Book review: Antifragile - Things that Gain from Disorder (N. N. Taleb)
After a couple of let downs, I decided to give Taleb another shot—and I’m glad I did it.
Taleb’s writing matured like old wine. This book, his latest, weaves a cohesive narrative between all subjects he had previously written about, which revolve around the same theme:
“Some things benefit from shocks; they thrive and grow when exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder, and stressors and love adventure, risk, and uncertainty. Yet, in spite of the ubiquity of the phenomenon, there is no word for the exact opposite of fragile. Let us call it antifragile. Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better.”
Reading this book is like being invited by the author to meet the inner workings of his mind. And he sets forth his wisdom about life, the market, societies, systems, Stoicism, and even health, while circumventing the “academicized” standards of knowledge sharing (which, surprisingly to many, isn’t the only way to do so). Taleb actually adopts that stance of a bard, or a storyteller, or as he calls himself, a flâneur who stopped by the café to give his account of twenty years of meditations about how marvelously complex the world is. Of course there is also the well-known, but now moderately frequent, ramblings about journalists, scientists, managers, Harvard students, etc. But be warned: it’s not what you think. He’s got a point, and it’s most definitely not pseudoscience.
Totally worth the read.