Rating Qualities

8
Eye Opening
Innovative

Antifragile
Things That Gain from Disorder
Nassim Nicholas Taleb | Random House, Inc. © 2012

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 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.

Review

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

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 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

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 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.

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

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 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.

This document is restricted to the personal use of Keith Liu (keith.liu@orange.com)

getAbstract maintains complete editorial responsibility for all parts of this review. All rights reserved. No part of this review may be reproduced or
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