I'll admit it - I cheated and skimmed the last third or so. I have some criticism (for one, I found a great deal of the content repetitive), but Mr. Taleb has earned my respect nonetheless. Perhaps he'll be glad I gave up on reading this, since he strongly advocates pursuing one's personal interests. In my case, I am primarily a reader (and on rare occasion, writer) of fiction. As advised, I need to get more 'skin in the game', and I think repurposing the time I would have spent reading this book is a start.

Non-fiction of this sort tends to register as 'real life', which I prefer to experience first-hand. Anecdotes and case studies have more impact when you're the one sharing them, no? At least, if you're in the habit of analysing them to bits with every retelling. Being the sole owner of the experience, you are entitled to use your experiences as you see fit. I think Mr. Taleb made this point as well.

In reading this book, I learned that I was probably not the target audience. While I won't go so far as to call myself enlightened, I agreed with many of the points made. It made me feel somewhat uneasy. Being repeatedly persuaded to abide by my own personal philosophy, as though I'd forgotten who I was as a person.

No rating, since to rate something I did not give my full attention to would be unfair.

I half like the book and yet also found a lot of it petty, griping and meandering from thought to notion without much of either. This is not a book to be taken as a whole, dip and dive but it is for the most part fluff.

In the book there is an anecdote of a student asking about what to read to which he replies along the lines of read nothing that's more recent than five years about anything more recent than twenty years ago. I forgot the exact range he supposedly suggested but this book immediately fails his own advice. Come back to it in another few years.

Real review at some point but, short version: Taleb describes systems that get stronger from volatility and mistreatment ("to a point"), and compares them with our tendency to plan and predict and generally design systems that break down when things don't go according to plan. There is a lot of insightful stuff in here, and some excellent unconventional thinking, and/but his writing style is a bit glib and can get in the way of his point being made. Sometimes.

This was a fascinating non-fiction read about a philosophy of antifragility.
(What is the opposite of fragile? Robust, strong, resilient all fall short . . .ergo . . .antifragile)

The author/philosopher/teacher is a big believer in antifragility, and the book is spent explaining what it means in different contexts.

I liked it, but did not love it. Also, heads up, you need to turn the ol' brain on to keep up with this guy.

After reading and enjoying Taleb's book The Black Swan, I thought that I would similarly enjoy this book. While the book did contain many interesting overarching ideas, I found myself struggling to get through it especially towards the end. One of the main detractions for me while reading is the propensity for the author to create an excessive amount of words/metaphors that tend to detract rather than enhance understanding, e.g. neomania, ephinomonea, green lumbar fallacy, barbell strategy. I was constantly having to try and search through the glossary of terms to remind myself of what these self-created terms were meant to represent. In the end this book left me more frustrated and confused when I closed it rather than thought provoking.

Interesting concepts backed by evidence. I want to read it again. My favorite chapter is Via Negativa

I'm giving this book 5 stars because it caused a fundamental change in the way I think. It's a really cool philosophy book actually. There are a lot of gems in here on health, nature, science, investing and ethics. I'll surely go back to it.

My key take-away is best summarised in a quote from the book: "Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better."

This was not an easy book to read though. The author is quite the intellectual with a very deep knowledge of history and math. I had to look up stuff to understand what's in the book. Be warned and enjoy!

I definitely appreciate having this concept of antifragility brought to light with a term for it. I found that the book was dense and the cadence threw me off a bit and it was challenging for me to keep a consistent pace--I'd be paying attention but then something in the writing would change and then I'd start thinking about other things and would need to re-read the sentence/paragraph. Ironically, that happened somewhat consistently. I did appreciate his humor at times, and the accompanying examples he gave to illustrate his arguments.

Book coincidences:
- mention’s Swann’s Way or La recherché and I’m currently reading it
- mentions Vladimir Navokov and I recently read Lolita

“Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better. This property is behind everything that has changed with time: evolution, culture, ideas, revolutions, political systems, technological innovation, cultural and economic success, corporate survival, good recipes (say, chicken soup or steak tartare with a drop of cognac), the rise of cities, cultures, legal systems, equatorial forests, bacterial resistance … even our own existence as a species on this planet. And antifragility determines the boundary between what is living and organic (or complex), say, the human body, and what is inert, say, a physical object like the stapler on your desk.” pg. 3

“We have been unconsciously exploiting antifragility in practical life and, consciously, rejecting it—particularly in intellectual life.” pg. 9

“In short, the fragilista (medical, economic, social planning) is one who makes you engage in policies and actions, all artificial, in which the benefits are small and visible, and the side effects potentially severe and invisible.” pg. 10

“There is the medical fragilista who overintervenes in denying the body’s natural ability to heal and gives you medications with potentially very severe side effects; the policy fragilista (the interventionist social planner) who mistakes the economy for a washing machine that continuously needs fixing (by him) and blows it up; the psychiatric fragilista who medicates children to ‘improve’ their intellectual and emotional life; the soccer-mom fragilista; the financial fragilista who makes people use ‘risk’ models that destroy the banking system (then uses them again); the military fragilista who disturbs complex systems; the predictor fragilista who encourages you to take more risks; and many more.” pg. 10

