrasted with mere stability.) This is in tension with his wonderful emphasis on artistic and quasi-sacred values elsewhere in the book.

But it talks about everything, is historically wide-eyed, relentlessly rational, and often funny. And the method-worldview-style it suggests might stop life crushing us utterly.

Matthew Royal

Best idea in this book: consider the downside as well as the upside, and systemic perverse incentives can largely be corrected by ensuring decision-makers have skin in the game. For these ideas, read Taleb's other book called "Skin in the Game" and throw this one in the trash.

Every real-world example he gives of something "anti-fragile" could be considered simply "resilient," so I doubt that it exists outside of mythology, like his example of the Hydra, which grows 2 new heads for each decapitation it experiences.

Long discussion on how nonlinear systems are anti-fragile, but it's more descriptive than definitive. He deplores his favorite straw men "Soviet Harvard Academics" for not understanding these systems with curves. (They do; they formulated them.)

On the one hand, academics are all ivory tower fools who don't understand his real-world economics papers like all these business people seem too, and on the other hand, these business people don't get the value of his theoretical foresight like these academic people who invited him to speak seem to.

On the one hand, doctors who are in the trenches know way more than academics who never leave their labs who arrogantly think their ideas will somehow survive working on flesh and blood patients, and on the other hand these foolish old timers used to use leeches, for crying out loud, rather than understand the mechanisms and pathways of disease.

Vitamins aren't real, icing your broken nose is disrespectful to nature, and will you alternative medicine types stop calling me already -- "the approach of this book is ultra-Orthodox, ultra-rigorous, and ultra-scientific; certainly not in favor of alternative medicine."

He simultaneously champions evidence based medicine and decries past ignorant practices. You can't have the first without the other. Practical application of theory on a population and monitoring the results is how we learn what works and what doesn't. If you are attempting the visceral experimentation he advocates, you'll inevitably find something that doesn't work and is in fact harmful 20 years down the line. There literally no other way to "just know" what the best way is, like he implies.

The only takeaway here is this book is a great example of ego justification.

Keven Wang

I am a fan of Taleb’s previous book. This one seems to be a bit over my head

Jowanza Joseph

Nassim Taleb does a good job of helping us understand how certain systems gain from disorder, however I had that idea down after the first 200 pages.  This book is far too long to recommend to anyone casually interested in these ideas, and it is a bit puzzling why he goes into so much depth on some issues and than glosses over others.  Overall I enjoyed it, just wished it were a bit shorter.

Arturo Hernández

It's the first time I get to read Nassim and it was a ride. There's something intriguing about the way he narrates his vision of life through every chapter. The main topic here is a concept he created and called "antifragility". He explains its relation to non-linearity and our fragile world exploring medicine, government, corporate topics and more. Although the overall text seems scientific, the way it's told helps the naive reader understand the concepts. It's full of examples and theories that the author finds a way to place through each chapter. I'm definitely intrigued by him after finishing this book and will aim forward to looking for more of his work. Recommended for sure 👌🏼

Daniel Lauzon

This was a singularly unpleasant reading experience. 
There are a few pearls of insight and wisdom here; too bad they are buried in a burdensome avalanche of useless vitriol, contradictions, and half-truths.

Meelahn

Bold, erudite, prophetic. This book itself is antifragile. Kudos.

Dana Kraft

Enjoyed his other books and this was also thought-provoking. It builds on his other books, so some of the concepts are not new, but he expands on them, and applies them to more of a comprehensive worldview. I understand and agree with much of what he says, and I'm left thinking about how that should affect some non-trivial aspects of my life.

References to and quotes from ancient writers weren't that helpful to me and they got a little tiresome.

Favorite nuggets:
- "The hidden benefit of antifragillity is that you can guess worse than random and still end up outperforming."
- "Negative knowledge is more robust than positive knowledge"
- "How many things must one disregard in order to act?"

Jon Noronha

The first few chapters are really interesting. The rest was really a waste -- pretty disappointing after The Black Swan.

