28/12/2017 Antifragile Summary | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | PDF Download
Book Antifragile Things That Gain from Disorder Nassim Nicholas Taleb Random House, Inc., 2012
Systems that thrive on disruption
are stronger and last longer.
Rating
8 8 Importance 10 Innovation 7 Style
Curious about Antifragile? Read our review below. We’re still awaiting the copyright holder’s go-ahead to summarize this book in our usual summary format. In the meantime, we hope you’ll find our review just as helpful.
Review This amazing book is brilliant, confusing, idiosyncratic, useful and irritating – sometimes, all at once. Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s core idea, which is profound and close to revolutionary, is this: Everyone is familiar with the idea of fragility. If something is fragile, it breaks. Fragility is a danger in all complex systems, and it is a growing danger in the increasingly interrelated global economy. The opposite of fragile is not “robust” or sturdy. “Antifragile” doesn’t refer to things that don’t break. Those qualities fall somewhere in the middle of a spectrum between fragile and antifragile. Something is antifragile – a term Taleb coined – if it benefits from shocks, stress, disruption, randomness or volatility. Thus, he teaches, people must learn to create systems, habits and practices that survive and benefit from disruption. In discussing ethics and antifragility, he argues against generalized responsibility and against decisions
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in which the consequences don’t affect the decision makers. He relishes challenging modern orthodoxies and argues for better ethics from those with “skin in the game.” If you’re short on time, read Taleb’s prologue. It gives a clear explanation of antifragility, a concept you can apply usefully on your own.
Shocks, Stress and Disruptions
However, if you stop after the prologue, you’ll miss the highly personal beauty of the remaining hundreds of pages. Taleb casts a wide net. He moves from system to system, identifying common principles in biology, politics, economics and other fields. He provides multimodal ways of accessing and understanding his concepts. These strategies range from the five-page table in the prologue delineating the respective qualities of fragile, robust and antifragile systems to rich examples from mythology, where he explains ideas by telling familiar stories. Taleb divides his discussion of antifragility into seven books of short, episodic chapters. Each moves in unexpected, surprising directions and explores a different idea. Taleb says you must learn to live happily in a world beyond your understanding or capacity to predict. The antifragile isn’t linear, and Taleb doesn’t follow a linear path in teaching these lessons:
Evolution Works Because It Is Antifragile
Taleb starts – but never claims to complete – the process of defining and mapping antifragility. In book one, he argues that many claims of completion are false and dangerous. He objects to today’s overemphasis on the particular and to the micromanagement it generates. He discusses evolution as an antifragile process that works because it is antifragile: it functions even when whole species get wiped out. Species die, but the resilient antifragile system continues. Fragile systems fear error and need precise, known rules. Antifragile systems, like evolution, benefit from error. This quality carries ethical implications for Taleb. Heroes risk failure for others. Entrepreneurs, who choose risks, are heroic. While conservative and libertarian commentators hail entrepreneurs as champions, Taleb is rare in linking that argument to larger systems.
Variation Makes Systems More Fragile
In book two, Taleb addresses the relationship between modernity and antifragility. Modernity refers to the contemporary desire to organize and control life. This model tries to smooth away variation, which makes systems more fragile. The “centralized state” takes this static, orderly but intrinsically flawed approach, which falsifies reality and dulls information signals. Taleb contrasts this with the continual awareness of the self-employed person who monitors the system for responses and treats personal failures as data. From that perspective, concrete, personal encounters breed compassion and engagement.
Taleb says government should apply a bottom-up approach as a more functional, ethical strategy for civic organization. He challenges the narrative that sees nations as natural organizational units, arguing instead that bureaucratic abstraction allows and enables unethical action, even tyranny. He sees the modern world as heir to two fallacies: intervention and predication. Both relate to the belief that people can and should control the world, and that they will achieve superior results if they do. Taleb presents counter-examples from medicine, politics and literature. Even if his reasoning is hard to follow, he offers enough data to convince you that he’s exposed a pervasive ideology that can dangerously blind its adherents.