“Why item (ix), time? Time is functionally similar to volatility: the more time, the more events, the more disorder. Consider that if you can suffer limited harm and are antifragile to small errors, time brings the kind of errors or reverse errors that end up benefiting you. This is simply what your grandmother calls experience. The fragile breaks with time.” pg. 13

“Only distilled ideas, ones that sit in us for a long time, are acceptable—and those that come from reality.” pg. 15

“If you see fraud and do not say fraud, you are a fraud.
Just as being nice to the arrogant is no better than being arrogant toward the nice, being accommodating toward anyone committing a nefarious action condones it.” pg. 15

“We are all, in a way, similarly handicapped, unable to recognize the same idea when it is presented in a different context. It is as if we are doomed to be deceived by the most superficial part of things, the packaging, the gift wrapping. This is why we don’t see antifragility in places that are obvious, too obvious. It is not part of the accepted way of thinking about success, economic growth, or innovation that these may result only from overcompensation against stressors. Nor do we see this overcompensation at work elsewhere. (And domain dependence is always why it has been difficult for many researchers to realize that uncertainty, incomplete understanding, disorder, and volatility are members of the same close family.)
This lack of translation is a mental handicap that comes with being human; and we will only start to attain wisdom or rationality when we make an effort to overcome and break through it.” pg. 39-40

“The world as a whole has never been richer, and it has never been more heavily in debt, living off borrowed money. The record shows that, for society, the richer we become, the harder it gets to live within our means. Abundance is harder for us to handle than scarcity.” pg. 42

“It is said that the best horses lose when they compete with slower ones, and win against better rivals. Undercompensation from the absence of a stressor, inverse hormesis, absence of challenge, degrades the best of the best. . .
This mechanism of overcompensation hides in the most unlikely places. If tired after an intercontinental flight, go to the gym for some exertion instead of resting. Also, it is a well-known trick that if you need something urgently done, give the task to the busiest (or second busiest) person in the office. Most humans manage to squander their free time, as free time makes them dysfunctional, lazy, and unmotivated—the busier they get, the more active they are at other tasks. Overcompensation, here again.” pg. 43

“Like tormenting love, some thoughts are so antifragile that you feed them by trying to get rid of them, turning them into obsessions. Psychologists have shown the irony of the process of thought control: the more energy you put into trying to control your ideas and what you think about, the more your ideas end up controlling you.” pg. 49

“Our antifragilities have conditions. The frequency of stressors matters a bit. Humans tend to do better with acute than with chronic stressors, particularly when the former are followed by ample time for recovery, which allows the stressors to do their jobs as messengers.” pg. 58

“Finally, an environment with variability (hence randomness) does not expose us to chronic stress injury, unlike human-designed systems. If you walk on uneven, not man-made terrain, no two steps will ver be identical—compare that to the randomness-free gym machine offering the exact opposite: forcing you into endless repetitions of the very same movement.
Much of modern life is preventable chronic stress injury.” pg. 64

“So some parts on the inside of a system may be required to be fragile in order to make the system antifragile as a result. Or the organism itself might be fragile, but the information encoded in the genes reproducing it will be antifragile. The point is not trivial, as it is behind the logic of evolution.” pg. 66

“For the antifragile, harm from errors should be less than the benefits. We are talking about some, not all errors, of course; those that do not destroy a system help prevent larger calamities. The engineer and historian of engineering Henry Petroski presents a very elegant point. Had the Titanic not had that famous accident, as fatal as it was, we would have kept building larger and larger ocean liners and the next disaster would have been even more tragic. So the people who perished were sacrificed for the greater good; they unarguably saved more lives than were lost. The story of the Titanic illustrates the difference between gains for the system and harm to some of its individual parts.” pg. 72

“Further, my characterization of a loser is someone who, after making a mistake, doesn’t introspect, doesn’t exploit it, feels embarrassed and defensive rather than enriched with a new piece of information, and tries to explain why he made the mistake rather than moving on. These types often consider themselves the ‘victims’ of some large plot, a bad boss, or bad weather.” pg. 74

“For the economy to be antifragile and undergo what is called evolution, every single individual business must necessarily be fragile, exposed to breaking—evolution needs organisms (or their genes) to die when supplanted by others, in order to achieve improvement, or to avoid reproduction when they are not as fit as someone else. Accordingly, the antifragility of the higher level may require the fragility—and sacrifice—of the lower one. Every time you use a coffeemaker for your morning cappuccino, you are benefiting from the fragility of the coffeemaking entrepreneur who failed. He failed in order to help put the superior merchandise on your kitchen counter.” pg. 74-75

“We can also see from the turkey story the mother of all harmful mistakes: mistaking absence of evidence (of harm) for evidence of absence, a mistake that we will see tends to prevail in intellectual circles and one that is grounded in the social sciences.” pg. 93

