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Antifragile
- Things That Gain from Disorder
- Narrated by: Joe Ochman
- Length: 16 hrs and 14 mins
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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.
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)
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Average Customer RatingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Philo
- 12-24-12
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.
191 people found this helpful
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- J. S. White
- 12-23-12
Self aggrandizing anti-intellectual polemic
I really wanted to like this book. I enjoyed "Fooled by Randomness" and "The Black Swan". I'd forgotten how arrogant and self-important Taleb is by the time I purchased this book. In the other two books, interesting thoughts and data made the arrogance tolerable. After three or four chapters of this book, I had to give up.
I'm the *FIRST* one to be excited by discovering that the "conventional wisdom" is wrong. It means new and interesting thoughts and wider future possibilities, and I've got a perverse attraction to such things. But I don't - not for one minute - believe that the researchers that accept the "conventional wisdom" are fools or idiots. I can believe someone has drawn the wrong conclusions, yet still believe that they are intelligent people of good will and intent. I've been wrong myself, so I understand that it is possible to do so - be wrong, that is - without being an idiot, a fool, or mendacious and malicious.
The concept "I understand, but disagree" is completely foreign to Taleb's mindset. He asserts repeatedly that those who disagree with him are fools and simpletons. He spends more time deriding them than he does illustrating his evidence. He often substitutes anecdotal evidence as authoritative, then cherry-picks research to support the idea he's chosen. This doesn't mean the idea is *wrong*; it means that it doesn't provide the necessary evidence to choose it over other possible explanations. I don't mind the occasional well-placed, witty jab at one's intellectual opponents in the arena of ideas, but Taleb's incessant sniping at everyone from "academics" (which he speaks of with a decided sneer) to "bankers" (which he speaks of equally sneeringly) grates on my nerves after a while. "All right, Mr. Taleb, I get it. You don't like academics or bankers, nutritionists, cardiologists, fitness scientists, etc. Can we get past this now?"
I hope someone else repackages these ideas in a more palatable package. If they're as earthshaking as Taleb thinks they are, it won't be long. Until then, I guess I'll be behind the curve, as this is unreadable.
142 people found this helpful
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- Liz
- 01-15-13
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.
88 people found this helpful
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- Amazon Customer
- 12-26-12
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.
87 people found this helpful
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- E. Smakman
- 05-03-13
How to focus on impact instead of risk
There are two things to say about this book: one is about the intellectual content, which is brilliant and thought-provoking. The other is its tone and character, which is nauseating at times and simply boring at most others. Enough is said about that in other reviews, suffice to say that he does it even more in this book than in his previous tomes.
Back to the content then: Taleb asserts that we cannot KNOW the probability or risk of certain events, that is why instead we should focus on its consequences, bad or good. Almost all relevant events are 'non-linear', meaning that the potential benefits far outweigh the potential costs or vice versa. If we focus on reducing the potentially large negative consequences of events and expose ourselves to potentially large positive consequences of others (at little cost) than we are really progressing. He advocates a barbell strategy, of limiting your biggest risks while exposing yourself to the biggest upsides.
Some interesting elements:
(1) the 'via negitiva' or subtractive way of doing things. It is easier to predict the things that in the future will no longer be there (the fragile), then the new things that will arise and be successful. The old is more likely to stay around than the new (it has been around longer). (2) The small, decentral is less harmful than the big central which drags everybody along. (3) 'stressors'. Minor stressors (pains, damage) due to volatility are good for strength. Too much stability creates comfort and lack of strength. This is true for humans: no effort, no strength. But also for government monopolies.
And finally (4) his main point: let us try to intervene less in society, economy and human beings, because practically all intervention has large negative and unknown consequences. Only intervene when not intervening ends most likely very bad. This could be a policy for the military too?
I for one can recommend the content of this book if you can stomach the tone, and am myself still digesting its consequential conclusions.
75 people found this helpful
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- Mr. Andre
- 10-08-13
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.
47 people found this helpful
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- Horace
- 03-01-13
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.
30 people found this helpful
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- Christopher B. Clark
- 10-17-19
What did I just listen to?
This is the most bizarre, confusing and convoluted compilation of words that I have ever listened to. Imagine a bitter, angry college professor dropping acid and then lecturing you. That’s sort of how this book is. The main premise is established early on: some stuff benefits from volatility and can be categorized as “antifragile,” which is fine... but then we spend a significant amount of time exploring the fact that the author had to “invent” this word because no one has ever defined this property before. I’m listening to this like, “okay?” At another point, he starts rattling off stuff about “lecturing birds,” and “fat tony,” and petty beefs that happen in academia. I had to shut off the audiobook. This dude is all over the place.
