Paul Adams - Summary of Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder

Summary

of

Antifragile

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Conversation Starters

By Paul Adams

Book Habits

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T ips for Using Conversation Starters:

EVERY GOOD BOOK CONTAINS A WORLD FAR DEEPER THAN the surface of its pages. Questions herein are designed to bring us beneath the surface of the page and invite us into the world that lives on. These questions can be used to:

• Foster a deeper understanding of the book
• Promote an atmosphere of discussion for groups
• Assist in the study of the book, either individually or corporately
• Explore unseen realms of the book as never seen before

Introducing Antifragile

I

n 2012, Nassim Nicholas Taleb released his bestselling book Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder. This book is part of the Incerto series. In this series, Taleb writes about managing uncertainties and risks. Prior to Antifragile, Taleb released the first three books in the series entitled Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets in 2001, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable in 2007 and The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms in 2010. In 2018, Antifragile was succeeded by Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life .

Talebs introduction to the book says that some benefit from shocks. They thrive when exposed to randomness, disorder, volatility and stressors. Because of these, they grow. These people love risk, adventure and uncertainty. However, even if the phenomenon in ubiquitous, there is no word created for describing the exact opposite of being fragile. Hence, Taleb called it antifragile. The definition of antifragility goes beyond robustness or resilience. The resilient resists the shocks when he or she encounters them. The antifragile grows and gets better when he or she encounter shocks. This phenomenon has been around in the field of medicine. For example, Wolffs law is about how human bones grow stronger when they need to carry external load. Hormesis is a good example of mild antifragility. This happens when the stressor is a substance thats poisonous to the body.

The antifragile becomes better and grows overall from a small dose of that particular stressor. Taleb emphasizes that antifragility is different from resilience and robustness. In the sense that the antifragile does not only withstand stressors but also improves with and grows through stressors. It does not matter whether the stressors are too large or too small. Just like human bones get stronger when subjected to tension and stress, rumors and riots intensify when repressed. Many things in this life benefit from disorder, volatility, stress and turmoil.

According to Taleb, the larger point of antifragility is that depriving people of the vital stressors is not necessarily a beneficial thing. It can be downright harmful to the people deprived of these stressors. Taleb technically defines antifragility as a beneficial nonlinear response. Quite simply, antifragility is defined as the convex response to a source of harm with varied ranges and other forms of stressors. This leads to a positive sensitivity to an increase in the varied forms of disorder cluster. Disorder cluster is how Taleb categorizes volatility, stress, variability, uncertainty and dispersion of outcomes. Likewise, Taleb defines fragility as a concave sensitivity to different stressors. This leads to a negative sensitivity to an increase in volatility. The relation between sensitivity, fragility, convexity to disorder can be mathematically calculated by theorem. This cannot be derived from mining empirical data or historical narratives.

Taleb further explains, as the book progresses, in great depth the domain of fragility and the opposing domain of the antifragile. This shows how to detect fragility, measure it, and transform it. The recurring themes that appear throughout the book include the phenomenon of Via Negativa, Skin in the Game, Lindy Effect, the Green Lumber Fallacy and Barbell Strategy .

In his book The Black Swan , Taleb explained that everything about the world we live in is based on highly unpredictable and improbable events. In Antifragile , Taleb defeats the fear of uncertainty and makes it necessary and even desirable to the growth of humans. He proposes that things should be built in an antifragile manner. He says that the antifragile grows to be immune to prediction errors and protected from events that are adverse. He answers random questions that proves that antifragility is the way to go.

Some of these are: Why are the governments social policies only protect the strong but hurt the weak? Why its good to write your resignation letter even before starting your first day on the job? How did the tragedy of the sinking of the Titanic actually save lives? Why the city-state is actually much better than the nation-state? Why is debt very bad for you? Why efficient is not efficient at all? Antifragile spans through innovations through trial and error, politics, life decisions, war, urban planning, economic systems, personal finance, medicine and more. Throughout the book, he adds the voices of ancient wisdom from the Greek, Roman, Seminitc and medieval sources. Added to that, he gives the street wisdom of the famous Fat Tony of Brooklyn. Antifragile is a manual for living in a Black Swan world.