“Unfortunately, you cannot randomize a political party out of existence. What is plaguing us in the United States is not the two-party system, but being stuck with the same two parties. Parties don’t have organic built-in expiration dates.” pg. 104

“To sum up, anything in which there is naive interventionism, nay, even just intervention, will have iatrogenics.” pg. 113

“While we now have a word for causing harm while trying to help, we don’t have a designation for the opposite situation, that of someone who ends up helping while trying to cause harm. Just remember that attacking the antifragile will backfire. For instance, hackers make systems stronger. Or as in the case of Ayn Rand, obsessive and intense critics help a book spread.” pg. 113

“Perhaps the idea behind capitalism is an inverse-iatrogenic effect, the unintended-but-not-so-unintended consequences: the system facilitates the conversion of selfish aim (or, to be correct, not necessarily benevolent ones) at the individual level into beneficial results for the collective.” pg. 114

“Let me warn against misinterpreting the message here. The argument is not against the notion of intervention; in fact I showed above that I am equally worried about under intervention when it is truly necessary. I am just warning against naive intervention and lack of awareness and acceptance of harm done by it.” pg. 119

“Here, all I am saying is that we need to avoid being blind to the natural antifragility of systems, their ability to take care of themselves, and fight our tendency to harm and fragile them by not giving them a chance to do so.” pg. 119

“Few understand that procrastination is our natural defense, letting things take care of themselves and exercise their antifragility; it results from some ecological or naturalistic wisdom, and is not always bad—at an existential level, it is my body rebelling against its entrapment. It is my soul fighting the Procrustean bed of modernity. Granted, in the modern world, my tax return is not going to take care of itself—but by delaying a non-vital visit to a doctor, or deferring the writing of a passage until my body tells me that I am ready for it, I may be using a very potent naturalistic filter. I write only if I feel like it and only on a subject I feel like writing about—and the reader is no fool. So I use procrastination as a message from my inner self and my deep evolutionary past to resist interventionism in my writing. Yet some psychologists and behavioral economists seem to think that procrastination is a disease to be remedied and cured.” pg. 122

“Since procrastination is a message from our natural willpower via low motivation, the cure is changing the environment, or one’s profession, by selecting one in which one does not have to fight one’s impulses. Few can grasp the logical consequence that, instead, one should lead a life in which procrastination is good, as a naturalistic-risk-based form of decision making.” pg. 123

“There is another dimension to the need to focus on actions and avoid words: the health-eroding dependence on external recognition. People are cruel and unfair in the way they confer recognition, so it is best to stay out of that game. Stay robust to how others treat you.” pg. 148

“You can’t predict in general, but you can predict that those who rely on predictions are taking more risks, will have some trouble, perhaps even go bust. Why? Someone who predicts will be fragile to prediction errors. An overconfident pilot will eventually crash the plane. And numerical prediction leads people to take more risks.” pg. 150

“Stoicism, seen this way, becomes pure robustness—for the attainment of a state of immunity from one’s external circumstances, good or bad, and an absence of fragility to decisions made by fate, is robustness. Random events won’t affect us either way (we are too strong to lose, and not greedy to enjoy the upside), so we stay in the middle column of the Triad.” pg. 153

“An intelligent life is all about such emotional positioning to eliminate the sting of harm, which as we saw is done by mentally writing off belongings so one does not feel any pain from losses. The volatility of the world no longer affects you negatively.” pg. 156

“So he [Seneca] played a trick on fate: kept the good and ditched the bad; cut the downside and kept the upside. Self-servingly, that is, by eliminating the harm from fate and un-philosophically keeping the upside. This cost-benefit analysis is not quite Stoicism in the way people understand the meaning of Stoicism (people who study Stoicism seem to want Seneca and other Stoics to think like those who study Stoicism). There is an upside-downside asymmetry.
That’s antifragility in its purest form.” pg. 157

“Fragility implies more to lose than to gain, equals more downside than upside, equals (unfavorable) asymmetry.
Antifragility implies more to gain than to lose, equals more upside than downside, equals (favorable) asymmetry.” pg. 158

“One finds similar ideas in ancestral lore: it is explained in a Yiddish proverb that says ‘Provide for the worst; the best can take care of itself.’ This may sound like a platitude, but it is not: just observe how people tend to provide for the best and hope that the worst will take care of itself. We have ample evidence that people are averse to small losses, but not so much toward very large Black Swan risks (which they underestimate), since they tend to insure for small probable losses, but not large infrequent ones. Exactly backwards.” pg. 163

“The barbell businessman-scholar situation was ideal; after three or four in the afternoon, when I left the office, my day job ceased to exist until the next day and I was completely free to pursue what I found most valuable and interesting. When I tried to become an academic I felt like a prisoner, forced to follow others’ less rigorous, self-promotional programs.” pg. 144

“The strength of the computer entrepreneur Steve Jobs was precisely in distrusting market research and focus groups—those based on asking people what they want—and following his own imagination. His modus was that people don’t know what they want until you provide them with it.” pg. 171

Book: borrowed from SSF Main Library. Read as part of Compology's book club.