25 people found this helpful
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- Will
- 12-08-12
Taleb's Recipe for a Free and Affluent Society
I had a lot of wonderful "Aha" moments listening to this audio book about Antifragile vs. Fragile systems. The author has identified a key underlying paradyne for failure or success, whether personal, in business or with government programs.
Long ago, another book: Leadership and the new science by Margaret Wheatley convinced me that nature is self organizing and business can be set up to be self organizing. Nassim Nicholas Taleb echo's that idea and states, the natural order is overwhelmingly Antifragile, while our manmade order tends to be Fragile. The earth and mankind have evolved all by themselves without some great leader calling the shots, because nature is Antifragile. If we listen/obey leaders who tell us how to live our own lives (which we already know intuitively and logically), we are likely to become Fragile.
Fragility is all about risks. An activity is Fragile, if the downside (negative) risks predominate over the upside risks or the downside risks are greater than the upsize risks. Fragile is the property of most manmade systems. How does that apply to us? Modernity has created structures that allows certain groups of people, like corporate bankers, politicians and academics to take excessive risks without any skin in the game and thereby pass the downside consequences onto others, making them Fragile. One way avoid this Nassim Nicholas Taleb argues, is to make ourselves Antifragile by insisting all decisions makers affecting our lives have skin in the game. However, bankers, politicians and academics usually have no skin in the game. In fact, often they gain at the expense of the people they serve. So the solution is, limit the size and power of banks, corporations and government to minimize the damage.
Taleb also points out that top down decisions by leaders who don't understand complex system, such as our economy, and have no skin in the game pass laws/regulations that make small problems large; for example our Financial Crisis:
1. The Federal Reserve made our financial system Fragile when it tried to prevent a small adjustment/recession by keeping interest rates too low and ended up causing a housing bubble plus the great recession.
2. Taxpayers became Fragile when large banks took excessive downside risk because the government protected the banks against that risk at taxpayer expense.
There is a bit of fluff in the book, but overall Taleb makes a great case limiting downsize risk and how we can achieve it. He deserves Nobel Prize.
24 people found this helpful
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- Rowdy
- 12-26-12
Uninteresting perspectives from a sensationalist
Taleb has a bone to pick. Apparently, it's with air conditioners, insurance companies, dietitians, economists, and academics (a group in which he, himself, must be included). He thinks that all of these people/things keep us from suffering enough to be strong. Save yourself the time and pick up anything by Gladwell, it'll be a better read with much less hateful navel-gazing.
20 people found this helpful
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Book Summary: Antifragile by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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Seneca's Letters from a Stoic is considered one of the thought-leaders of philosophy in the history of classical literature. The compilation offers a comprehensive introduction to the stoic philosophy. Stoicism is Hellenistic philosophy that dominated literature and conversation until around Three AD. Its roots are traced back to ancient Greece at its founding by Zeno of Citium.
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Great stories!
- By V on 04-29-19
By: Lucius Seneca
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The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity
- By: Carlo M. Cipolla, Nassim Nicholas Taleb - foreword
- Narrated by: Paul Boehmer
- Length: 54 mins
- Unabridged
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Throughout history, a powerful force has hindered the growth of human welfare and happiness. It is more powerful than the Mafia or the military. It has global catastrophic effects and can be found anywhere from the world's most powerful boardrooms to your local bar. It is human stupidity. Carlo M. Cipolla, noted professor of economic history at the UC Berkeley, created this vitally important book in order to detect and neutralize its threat.
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What do you have to loose?
- By Andres on 04-06-21
By: Carlo M. Cipolla, and others
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The Calm Before the Storm
- Why Volatility Signals Stability and Vice Versa
- By: Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Gregory F. Treverton
- Narrated by: Kevin Stillwell
- Length: 27 mins
- Unabridged
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Instead of trying to predict "Black Swan" events such as coups or crises, forecasters should look at how political systems handle disorder. The best indicator of a country's future trajectory is not a lengthy past stability, but recent moderate volatility.
