Copyright © 2012 by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
RANDOM HOUSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Taleb, Nassim.
Antifragile : things that gain from disorder / Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4000-6782-4
eISBN: 978-0-679-64527-6
1. Uncertainty (Information theory)—Social aspects. 2. Forecasting. 3. Complexity (Philosophy) I. Title.
Q375.T348 2012
155.2’4—dc23 2012028697
Cover design: Keenan
Cover Illustration: based on a photograph
© Malerapaso/iStockphoto
www.atrandom.com
v3.1
To Sarah Josephine Taleb
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter Summaries and Map
Prologue
APPENDIX: The Triad, or A Map of the World and Things Along the Three Properties
BOOK I: THE ANTIFRAGILE: AN INTRODUCTION
Chapter 1. Between Damocles and Hydra
Half of Life Has No Name
Please Behead Me
On the Necessity of Naming
Proto-Antifragility
Domain Independence Is Domain Dependent
Chapter 2. Overcompensation and Overreaction Everywhere
How to Win a Horse Race
Antifragile Responses as Redundancy
On the Antifragility of Riots, Love, and Other Unexpected Beneficiaries of Stress
Please Ban My Book: The Antifragility of Information
Get Another Job
Chapter 3. The Cat and the Washing Machine
The Complex
Stressors Are Information
Equilibrium, Not Again
Crimes Against Children
Punished by Translation
Touristification
The Secret Thirst for Chance
Chapter 4. What Kills Me Makes Others Stronger
Antifragility by Layers
Evolution and Unpredictability
Organisms Are Populations and Populations Are Organisms
Thank You, Errors
Learning from the Mistakes of Others
How to Become Mother Teresa
Why the Aggregate Hates the Individual
What Does Not Kill Me Kills Others
Me and Us
National Entrepreneur Day
BOOK II: MODERNITY AND THE DENIAL OF ANTIFRAGILITY
Chapter 5. The Souk and the Office Building
Two Types of Professions
Lenin in Zurich
Bottom-up Variations
Away from Extremistan
The Great Turkey Problem
Twelve Thousand Years
War, Prison, or Both
Pax Romana
War or No War
Chapter 6. Tell Them I Love (Some) Randomness
Hungry Donkeys
Political Annealing
That Time Bomb Called Stability
The Second Step: Do (Small) Wars Save Lives?
What to Tell the Foreign Policy Makers
What Do We Call Here Modernity?
Chapter 7. Naive Intervention
Intervention and Iatrogenics
First, Do No Harm
The Opposite of Iatrogenics
Iatrogenics in High Places
Can a Whale Fly Like an Eagle?
Not Doing Nothing
Non-Naive Interventionism
In Praise of Procrastination—the Fabian Kind
Neuroticism in Industrial Proportions
A Legal Way to Kill People
Media-Driven Neuroticism
The State Can Help—When Incompetent
France Is Messier than You Think
Sweden and the Large State
Catalyst-as-Cause Confusion
Chapter 8. Prediction as a Child of Modernity
Ms. Bré Has Competitors
The Predictive
Plus or Minus Bad Teeth
The Idea of Becoming a Non-Turkey
No More Black Swans
BOOK III: A NONPREDICTIVE VIEW OF THE WORLD
Chapter 9. Fat Tony and the Fragilistas
Indolent Fellow Travelers
The Importance of Lunch
The Antifragility of Libraries
On Suckers and Nonsuckers
Loneliness
What the Nonpredictor Can Predict
Chapter 10. Seneca’s Upside and Downside
Is This Really Serious?
Less Downside from Life
Stoicism’s Emotional Robustification
The Domestication of Emotions
How to Become the Master
The Foundational Asymmetry
Chapter 11. Never Marry the Rock Star
On the Irreversibility of Broken Packages
Seneca’s Barbell
The Accountant and the Rock Star
Away from the Golden Middle
The Domestication of Uncertainty
BOOK IV: OPTIONALITY, TECHNOLOGY, AND THE INTELLIGENCE OF ANTIFRAGILITY
Do You Really Know Where You Are Going?
The Teleological Fallacy
America’s Principal Asset
Chapter 12. Thales’ Sweet Grapes
Option and Asymmetry
The Options of Sweet Grapes
Saturday Evening in London
Your Rent
Asymmetry
Things That Like Dispersion
The Thalesian and the Aristotelian
How to Be Stupid
Nature and Options
The Rationality
Life Is Long Gamma
Roman Politics Likes Optionality
Next
Chapter 13. Lecturing Birds on How to Fly
Once More, Less Is More
Mind the Gaps
Search and How Errors Can Be Investments
Creative and Uncreative Destructions
The Soviet-Harvard Department of Ornithology
Epiphenomena
Greed as a Cause
Debunking Epiphenomena
Cherry-picking (or the Fallacy of Confirmation)
Chapter 14. When Two Things Are Not the “Same Thing”
Where Are the Stressors?
L’Art pour l’Art, to Learn for Learning’s Sake
Polished Dinner Partners
The Green Lumber Fallacy
How Fat Tony Got Rich (and Fat)
Conflation
Prometheus and Epimetheus
Chapter 15. History Written by the Losers
The Evidence Staring at Us
Is It Like Cooking?
The Industrial Revolution
Governments Should Spend on Nonteleological Tinkering, Not Research
The Case in Medicine
Matt Ridley’s Anti-Teleological Argument
Corporate Teleology
The Inverse Turkey Problem
To Fail Seven Times, Plus or Minus Two
The Charlatan, the Academic, and the Showman
Chapter 16. A Lesson in Disorder
The Ecological and the Ludic
The Touristification of the Soccer Mom
An Antifragile (Barbell) Education
Chapter 17. Fat
Tony Debates Socrates
Euthyphro
Fat Tony Versus Socrates
Primacy of Definitional Knowledge
Mistaking the Unintelligible for the Unintelligent
Tradition
The Sucker-Nonsucker Distinction
Fragility, Not Probability
Conflation of Events and Exposure
Conclusion to Book IV
What Will Happen Next?
