Antifragile is a standalone book in Nassim Nicholas Taleb's landmark
Incerto series, an investigation of opacity, luck, uncertainty,
probability, human error, risk, and decision-making in a world we don't
understand. The other books in the series are Fooled by Randomness, The
Black Swan, Skin in the Game, and The Bed of Procrustes.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the bestselling author of The Black Swan and
one of the foremost thinkers of our time, reveals how to thrive in an
uncertain world.
Just as human bones get stronger when subjected to stress and tension,
and rumors or riots intensify when someone tries to repress them, many
things in life benefit from stress, disorder, volatility, and turmoil.
What Taleb has identified and calls "antifragile" is that category of
things that not only gain from chaos but need it in order to survive and
flourish.
In The Black Swan, Taleb showed us that highly improbable and
unpredictable events underlie almost everything about our world. In
Antifragile, Taleb stands uncertainty on its head, making it
desirable, even necessary, and proposes that things be built in an
antifragile manner. The antifragile is beyond the resilient or robust.
The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets
better and better.
Furthermore, the antifragile is immune to prediction errors and
protected from adverse events. Why is the city-state better than the
nation-state, why is debt bad for you, and why is what we call
"efficient" not efficient at all? Why do government responses and social
policies protect the strong and hurt the weak? Why should you write your
resignation letter before even starting on the job? How did the sinking
of the Titanic save lives? The book spans innovation by trial and
error, life decisions, politics, urban planning, war, personal finance,
economic systems, and medicine. 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 loud and
clear.
Antifragile is a blueprint for living in a Black Swan world.
Erudite, witty, and iconoclastic, Taleb's message is revolutionary: The
antifragile, and only the antifragile, will make it.
Praise for Antifragile
"Ambitious and thought-provoking . . . highly entertaining."--The
Economist
"A bold book explaining how and why we should embrace uncertainty,
randomness, and error . . . It may just change our
lives."--Newsweek