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Fine Taleb, but repeats some themes in other books
- By Philo on 03-23-15
By: Nassim Nicholas Taleb, and others
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I Am a Strange Loop
- By: Douglas R. Hofstadter
- Narrated by: Greg Baglia
- Length: 16 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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One of our greatest philosophers and scientists of the mind asks where the self comes from - and how our selves can exist in the minds of others. I Am a Strange Loop argues that the key to understanding selves and consciousness is the "strange loop" - a special kind of abstract feedback loop inhabiting our brains. The most central and complex symbol in your brain is the one called "I". The "I" is the nexus in our brain, one of many symbols seeming to have free will and to have gained the paradoxical ability to push particles around, rather than the reverse.
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The Self That Wasn't There
- By SelfishWizard on 01-09-19
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The Coddling of the American Mind
- How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure
- By: Jonathan Haidt, Greg Lukianoff
- Narrated by: Jonathan Haidt
- Length: 10 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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The culture of “safety” and its intolerance of opposing viewpoints has left many young people anxious and unprepared for adult life. Lukianoff and Haidt offer a comprehensive set of reforms that will strengthen young people and institutions, allowing us all to reap the benefits of diversity, including viewpoint diversity. This is a book for anyone who is confused by what’s happening on college campuses today, or has children, or is concerned about the growing inability of Americans to live and work and cooperate across party lines.
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Only Praise
- By TJ on 12-02-18
By: Jonathan Haidt, and others
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Go for No!
- Yes Is the Destination, No Is How You Get There
- By: Richard Fenton, Andrea Waltz
- Narrated by: Richard Fenton
- Length: 1 hr and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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In a world inundated with sales books on getting to yes, this audiobook recommends just the opposite, focusing on how increasing your failure rate can greatly accelerate your movement toward ultimate success. Go for No! chronicles four days in the life of fictional character Eric Bratton, a call-reluctant copier salesman who wakes up one morning to find himself in a strange house with no idea of how he got there.
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love the lesson to be learned
- By Elexus on 05-29-15
By: Richard Fenton, and others
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Thinking, Fast and Slow
- By: Daniel Kahneman
- Narrated by: Patrick Egan
- Length: 20 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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The guru to the gurus at last shares his knowledge with the rest of us. Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman's seminal studies in behavioral psychology, behavioral economics, and happiness studies have influenced numerous other authors, including Steven Pinker and Malcolm Gladwell. In Thinking, Fast and Slow, Kahneman at last offers his own, first book for the general public. It is a lucid and enlightening summary of his life's work. It will change the way you think about thinking. Two systems drive the way we think and make choices, Kahneman explains....
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Difficult Listen, but Probably a Great Read
- By Mike Kircher on 01-12-12
By: Daniel Kahneman
Related to this topic
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The Black Swan, Second Edition: The Impact of the Highly Improbable: With a new section: "On Robustness and Fragility"
- Incerto, Book 2
- By: Nassim Nicholas Taleb
- Narrated by: Joe Ochman
- Length: 15 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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A black swan is a highly improbable event with three principal characteristics: It is unpredictable; it carries a massive impact; and, after the fact, we concoct an explanation that makes it appear less random, and more predictable, than it was. The astonishing success of Google was a black swan; so was 9/11. For Nassim Nicholas Taleb, black swans underlie almost everything about our world, from the rise of religions to events in our own personal lives. Elegant, startling, and universal in its applications, The Black Swan will change the way you look at the world.
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Interesting, but over the top
- By Anonymous User on 08-08-19
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Fooled by Randomness
- The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets
- By: Nassim Nicholas Taleb
- Narrated by: Sean Pratt
- Length: 10 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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This audiobook is about luck, or more precisely, how we perceive and deal with luck in life and business. It is already a landmark work, and its title has entered our vocabulary. In its second edition, Fooled by Randomness is now a cornerstone for anyone interested in random outcomes.
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Pass on this one and read The Black Swan
- By Wade T. Brooks on 06-25-12
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The Art of Thinking Clearly
- By: Rolf Dobelli
- Narrated by: Eric Conger
- Length: 7 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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A novelist, thinker, and entrepreneur, Rolf Dobelli deftly shows that in order to lead happier, more prosperous lives, we don't need extra cunning, new ideas, shiny gadgets, or more frantic hyperactivity - all we need is less irrationality. Simple, clear, and always surprising, this indispensable audiobook will change the way you think and transform your decision making - at work, at home, every day.
