Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Written by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Format: MP3

Written by: Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Narrated by: Joe Ochman
Length: 16 hrs and 13 mins

Format: Unabridged

Release Date:11-27-12
Publisher’s Summary

From the best-selling author of The Black Swan and one of the foremost thinkers of our time, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, a book on how some things actually benefit from disorder.

In The Black Swan Taleb outlined a problem, and in Antifragile he offers a definitive solution: how to gain from disorder and chaos while being protected from fragilities and adverse events. For what Taleb calls the “antifragile” is actually beyond the robust, because it benefits from shocks, uncertainty, and stressors, just as human bones get stronger when subjected to stress and tension. The antifragile needs disorder in order to survive and flourish.

Taleb stands uncertainty on its head, making it desirable, even necessary, and proposes that things be built in an antifragile manner. The antifragile is immune to prediction errors. Why is the city-state better than the nation-state, why is debt bad for you, and why is everything that is both modern and complicated bound to fail? The audiobook spans innovation by trial and error, health, biology, medicine, life decisions, politics, foreign policy, urban planning, war, personal finance, and economic systems. 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 heard loud and clear.

Extremely ambitious and multidisciplinary, Antifragile provides a blueprint for how to behave - and thrive - in a world we don’t understand, and which is too uncertain for us to even try to understand and predict. Erudite and witty, Taleb’s message is revolutionary: What is not antifragile will surely perish.
What the Critics Say

“[This] is the lesson of Taleb…and also the lesson of our volatile times. There is more courage and heroism in defying the human impulse, in taking the purposeful and painful steps to prepare for the unimaginable.” (Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point)

“[Taleb writes] in a style that owes as much to Stephen Colbert as it does to Michel de Montaigne.” (The Wall Street Journal)

“The most prophetic voice of all…. [Taleb is] a genuinely significant philosopher…someone who is able to change the way we view the structure of the world through the strength, originality and veracity of his ideas alone.” (GQ)
Some good ideas, smart guy, not smart as HE thinks”

As a longtime reader of Taleb, I find him at best mostly bracing, sometimes head-turning with new twists of ideas, sometimes charmingly abrasive. He can be like a bright, independent-thinking pal to spend a walk with (and I walk with books mostly). This book is worth it on that level. There are important ideas here which the herd misses, probably to its ultimate regret. But plenty of time is spent here with ideas not as new and revolutionary as he touts them as, and of course the self-absorbed cheap-shot attacks on straw-man “academics,” etc. Why spend so much time attacking mediocrities in that corner of the world? It gets repetitive, and that’s where (despite his protestations) a SMART editor (unlike, again, the mediocre straw-man editors he criticizes) would come in handy. There seems to be a framing effect, a saliency bias, Mr Taleb is brilliant but very wrapped up in his world of airport luggage, dinners, academics, with a certain adolescent resentment about elements of it. I feel sometimes like I’m trapped in an airport luncheon with him and his loathsome dull academics, as he prattles on.
“big fan but what is up with the bleeps?”

Any additional comments?

Taleb and his “abrasive personality” as another reviewer aptly noted is slightly obnoxious but mostly brilliant…long time fan here. But does anyone know why the book is censored with those horrible bleeps? What does Audible have to say about it? There is really no excuse for it.
“Why was this censored?”

If you could sum up Antifragile in three words, what would they be?

Captivating, applicable, snarky.

What did you like best about this story?

Taleb does a good job of linking his overall points to experiences in day to day life.

How did the narrator detract from the book?

The narrator did an acceptable job. What was unacceptable was the decision to bleep out swear-words. This isn’t a children’s book, and the occasional “bullsh*t” and “f*ck-you” are very much in Taleb’s style of communicating. Bleeping them out was distracting and very disruptive.

Any additional comments?

I have to ask, why would someone bleep out swear words in a book like this? It’s not quite as bad as censoring a book like Orwell’s 1984, but it’s close.
“Rambling and unctuous, self-absorbed and trite”

What disappointed you about Antifragile?

Another Taleb book that spends more time talking about how brilliant Nassim is (and how stupid everybody else is and how stupid they are for not realizing how brilliant he is) than anything else.

Taleb’s attempts to construct parables, to stitch together what appears to be an unedited notebook around his central theme is a repetitive morass of endless repetition and the same thing over and over until the very end where he repeats himself again.

Only he doesn’t appear to realize he’s doing it…

Here is the take-away. It is an old one, and one that is not new, and didn’t really need a new name (no matter what Taleb seems to think):

There are things that fall apart when faced with surprises. These things are fragile. Often you can make small gains in the short run by investing in these, but you are exposed to tremendous loss when that surprise comes along. There are also things that make small losses in the short run (under normal circumstances) but that gain from surprises. If you can survive the stream of small losses, the big gains are really big. For this reason, it’s always better to be in the second situation than the first.

Ta
Da!

Has Antifragile turned you off from other books in this genre?

No, the genre is still strong.

What about Joe Ochman’s performance did you like?

He accurately captured the self-absorbed, vitriolic and condescending tone of the book. I grew to hate his voice and speaking style as much as Taleb himself!

If you could play editor, what scene or scenes would you have cut from Antifragile?

You could cut 2/3 of this book without affecting the quality. I’m sure Taleb would fire you as editor and tell you you’re too much of a simpleton to understand his genius and that every drop of turd in this book is a pearl of his infinite and misunderstood wisdom.
“My Pick, Book of the Year, 2013″

The 1960s’ (earlier or later depending on the field) represented the zenith of a particular collection of ways of thinking about applied probability, about large systems, and about epistemology. Defining this paradigm is tricky. I think of Thomas Kuhn, Kalman Filters, NASA’s approach to quality, Karl Popper, and the invention of the FFT, but list is too idiosyncratic to be helpful. But the point here is that this way of thinking (which I have trouble defining) has given way to a new paradigm that is more about complexity theory (although not so much about chaos theory), network affects, heavy tail distribution, facials, and the unknowable. This book is trying to explain this new paradigm.

Taleb’s technical papers have contributed some to the development of this new paradigm, but his great contribution is the creation of an accessible philosophy built around this new science. This philosophical construction started with Fooled by Randomness, progressed in The Black Swan, and now culminates in Anti-Fragile.

To “get it” you probably have to just read the books, but I’ll try to explain. In Fooled by Randomness he examines the oft practiced money manager con, where you are sold a betting system is right 80% of the time. Sounds like a winner, but beware, the losses when the scheme is wrong are more than 4 times the winning when it’s right. Many a high wage earner has been bilked by myriad versions of this con. In The Black Swan he follows the question of how such cons are constructed, to propose that reality is partitioned into two types of probability distributions: those like the distribution of the height of people and those like the distributions of the wealth of people. The latter distribution is incomprehensibly more varied than the former. He then asserts that randomness fools use when we confusion the two kinds of randomness. In the Anti-Fragile he considers how the two types of randomness are constructed. It is well known that the low variance type arise from combining lots of independent events and the high variability type arise form feedback between lots of connected events.

And then his punch line is … large systems with lots of feedback among the connected parts can be fragile as when the connections cause cascading failures, or they can be anti-fragile as when small failures lead to compensations that strengthen the system. This insight leads to a way of about almost everything.

Oh yea, the alternate title might be, “The Quasi-Organized Ranting of a Misunderstood Genius”. He has learned that anti-fragile things benefit from verity, adversity, and controversy; and has concluded that writing popular books falls in this category. So in each book he increases the narcissus, the adolescence, and the taunting. In this book I think the new high water mark was when he said his former boss was constipated. I hope he hasn’t crossed a threshold were the anti-fragile is simply annihilated.

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