Book description
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, many things in life benefit from stress, disorder,
volatility, and turmoil. What Taleb has identified and calls
antifragile are 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. Here
Taleb stands uncer tainty on its head, making it desirable, even
necessary. The antifragile is beyond the resilient or robust. The
resil ient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets
better and better.
What's more, 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 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,
drawing on modern street wisdom and ancient sources.
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.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb has devoted his life to problems of
uncertainty, probability, and knowledge and has led three careers
around this focus, as a businessman-trader, a philosophical essayist,
and an academic researcher. Although he now spends most of his time
working in intense seclusion in his study, in the manner of
independent scholars, he is currently Distinguished Professor of Risk
Engineering at New York University's Polytechnic Institute. His main
subject matter is "decision making under opacity," that is,
a map and a protocol on how we should live in a world we don't understand.
His books Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan have been
published in thirty-three languages.
Taleb believes that prizes, honorary degrees, awards, and
ceremonialism debase knowledge by turning it into a spectator sport.