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Major Downer
- By Daniel Ales on 01-22-20
By: Rolf Dobelli
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The Knowledge Illusion
- Why We Never Think Alone
- By: Steven Sloman, Philip Fernbach
- Narrated by: Mike Chamberlain
- Length: 9 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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Humans have built hugely complex societies and technologies, but most of us don't even know how a pen or a toilet works. How have we achieved so much despite understanding so little? Cognitive scientists Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach argue that we survive and thrive despite our mental shortcomings because we live in a rich community of knowledge. The key to our intelligence lies in the people and things around us.
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Welcome insight into what we do and don't know
- By S. Yates on 11-01-17
By: Steven Sloman, and others
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The Great Mental Models
- General Thinking Concepts
- By: Shane Parrish
- Narrated by: Shane Parrish
- Length: 3 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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The Great Mental Models: General Thinking Concepts is the first book in The Great Mental Models series designed to upgrade your thinking with the best, most useful and powerful tools so you always have the right one on hand. This volume details nine of the most versatile all-purpose mental models you can use right away to improve your decision making, your productivity, and how clearly you see the world.
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A dissapointing debut
- By Peter on 04-14-19
By: Shane Parrish
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The Broken Ladder
- How Inequality Affects the Way We Think, Live, and Die
- By: Keith Payne
- Narrated by: James Foster
- Length: 7 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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Today's inequality is on a scale that none of us has seen in our lifetimes, yet this disparity between rich and poor has ramifications that extend far beyond mere financial means. In The Broken Ladder, psychologist Keith Payne examines how inequality divides us not just economically, but also has profound consequences for how we think, how our cardiovascular systems respond to stress, how our immune systems function, and how we view moral ideas such as justice and fairness.
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amazing book. changed my thinking about poverty.
- By David Larson on 07-03-17
By: Keith Payne
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The Black Swan, Second Edition: The Impact of the Highly Improbable: With a new section: "On Robustness and Fragility"
- Incerto, Book 2
- By: Nassim Nicholas Taleb
- Narrated by: Joe Ochman
- Length: 15 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A black swan is a highly improbable event with three principal characteristics: It is unpredictable; it carries a massive impact; and, after the fact, we concoct an explanation that makes it appear less random, and more predictable, than it was. The astonishing success of Google was a black swan; so was 9/11. For Nassim Nicholas Taleb, black swans underlie almost everything about our world, from the rise of religions to events in our own personal lives. Elegant, startling, and universal in its applications, The Black Swan will change the way you look at the world.
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Interesting, but over the top
- By Anonymous User on 08-08-19
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Fooled by Randomness
- The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets
- By: Nassim Nicholas Taleb
- Narrated by: Sean Pratt
- Length: 10 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
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Performance
-
Story
This audiobook is about luck, or more precisely, how we perceive and deal with luck in life and business. It is already a landmark work, and its title has entered our vocabulary. In its second edition, Fooled by Randomness is now a cornerstone for anyone interested in random outcomes.
-
-
Pass on this one and read The Black Swan
- By Wade T. Brooks on 06-25-12
-
The Art of Thinking Clearly
- By: Rolf Dobelli
- Narrated by: Eric Conger
- Length: 7 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A novelist, thinker, and entrepreneur, Rolf Dobelli deftly shows that in order to lead happier, more prosperous lives, we don't need extra cunning, new ideas, shiny gadgets, or more frantic hyperactivity - all we need is less irrationality. Simple, clear, and always surprising, this indispensable audiobook will change the way you think and transform your decision making - at work, at home, every day.
-
-
Major Downer
- By Daniel Ales on 01-22-20
By: Rolf Dobelli
-
The Knowledge Illusion
- Why We Never Think Alone
- By: Steven Sloman, Philip Fernbach
- Narrated by: Mike Chamberlain
- Length: 9 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Humans have built hugely complex societies and technologies, but most of us don't even know how a pen or a toilet works. How have we achieved so much despite understanding so little? Cognitive scientists Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach argue that we survive and thrive despite our mental shortcomings because we live in a rich community of knowledge. The key to our intelligence lies in the people and things around us.
-
-
Welcome insight into what we do and don't know
- By S. Yates on 11-01-17
By: Steven Sloman, and others
-
The Great Mental Models
- General Thinking Concepts
- By: Shane Parrish
- Narrated by: Shane Parrish
- Length: 3 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The Great Mental Models: General Thinking Concepts is the first book in The Great Mental Models series designed to upgrade your thinking with the best, most useful and powerful tools so you always have the right one on hand. This volume details nine of the most versatile all-purpose mental models you can use right away to improve your decision making, your productivity, and how clearly you see the world.
