Antifragile

Things That Gain from Disorder

By: Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Narrated by: Joe Ochman

Length: 16 hrs and 14 mins

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.

Please note: The bleeps in the audio are intentional and are as written by the author. No material is censored, and no audio content is missing.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

©2012 Nassim Nicholas Taleb (P)2012 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

"[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)

The best in the set.

Nasims best book in the set on randomness. This one is the most easily applied to decision makers. Very entertaining and useful ways of thinking. As a whole his Incerto book set is life changing material. I recommend it to anyone.

good idea and concept, but verbose

The main thesis is that fragile objects form very stable networks/systems. These networks are anti-fragil and they thrive on changes/challenges. For a system, such as a human body or the economy to be anti-fragile (an not just mere robust), the whole system needs to gets stronger when changes destroy individual components (muscle fibers after training or bankruptcy of companies).

This concept certainly holds truth and is worth thinking about and the book is worth reading.

A drawback of the book are the length and many anecdotes and side stories in the book. There is also a tendency to see everything black and white and a lot of statements sounded like everything was better in the past, as in ancient Greek or Phoenica (i.e old Lebanon). As a molecular biologist myself, I found lots of the criticism of modern science one sided: yes there are mistakes in medicine, often driven by corporate greed. HOWEVER: look at the success of Spinraza, a new drug against spinal muscular atrophy that clearly saved kids lives. Finally, economic sciences, sociology, etc are not sciences similar to chemistry, physics and math, the latter really improved peoples lives.

MUST READ

Read this book from start to finish asap! So much great knowledge! must read this

Se tenía que decir, y se dijo!

Nassim Taleb logra poner en palabras todas nuestras intuiciones a caer de cómo funciona el mundo y adicionalmente destila la idea principal de dicho funcionamiento... La antifragilidad.

Dense

I have to warn anyone who picks up either the text or the audio version of this book. It is dense. The concept can be a bit difficult to understand but it still good and something worth keeping in mind as you go about your day to day life.

Important...

...for so many reasons. Covers almost all aspects of life. I had a misconception of what this book was about. Antifragility is not just a psychological idea, it’s much broader than that.
By far my favorite Taleb book this far.

Interesting point of view

Although I didn't always agree with the conclusions of the author, I enjoyed a lot listening to how he analyses things. There is a high probability that I revisit this book in the medium term.

Complejo e inusual pero interesante

Es un libro difícil de seguir y poco ortodoxo pero plantea unas ideas interesantes

Eye Opening

I would have to say that I never really thought of situations in terms of risk taking the way Nicholas describes it and I will most likely adjust the way I live based off of this. Im an industrial engineer where a part of the syllabus in college was forecasting, however there always seemed to be missing a real time aspect to these calculations. Forecasting promised to give the statistician foresight into behavior however it was based on the past and what could happen would always require that we adjusted our calculations based on a new factor. I do believe some statistical methods are not a total waste such as statistical sampling or quality control methods, however forecasting is definitely not a good methodology. This book also shed light about why taking risks and shots at things like starting a business or a relationship has a big upside in that you only need it to hit once in order to benefit big from that interaction.

muy complejo...

Es un libro muy complejo, cambia las ideas de un lado para otro.... con poca relación....