BOOK V: THE NONLINEAR AND THE NONLINEAR
On the Importance of Attics
Chapter 18. On the Difference Between a Large Stone and a Thousand Pebbles
A Simple Rule to Detect the Fragile
Why Is Fragility Nonlinear?
When to Smile and When to Frown
Why Is the Concave Hurt by Black Swan Events?
Traffic in New York
Someone Call New York City Officials
Where More Is Different
A “Balanced Meal”
Run, Don’t Walk
Small May Be Ugly, It Is Certainly Less Fragile
How to Be Squeezed
Kerviel and Micro-Kerviel
How to Exit a Movie Theater
Projects and Prediction
Why Planes Don’t Arrive Early
Wars, Deficits, and Deficits
Where the “Efficient” Is Not Efficient
Pollution and Harm to the Planet
The Nonlinearity of Wealth
Conclusion
Chapter 19. The Philosopher’s Stone and Its Inverse
How to Detect Who Will Go Bust
The Idea of Positive and Negative Model Error
How to Lose a Grandmother
Now the Philosopher’s Stone
How to Transform Gold into Mud: The Inverse Philosopher’s Stone
BOOK VI: VIA NEGATIVA
Where Is the Charlatan?
Subtractive Knowledge
Barbells, Again
Less Is More
Chapter 20. Time and Fragility
From Simonides to Jensen
Learning to Subtract
Technology at Its Best
To Age in Reverse: The Lindy Effect
A Few Mental Biases
Neomania and Treadmill Effects
Architecture and the Irreversible Neomania
Wall to Wall Windows
Metrification
Turning Science into Journalism
What Should Break
Prophets and the Present
Empedocles’ Dog
What Does Not Make Sense
Chapter 21. Medicine, Convexity, and Opacity
How to Argue in an Emergency Room
First Principle of Iatrogenics (Empiricism)
Second Principle of Iatrogenics (Nonlinearity in Response)
Jensen’s Inequality in Medicine
Burying the Evidence
The Never-ending History of Turkey Situations
Nature’s Opaque Logic
Guilty or Innocent
Plead Ignorance of Biology: Phenomenology
The Ancients Were More Caustic
How to Medicate Half the Population
The “Rigor of Mathematics” in Medicine
Next
Chapter 22. To Live Long, but Not Too Long
Life Expectancy and Convexity
Subtraction Adds to Your Life
The Iatrogenics of Money
Religion and Naive Interventionism
If It’s Wednesday, I Must Be Vegan
Convexity Effects and Random Nutrition
How to Eat Yourself
Walk-Deprived
I Want to Live Forever
BOOK VII: THE ETHICS OF FRAGILITY AND ANTIFRAGILITY
Chapter 23. Skin in the Game: Antifragility and Optionality at the Expense of Others
Hammurabi
The Talker’s Free Option
Postdicting
The Stiglitz Syndrome
The Problem of Frequency, or How to Lose Arguments
The Right Decision for the Wrong Reason
The Ancients and the Stiglitz Syndrome
To Burn One’s Vessels
How Poetry Can Kill You
The Problem of Insulation
Champagne Socialism
Soul in the Game
Options, Antifragility, and Social Fairness
The Robert Rubin Free Option
Which Adam Smith?
The Antifragility and Ethics of (Large) Corporations
Artisans, Marketing, and the Cheapest to Deliver
Lawrence of Arabia or Meyer Lansky
Next
Chapter 24. Fitting Ethics to a Profession
Wealth Without Independence
The Professionals and the Collective
The Ethical and the Legal
Casuistry as Optionality
Big Data and the Researcher’s Option
The Tyranny of the Collective
Chapter 25. Conclusion
Epilogue
Glossary
Appendix I
Appendix II
Additional Notes, Afterthoughts, and Further Reading
Bibliography
Acknowledgments
Other Books by This Author
About the Author
Chapter Summaries and Map
Boldface terms are in the Glossary.
BOOK I: THE ANTIFRAGILE: AN INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER 1. Explains how we missed the word “antifragility” in classrooms. Fragile-Robust-Antifragile as Damocles-Phoenix-Hydra. Domain dependence.
CHAPTER 2. Where we find overcompensation. Obsessive love is the most antifragile thing outside of economics.
CHAPTER 3. The difference between the organic and the engineered. Touristification and attempts to suck volatility out of life.
CHAPTER 4. The antifragility of the whole often depends on the fragility of the parts. Why death is a necessity for life. The benefits of errors for the collective. Why we need risk takers. A few remarks about modernity missing the point. A salute to the entrepreneur and risk taker.
BOOK II: MODERNITY AND THE DENIAL OF ANTIFRAGILITY
THE PROCRUSTEAN BED
CHAPTER 5. Two different randomness categories, seen through the profiles of two brothers. How Switzerland is not controlled from above. The difference between Mediocristan and Extremistan. The virtues of city-states, bottom-up political systems, and the stabilizing effect of municipal noise.
CHAPTER 6. Systems that like randomness. Annealing inside and outside physics. Explains the effect of overstabilizing organisms and complex systems (political, economic, etc.). The defects of intellectualism. U.S. foreign policy, and pseudostabilization.
CHAPTER 7. An introduction to naive intervention and iatrogenics, the most neglected product of modernity. Noise and signal and overintervening from noise.
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