-
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A dissapointing debut
- By Peter on 04-14-19
By: Shane Parrish
-
The Broken Ladder
- How Inequality Affects the Way We Think, Live, and Die
- By: Keith Payne
- Narrated by: James Foster
- Length: 7 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Today's inequality is on a scale that none of us has seen in our lifetimes, yet this disparity between rich and poor has ramifications that extend far beyond mere financial means. In The Broken Ladder, psychologist Keith Payne examines how inequality divides us not just economically, but also has profound consequences for how we think, how our cardiovascular systems respond to stress, how our immune systems function, and how we view moral ideas such as justice and fairness.
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amazing book. changed my thinking about poverty.
- By David Larson on 07-03-17
By: Keith Payne
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How Our Brains Betray Us
- Change the Way You Think and Make Better Decisions by Understanding the Cognitive Biases and Heuristics That Destroy Our Lives!
- By: Magnus McDaniels
- Narrated by: Cody Davids
- Length: 3 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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Tired of making decisions that seem to only work against you? It starts with understanding your brain and the decision-making process. Cognitive biases and heuristics have developed over thousands of years of evolution and can lead to serious damages in multiple areas of life if you don’t recognize them and stop them dead in their tracks. How Our Brains Betray Us has everything you need to know with examples, tools, and strategies to identify the most powerful cognitive biases that impair all types of decisions, how to avoid them and also use them to your advantage.
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The best book I have read about heuristics
- By Marcin on 02-28-23
By: Magnus McDaniels
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The Data Detective
- Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics
- By: Tim Harford
- Narrated by: Tim Harford
- Length: 10 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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Today we think statistics are the enemy, numbers used to mislead and confuse us. That’s a mistake, Tim Harford says in The Data Detective. We shouldn’t be suspicious of statistics - we need to understand what they mean and how they can improve our lives: they are, at heart, human behavior seen through the prism of numbers and are often “the only way of grasping much of what is going on around us”.
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I expected more
- By A. Visserman on 03-09-21
By: Tim Harford
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The AI Delusion
- By: Gary Smith
- Narrated by: Eric Michael Summerer
- Length: 8 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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We live in an incredible period in history. The computer revolution may be even more life-changing than the Industrial Revolution. We can do things with computers that could never be done before, and computers can do things for us that could never be done before. But our love of computers should not cloud our thinking about their limitations. The AI Delusion explains why we should not be intimidated into thinking that computers are infallible, that data-mining is knowledge discovery, and that black boxes should be trusted.
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The non-obvious obvious
- By Jordan Worley on 07-19-19
By: Gary Smith
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Mindware
- Tools for Smart Thinking
- By: Richard E. Nisbett
- Narrated by: Joe Barrett
- Length: 10 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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Many scientific and philosophical ideas are so powerful that they can be applied to our lives at home, work, and school to help us think smarter and more effectively about our behavior and the world around us. Surprisingly, many of these ideas remain unknown to most of us. In Mindware, the world-renowned psychologist Richard Nisbett presents these ideas in clear and accessible detail, offering a tool kit for better thinking and wiser decisions.
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Sound scientific advice on how to live your life
- By Neuron on 08-26-15
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The Book of Why
- The New Science of Cause and Effect
- By: Judea Pearl, Dana Mackenzie
- Narrated by: Mel Foster
- Length: 15 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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"Correlation does not imply causation". This mantra has been invoked by scientists for decades and has led to a virtual prohibition on causal talk. But today, that taboo is dead. The causal revolution, sparked by Judea Pearl and his colleagues, has cut through a century of confusion and placed causality - the study of cause and effect - on a firm scientific basis.
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Great book! Not a great audiobook.
- By rrwright on 05-30-18
By: Judea Pearl, and others
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The Fourth Age
- By: Byron Reese
- Narrated by: Danny Campbell
- Length: 11 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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We are now on the doorstep of a fourth change brought about by two technologies: AI and robotics. The Fourth Age provides extraordinary background information on how we got to this point, and how - rather than what - we should think about the topics we’ll soon all be facing: machine consciousness, automation, employment, creative computers, radical life extension, artificial life, AI ethics, the future of warfare, superintelligence, and the implications of extreme prosperity.
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A Big History Story of AI
- By SurferDoug on 04-25-18
By: Byron Reese