Blend Risk and Conservatism
Taleb develops an alternative model of the world he identifies as springing from Seneca and the Stoic philosophers. In book three, he uses this “nonpredictive” approach to apply emotional realism to making decisions about the future – using more evaluation and less prediction. Taleb encourages an appropriate, beneficial blending of approaches: some extreme risk, some conservatism. This section reads as an idea or inspiration, not as a worked-out plan, perhaps since such a plan might run counter to the book’s larger themes. This section feels less mature than the rest of the volume.
“Only Suckers Wait for Answers” or Stress Adaptability over Fixed Planning Books four and five are Antifragile’s most intellectually ambitious and challenging. The pace with which Taleb engages St. Thomas Aquinas and declares his flawed thinking might frustrate you. If the “Teleological Fallacy” matters so much, Taleb could have supplied a more methodical dissection. Yet, he impels you to think about Aquinas’s pivotal declaration, “An agent does not move except out of intention for an end,” the basis of the teleological contention that people are supposed to know where they are going, but they don’t – or can’t. Here, Taleb’s narrative is emotionally engaging and persuasive. His image of Harvard intellectuals lecturing birds on how to fly, then taking credit when they do, suggests gritty satire as well as useful parallels.
Taleb explodes fundamental flaws in modern culture. He argues that formal education is a result of innovation and prosperity, not their effect. He contends that most people don’t realize that the world functions differently on the personal level than on the level of, say, a national economy. He credits America for “risk taking and use of optionality,” for “rational trial and error,” and for starting again after failure, as opposed to regarding failure with shame. He distinguishes between the “teleological” mind-set (following Aquinas) and an American-kind of future-oriented “optionality,” which incorporates adaptation and breadth, rather than narrow, fixed planning.
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Taleb always returns to a central core of ideas and approaches. In grasping for what really works in the world, he addresses longstanding, pervasive myths. This accounts for his shifts in narrative perspective and explains seeming inconsistencies in his work. He remains unconcerned with logical consistency or even with answering all possible questions on a topic. He relishes blowing up false answers, even those codified by centuries of tradition and repetition. Taleb sums up his ideas in a fragmentary dialogue between his recurring mouthpiece “Fat Tony” and Socrates: “Only suckers wait for answers; questions are not made for answers.” Taleb’s job is not to tell you the truth, but to untell you untruths, letting you find answers for yourself. This demands you to shift away from familiar reading patterns, and it takes a lot of trust. Taleb refuses to be a teacher who lectures you on how to fly. He wants you to learn to use your wings on your own.
Identify and Embrace the Raw Core of Pure Value
Book six’s strangeness generates its wonder. In an information age when every writer and thinker celebrates big data, it takes intellectual bravery to turn toward less information. It takes even more bravery to embrace the “via negativa.” Most readers are unfamiliar with mystical practices and wouldn’t ever turn to them for practical guidance. The via negativa, which has a long history in mystical practices, is a hard, obscure path. Many religious writings try to define God or the divine as clearly, poetically or movingly as possible. But, the via negativa, which Taleb calls “subtractive knowledge,” looks for purity and strips away everything that the divine is not. As he explains, “If we cannot express what something is exactly, we can say something about what it is not – the indirect rather than the direct expression.”
Taleb links the via negativa to accessible ideas like “less is more” or the Pareto principle. He argues for shedding anything you shouldn’t do. This shows tremendous faith in reality and in history. It requires turning away from buzzwords and faddish programs, identifying the rare core of the real value and embracing it. This is the ultimate form of marching to your own drummer. It seems hard to practice in large organizations, but it is essential for clear thought, good health and entrepreneurship.
If You Have “Skin in the Game,” Take Responsibility
When Taleb discusses ethics and antifragility in book seven, he argues against generalized responsibility and against decisions in which the consequences don’t affect the decision makers. He urges better ethics from people rather than collectives and from those with skin in the game.
About the Author
Nassim Nicholas Taleb is a distinguished professor of risk engineering at New York University Polytechnic School of Engineering and a distinguished research scholar at Said Business School at Oxford. He also wrote The Black Swan, Fooled by Randomness and The Bed of Procrustes.
