Read Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder Online
Authors: Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (3 page)
Boldface terms are in the
Glossary
.
BOOK I: THE ANTIFRAGILE: AN INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER 1
. Explains how we missed the word “antifragility” in classrooms. Fragile-Robust-Antifragile as Damocles-Phoenix-Hydra. Domain dependence.CHAPTER 2
. Where we find overcompensation. Obsessive love is the most antifragile thing outside of economics.CHAPTER 3
. The difference between the organic and the engineered.
Touristification
and attempts to suck volatility out of life.CHAPTER 4
. The antifragility of the whole often depends on the fragility of the parts. Why death is a necessity for life. The benefits of errors for the collective. Why we need risk takers. A few remarks about modernity missing the point. A salute to the entrepreneur and risk taker.
BOOK II: MODERNITY AND THE DENIAL OF ANTIFRAGILITY
THE PROCRUSTEAN BED
CHAPTER 5
. Two different randomness categories, seen through the profiles of two brothers. How Switzerland is not controlled from above. The difference between
Mediocristan
and
Extremistan.
The virtues of city-states, bottom-up political systems, and the stabilizing effect of municipal noise.CHAPTER 6
. Systems that like randomness. Annealing inside and outside physics. Explains the effect of overstabilizing organisms and complex systems (political, economic, etc.). The defects of intellectualism. U.S. foreign policy, and pseudostabilization.CHAPTER 7
. An introduction to
naive intervention
and
iatrogenics,
the most neglected product of modernity. Noise and signal and overintervening from noise.CHAPTER 8
. Prediction as the child of modernity.
BOOK III: A NONPREDICTIVE VIEW OF THE WORLD
CHAPTER 9
. Fat Tony, the smeller of fragility, Nero, long lunches, and squeezing the
fragilistas.CHAPTER 10
. In which Professor Triffat refuses his own medicine and we use Seneca and stoicism as a back door to explain why everything antifragile has to have more upside than downside and hence benefits from volatility, error, and stressors—the
fundamental asymmetry.CHAPTER 11
. What to mix and not to mix. The
barbell strategy
in life and things as the transformation of anything from fragile to antifragile.
BOOK IV: OPTIONALITY, TECHNOLOGY, AND THE INTELLIGENCE OF ANTIFRAGILITY
(The tension between education, which loves order, and innovation, which loves disorder.)
CHAPTER 12
. Thales versus Aristotle, and the notion of
optionality,
which allows you not to know what’s going on—why it has been misunderstood owing to the conflation. How Aristotle missed the point. Optionality in private life. Conditions under which tinkering outperforms design.
Rational
flâneur.CHAPTER 13
. Asymmetric payoffs behind growth, little else. The
Soviet-Harvard illusion,
or the lecturing-birds-how-to-fly effect. Epiphenomena.CHAPTER 14
.
The green lumber fallacy.
Tension between episteme and trial and error, and the role through history. Does knowledge generate wealth, and if so, which knowledge? When two things are not the same thing.CHAPTER 15
. Rewriting the history of technology. How, in science, history is rewritten by the losers and how I saw it in my own business and how we can generalize. Does knowledge of biology hurt medicine? Hiding the role of luck. What makes a good entrepreneur?CHAPTER 16
. How to deal with Soccer Moms. The education of a
flâneur.CHAPTER 17
. Fat Tony argues with Socrates. Why can’t we do things we can’t explain, and why do we have to explain things we do? The
Dionysian.
The sucker-nonsucker approach to things.
BOOK V: THE NONLINEAR AND THE NONLINEAR
CHAPTER 18
.
Convexity, concavity,
and convexity effects. Why size fragilizes.CHAPTER 19
.
The Philosopher’s Stone.
Deeper into convexity. How Fannie Mae went bust. Nonlinearity. The heuristic to detect fragility and antifragility. Convexity biases,
Jensen’s inequality,
and their impact on ignorance.
CHAPTER 20
.
Neomania.
Looking at the future by
via negativa.
The
Lindy effect:
the old outlives the new in proportion to its age.
Empedocles’ Tile.
Why the irrational has an edge over the perceived-to-be-rational.CHAPTER 21
. Medicine and asymmetry. Decision rules in medical problems: why the very ill has a convex payoff and the healthy has concave exposures.CHAPTER 22
. Medicine by subtraction. Introduces the match between individuals and the type of randomness in the environment. Why I don’t want to live forever.
BOOK VII: THE ETHICS OF FRAGILITY AND ANTIFRAGILITY
CHAPTER 23
. The
agency problem
as transfer of fragility.
Skin in the game. Doxastic commitment,
or
soul in the game.
The
Robert Rubin problem,
the
Joseph Stiglitz problem,
and the
Alan Blinder problem,
all three about agency, and one about
cherry-picking.CHAPTER 24
.
Ethical
inversion.
The collective can be wrong while individuals know it. How people are trapped into an opinion, and how to set them free.CHAPTER 25
. Conclusion.EPILOGUE
. What happens when Nero leaves to go to the Levant to observe the rite of Adonis.
Wind extinguishes a candle and energizes fire.
Likewise with randomness, uncertainty, chaos: you want to use them, not hide from them. You want to be the fire and wish for the wind. This summarizes this author’s nonmeek attitude to randomness and uncertainty.
We just don’t want to just survive uncertainty, to just about make it. We want to survive uncertainty and, in addition—like a certain class of aggressive Roman Stoics—have the last word. The mission is how to domesticate, even dominate, even conquer, the unseen, the opaque, and the inexplicable.
How?
Some things benefit from shocks; they thrive and grow when exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder, and stressors and love adventure, risk, and uncertainty. Yet, in spite of the ubiquity of the phenomenon, there is no word for the exact opposite of fragile. Let us call it antifragile.
Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better. This property is behind everything that has changed with time: evolution, culture, ideas,
revolutions, political systems, technological innovation, cultural and economic success, corporate survival, good recipes (say, chicken soup or steak tartare with a drop of cognac), the rise of cities, cultures, legal systems, equatorial forests, bacterial resistance … even our own existence as a species on this planet. And antifragility determines the boundary between what is living and organic (or complex), say, the human body, and what is inert, say, a physical object like the stapler on your desk.
The antifragile loves randomness and uncertainty, which also means—crucially—a love of errors, a certain class of errors. Antifragility has a singular property of allowing us to deal with the unknown, to do things without understanding them—and do them well. Let me be more aggressive: we are largely better at doing than we are at thinking, thanks to antifragility. I’d rather be dumb and antifragile than extremely smart and fragile, any time.
It is easy to see things around us that like a measure of stressors and volatility: economic systems, your body, your nutrition (diabetes and many similar modern ailments seem to be associated with a lack of randomness in feeding and the absence of the stressor of occasional starvation), your psyche. There are even financial contracts that are antifragile: they are explicitly designed to benefit from market volatility.
Antifragility makes us understand fragility better. Just as we cannot improve health without reducing disease, or increase wealth without first decreasing losses, antifragility and fragility are degrees on a spectrum.