The author of The Black Swan appears to have something equally powerful, and related, in his concept of “antifragility.” What is fragile, Taleb writes, succumbs to shocks. What is robust resists shocks. What is antifragile learns from shocks.

Organizations, especially large ones, crave order and predictability and exert their considerable powers to ensure stability. But by suppressing the impact of small shocks they make themselves vulnerable to large shocks, which are inevitable. Their fragility is self-inflicted. By contrast, entities allowed (or designed) to feed on disorder prosper in an increasingly disorderly world. Often they have bottom-up features that live close to the small shocks and adapt locally and quickly. Thus city governments are far more antifragile than national governments (except highly distributed ones like Switzerland).

Likewise with systems. Most restaurants fail, Taleb points out, but in their intensely competitive, relatively unregulated market, the result is that restaurants keep getting better. The system learns. The opposite applies to the over-regulated system of banks, where any failure jeopardizes all. The system is fragile, and when it fails, it fails big. (Taleb enjoyed making a great deal of money out of the financial crisis of 2008, which he had anticipated with private investment as well as public warnings. His view of ethics is that all advisors, leaders, managers, and philosophers must have skin in the game: they must take the same risks they encourage on others. Otherwise they don’t learn, and they are frauds.)

Taleb deems himself a philosopher in the tradition of the ancients of Greece and Rome, especially the Stoics, who made themselves indifferent to disaster yet open to success. They cultivated a kind of asymmetry which made sure that losses were inconsequential while gains could on occasion be very large. Much of the book is devoted to analyzing how advantageous asymmetry works.

Grand theories, what Taleb calls “narratives,” can be dangerously blinding, because they overlook everything that is not understood, which is where the juicy surprises come from. Real-world practitioners like pit traders can seem profoundly ignorant, but what they are in reality is profoundly tuned to the nuances and mysteries of their practice. Like the great engineers, they don’t write books. History (most of it) is written by the losers, by the theorists, who only write books. Evolution, the most antifragile system of all, has no theory of itself.

Nassim Taleb is fun to read, highly personal, in your face, inviting argument at every level from his choice of terminology to his choice of wine.

–Stewart Brand

Inside The Book

Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better.… Antifragility has a singular property of allowing us to deal with the unknown, to do things without understanding them—and do them well.… By grasping the mechanisms of antifragility we can build a systematic and broad guide to nonpredictive decision making under uncertainty in business, politics, medicine, and life in general.

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Time is functionally similar to volatility: the more time, the more events, the more disorder.… The fragile breaks with time.

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Tonight I will be meeting friends in a restaurant (tavernas have existed for at least twenty-five centuries). I will be walking there wearing shoes hardly different from those worn fifty-three hundred years ago by the mummified man discovered in a glacier in the Austrian Alps. At the restaurant, I will be using silverware, a Mesopotamian technology, which qualifies as a “killer application” given what it allows me to do to the leg of lamb, such as tear it apart while sparing my fingers from burns. I will be drinking wine, a liquid that has been in use for at least six millennia. The wine will be poured into glasses, an innovation claimed by my Lebanese compatriots to come from their Phoenician ancestors, and if you disagree about the source, we can say that glass objects have been sold by them as trinkets for at least twenty-nine hundred years. After the main course, I will have a somewhat younger technology, artisanal cheese, paying higher prices for those that have not changed in their preparation for several centuries.

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If a book has been in print for forty years, I can expect it to be in print for another forty years. But, and that is the main difference, if it survives another decade, then it will be expected to be in print another fifty years. This, simply, as a rule, tells you why things that have been around for a long time are not “aging” like persons, but “aging” in reverse. Every year that passes without extinction increases the additional life expectancy.

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We notice what varies and changes more than what plays a large role but doesn’t change. We rely more on water than on cell phones but because water does not change and cell phones do, we are prone to thinking that cell phones play a larger role than they do.

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Rational flâneur: Someone who, unlike a tourist, makes a decision opportunistically at every step to revise his schedule (or his destination) so he can imbibe things based on new information obtained. In research and entrepreneurship, being a flâneur is called “looking for optionality.” A non-narrative approach to life.

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