Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (Incerto, #4)

by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better. This

antifragility determines the boundary between what is living and organic (or complex),

By grasping the mechanisms of antifragility we can build a systematic and broad guide to nonpredictive decision making under uncertainty

Fragility can be measured; risk is not measurable

I’ll be interested to see why and how this is true.

This provides a solution to what I’ve called the Black Swan problem—the impossibility of calculating the risks of consequential rare events and predicting their occurrence.

And we can almost always detect antifragility (and fragility) using a simple test of asymmetry: anything that has more upside than downside from random events (or certain shocks) is antifragile; the reverse is fragile.

Which brings us to the largest fragilizer of society, and greatest generator of crises, absence of “skin in the game.”

At no point in history have so many non-risk-takers, that is, those with no personal exposure, exerted so much control. The chief ethical rule is the following: Thou shalt not have antifragility at the expense of the fragility of others.

You get pseudo-order when you seek order; you only get a measure of order and control when you embrace randomness.

the illusion I call lecturing birds how to fly.

Pithy

The fragilista falls for the Soviet-Harvard delusion, the (unscientific) overestimation of the reach of scientific knowledge.