Antifragile: How to Benefit from Chaos and Disorder

Pete Baikins: I enjoyed reading this book and am looking forward to applying the thinking from it to my life.

United Kingdom on Dec 05, 2023

: Probably the book that influenced my thinking the most. Incredibly concrete, engaging, and useful.

It should be required reading in high school, in my opinion.

Italy on Jul 22, 2023

Evgeny Vasyuk: À mon avis, c'est le meilleur livre de Taleb.

France on Jun 30, 2023

A Amarender Reddy: Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder by Nassim Nicholas Taleb is a thought-provoking and insightful book that challenges readers to rethink their assumptions about risk, uncertainty, and resilience. Taleb is a renowned thinker and writer, and his ideas have had a significant impact on fields as diverse as finance, economics, and philosophy.
The concept of antifragility, as introduced by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his book "Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder", describes systems or entities that not only withstand stress, shocks, and uncertainty, but actually thrive and improve as a result. Antifragility is the opposite of fragility, where a system or entity is vulnerable to damage or collapse under stress, shocks, and uncertainty.

Antifragile systems are characterized by their ability to adapt and learn from mistakes, to use variability and randomness to their advantage, and to improve through exposure to stressors. These systems are not only resilient, but they actively seek out and benefit from disruption and disorder.

Taleb argues that antifragility is an essential characteristic for survival and success in complex and unpredictable environments....

India on May 05, 2023

John Walker: This book is volume three in the author's  Incerto  series, following  Fooled by Randomness  and  The Black Swan . It continues to explore the themes of randomness, risk, and the design of systems: physical, economic, financial, and social, which perform well in the face of uncertainty and infrequent events with large consequences. He begins by posing the deceptively simple question, “What is the antonym of ‘fragile’?”

After thinking for a few moments, most people will answer with “robust” or one of its synonyms such as “sturdy”, “tough”, or “rugged”. But think about it a bit more: does a robust object or system actually behave in the opposite way to a fragile one? Consider a teacup made of fine china. It is fragile—if subjected to more than a very limited amount of force or acceleration, it will smash into bits. It is fragile because application of such an external stimulus, for example by dropping it on the floor, will dramatically degrade its value for the purposes for which it was created (you can't drink tea from a handful of sherds, and they don't look good sitting on the shelf). Now consider a teacup made of...

United States on Dec 16, 2019

Geoff: I have read both Black Swan and Fooled by Randomness by Taleb however it was some time ago and being a fan I was eager to read this, the fourth Incerto book. It did not disappoint despite taking me a far longer time to finish than I had expected.

The concept of Fragility and Anti-Fragility is presented excellently here. I had never really considered how they exist in our every day lives but now see that far more clearly. It is in a contemplative state, while reading this book, that caused me to evaluate a lot of what Taleb has presented and even try to understand how he comes about with his statements and conclusions. This is the reason for the long reading time. At the end of the book Taleb offers technical overviews to his ideas and references to look into to follow-up on the ideas. Unfortunately, I am not technical enough to be able to fully comprehend the calculations he shows but I do have a desire to do so and may use this inspiration to further my understanding of Statistics so I can follow-up.

What I took away from this book is that in life you need to make yourself Antifragile. To do so you must prepare for volatility by not being so fixated on a current...

Canada on Jul 06, 2019

Herve Lebret: Here's probably one of the toughest review I ever had to write and I am not sure it is a good one, even if the topic I am addressing is great and important. But it's been a challenge to summarize what I learnt: Nicholas Nassim Taleb gives in this follow-up to the Black Swan a very interesting analysis of how the world can be less exposed to Black Swans, not by becoming more robust only, but by becoming antifragile, i.e. by benefiting from random events. His views include tensions between the individual and the groups, how distributed systems are more robust than centralized ones, how small unites are less fragile than big ones. This does not mean Taleb is against orgamizations, governments or laws as too little intervention induces totally messy situations. It is about putting the cursor at the right level. Switzerland represents for Taleb a good illustration of good state organizations with little central government, a lot of local responsibility. He has similar analogies for the work place, where he explains that an independent worker, who knows well his market, is less fragile to crises than big corporations and their employees. One way to make systems less fragile is to put...

United States on Jan 22, 2013