Ugis

Very interesting though a bit long and difficult read. Finally I got used to Taleb's writing style. Antifragility is actually something I've been attracted to in life for a long time. Now I have a good name for that concept. Recommended read and there's plenty of food for thought. [reading time: 19h35m]

Non fiction that taught me a few things and made other things I followed much clearer. Much love for daddy taleb

Santosh Singh

Brilliant. This is the best of all the books that Taleb has written so far.

Sloan, Kara

It's like he turned a really interesting essay into a sub-par book.
Save yourself and just read the introduction. Book gets very repetitive and doesn't redeem itself. Hardly explores the other side of the argument except to demean it. 
Although the ideas are very interesting, the tone and delivery are grating, and not really worth the time.

Nat Welch

I love the concept of this book, but it's too long and the author is kind of a dick. I suggest reading the intro and then stopping. I read the intro and the first section and then skimmed the rest because I found it such a slog.

The notion of antifragility is fascinating and widely applicable. A few notes: 
* mother nature is antifragile and has been tinkering slowly over time, we should admit she's much wiser than we can be and be humble when proposing changes that go against it (e.g., diet, exercise, etc.) 

* organizations that are large are fragile, black swan events can have huge impacts in many people. Need to control for these. 

* government does best when smaller and thus the incentives align to do well for the people. when large government it's easy to get divorced from the people as incentives don't align. 

* company managers often don't have the right incentives. if they make a "big positive impact" they can get huge bonuses. if subsequently the company crashed due to their changes, they don't lose their prior pay and bonuses. thus no incentive to carefully build for the long term.

Omar Fernandez

Adam

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.

Andreas Holmer

Thought-proving and entertaining. At times even funny. But jeebus, Taleb really makes you work for it. There’s basically no structure to the book (a feature rather than a bug, Taleb apparently wanted to make life miserable for book reviewers who he suspects of not reading the texts (no structure means forcing a read through). Apparently, this was more important than making for a good reading experience). And the language (Taleb likes coming up with his own words) means you’ve got to really pay attention throughout. It pays to create and keep a glossary handy. But it’s worth it. Kind of (and I feel OK saying that because I know Taleb doesn’t give a hoot; he’s funny that way). Overall I feel richer having read it.

Gustavo Saiani

This book has a powerful main idea, sinthesized in the word "Antifragile". The concept deserves a clearer word.

Taleb offers us a few interesting anecdotes, many of which you may have heard before. But he goes for way too long without a nice structure, or trying to build a rapport with the reader. It's a pity, because the core idea of things that improve from stress seems very helpful.

I'd say read a summary and you'll be fine.

Bartlomiej Krztuk

In The Black SwanTaleb outlined a problem, and his revelatory new book Antifragileoffers a definitive solution- how to live in a world that is unpredicatable, chaotic, and full of shocks, and how to thrive during periods of disaster. Taleb stands uncertainty on its head, making it desirable, even necessary, and proposes that things be built in an antifragile manner. For what Taleb calls the 'antifragile' is beyond the merely robust; it benefits from shocks, uncertainty and stressors. The most successful of us, the most daring and creative will take advantage of disorder and invent new, more powerful opportunities and advantages beyond our expectations. 'Antifragility is the secret to success in a world full of uncertainty, a system for turning random mutations to lasting advantage . . . highly entertaining . . . . whether you find Mr Taleb amusing or irritating, you want to read on.' Economist'Taleb is a very funny writer with a finely tuned BS detector . . . Antifragility isn't just sound economic and political doctrine. It's also the key to a good life.' Fortune '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.' Matt Ridley, Wall Street Journal 'A new kind of strength . . . not invincible but better able to handle life's inevitable surprises . . . such a combination leaves open the possibility of big rewards while minimizing exposure to risk.' Los Angeles Times 'Taleb is an outsider in a business of outsiders, and if he is lobbing grenades at the power in the centre - well, that's the point.' Daily Telegraph

Antifragile Things that Gain from Disorder

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