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)

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.

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.

Must

It is very hard to accept all the ideas presented in this book (or any of Taleb's books) but that is an author that makes you think about and challenge everything he comes across. An instant classic.

Brilliant concepts with narrative to match

Nassim brings to the forefront what you instinctively know to be true. That nagging thing which made mankind what it is. Time, the great tester of all organisms big and small; evolution the anvil of “God (or Gods, if you prefer)”. You know? the classics never die. Solid...no, much better than solid it’s Antifragile. I’ve returned to it, and used it’s advice (Nassim would cringe) many times, got great results it even better, had fun while doing so. I’m getting the other books that make this series as soon as possible.

Outstanding.

I'd heard great things about this book, and it was even better than I expected. Joe Ochman's performance was outstanding, fitting the author's tone and attitude perfectly.

A Realistic way of looking at life and risk

shows us that much of what life hints to us about risk, strength and knowledge is true while what we commonly believe to be true is most often false. Great read for the curious mind.

Inspiring if you can stomach the verbal violence

The author's core idea it's very interesting and its consequences are far reaching. The narrator does a very reasonable job with all the dark sarcasm, righteous anger and difficult words in the book. It's a must-read if you can handle the language.

This one pushed me to new perspectives.

I loved this. So many truths, and so much to take. I realize how sheltered I have been and have been fortunate to miss a Black Swan. I will be returning to this one.

genius

NNT provides his clearest explanation of randomness, non-linerar effects and extreme events yet, with plenty of social commentary along the way.

Helpful

It's great to hear the voice of reason in economics every now and then. He has a great writing style. I love the sarcasm and humor.