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  • Published: 21 November 2012
  • ISBN: 9780718197902
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 544

Antifragile

Things that Gain from Disorder




A totally new idea - that some systems actually benefit from shocks, and how to expose ourselves to them

From the bestselling author of The Black Swan and one of the foremost thinkers of our time, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, a book on how to benefit from disorder.

In The Black Swan Taleb outlined a problem, and his revelatory new book Antifragile offers a definitive solution: how to live in a world that is unpredicatable, chaotic, and full of shocks, and how to thrive during periods of disaster. Taleb stands uncertainty on its head, making it desirable, even necessary, and proposes that things be built in an antifragile manner. For what Taleb calls the 'antifragile' is beyond the merely robust; it benefits from shocks, uncertainty and stressors. Antifragile is about what to do when we don't understand. It is a new word because it is a new concept.

Many of the greatest breakthroughs in human endeavour come from the innovation by trial and error that is part of antifragility. And some of the best systems we know of, including natural selection and evolution, have antifragility at their heart. How did the disaster of the sinking of the Titanic bring us closer to safety? Why does the stress on bones make us stronger? Why should you write a resignation letter on your first day in the office? Why should we detest the lack of accountability at the heart of capitalism?

The most successful of us, the most daring and creative will take advantage of disorder and invent new, more powerful opportunities and advantages beyond our expectations.

Irreverent and ambitious, Antifragile provides a blueprint for how to live-and thrive-in a world we don't understand, and which is too uncertain for us to even try to predict. Taleb's message is revolutionary: what is not antifragile will surely perish.

  • Published: 21 November 2012
  • ISBN: 9780718197902
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 544

About the author

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Nassim Nicholas Taleb has devoted his life to immersing himself in problems of luck, uncertainty, probability and knowledge. Part literary essayist, part empiricist, part no-nonsense mathematical trader, he is currently Dean's Professor in the Science of Uncertainty at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. His last book, the bestseller Fooled by Randomness, has been published in eighteen languages and was selected by Fortune magazine as one of "The Smartest Books of All Time". Taleb lives mostly in New York.

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Praise for Antifragile

Wall Street's principal dissident

Malcolm Gladwell

This] is the lesson of Taleb . . . and also the lesson of our volatile times. There is more courage and heroism in defying the human impulse, in taking the purposeful and painful steps to prepare for the unimaginable

Malcolm Gladwell

The hottest thinker in the world

Bryan Appleyard

A guru for every would-be Damien Hirst, George Soros and aspirant despot

John Cornwell, Sunday Times

A superhero of the mind

Boyd Tonkin

The most prophetic voice of all . . . Taleb is a genuinely significant philosopher . . . someone who is able to change the way we view the structure of the world through the strength, originality and veracity of his ideas alone

GQ

Changed my view of how the world works

Daniel Kahneman, Nobel Laureate