Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder

This may be one of the best books I have ever read. Certainly one of the best books I have read in a long time.

There are books that you might read just for pleasure, an easy escape into some world unlike your own that doesn't require much of you in the reading except that you sit back, relax and enjoy the ride.

This is not that kind of book.

This book grabbed me from nearly the very first page and never let me go. It requires a lot of engagement from the reader, a lot of thought and, at least in my case, a good dictionary close at hand. That said in my humble opinion it is well worth the effort. Taleb's premise makes so much sense and his examples are so compelling I kept going and going. In 400+ pages now I can safely say that instances where a page has been left without underlined passages or margin notes are few and far between. There is so much here that I cannot imagine anyone who reads it not finding something to be offended by, marvel at, agree with and be challenged by. It is that kind of book and Taleb is that kind of writer.

This is how good this book is. I won the copy I read from the LibraryThing Early Reviewer Program. Before I was done I had bought a hardcover copy for myself. I will probably buy another copy for everyone on my Christmas list. They may not read it but it won't be due to not having the opportunity. ( )

A note about these newly posted non-link reviews.

Wow … it's been months since I've been able to block the time out to get over to the coffee shop (for some reason, I can't write at home) to knock out some reviews! Frankly, I'm “late” with this one … I won this in the LibraryThing.com “Early Reviewers” program, from the September 2012 batch, and it did not get into my hands until late December. Officially, we're supposed to have a review in within 3 months, and it's been four and a half. Maybe they'll cut me some slack with this being a 500-page tome of fairly obscure stuff.

I'd not been aware of Nassim Nicholas Taleb's work previously, but he does seem to be particularly noted for his “Black Swan” work (not the movie) on high-impact yet rare events. His field of study deals with “uncertainty, probability, and knowledge” and this book, Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder is part of a loose trilogy of books in that arena.

Frankly, the concept of something that is “antifragile” is somewhat difficult to grasp … it's part of a triad of states, the other two of which are common: fragile and robust. Taleb had been a trader, and a good deal of what he bases the material here on is phrased in rather technical language from the study of volatility, with “gamma” and “vega” and other mathematical concepts that went right over my head. Early in the book he has a table with dozens of examples these states as expressed in different realms, but I'm hard pressed to pull examples to give you a clear idea of these categories because, in many of them, one of the three is missing, and in a lot of them, the example he gives requires a trip to the glossary! One is pretty straight-forward: Business. In this “Industry” is fragile, “Small Business” is robust, and being an “Artisan” is antifragile. For “Literature” he has e-readers as fragile, books as robust, and oral tradition as antifragile … for Science he has theory as fragile, phenomenology as robust, and heuristics as antifragile.

Speaking of science, Taleb has a rather charming concept which he calls the “Soviet-Harvard Illusion” which shines a wholly unflattering light on both government and academia (and the media for good measure as a contributing factor):

The Soviet-Harvard illusion (i.e., lecturing birds on flying and believing in being the cause behind these wonderful skills) belongs to a class of causal illusions called epiphenomena. What are these illusions? …
An epiphenomena is when you don’t observe A without observing B with it, so you are likely to think that A causes B, or that B causes A, depending on the cultural framework or what seems plausible to the local journalist. ...
The narrative fallacy is a more general disease of always wanting narratives instead of disconnected facts, or facts not glued by cause and effects. That’s how our minds work and that’s the prime reason I hate the media because it exploits our mental defects and gives us the illusion that more things on Planet Earth are explainable than they really are, hence more predictable.

Just about the only government (or large institution) that Taleb has any admiration for is Switzerland, of which he says: Note for now that this is the last major country that is not a nation-state, but rather a collection of small municipalities left to their own devices. In general the large is fragile, while the small and specialized is robust, and the small and unspecialized is “antifragile”.

Another concept that he introduces here is “iatrogenics” (which I'd not previously encountered), which means “caused by the healer”, and can be generalized to any form of interventionism (such as Congress passing horrible laws in response to particular and fleeting events that cause untold harm in their on-going application). This can, and does, crop up in endless institutional settings, from the clamor in the press for “something to be done”, to regulation for the sake of regulation, to examples of surgeries that become ubiquitous because they are both profitable and easy to prescribe.

Taleb has stories in here based on characters introduced in his previous books, including “Fat Tony” who has made his life's fortune in “not being a sucker”, and illustrates how he “bets” against the sucker response … costing him small amounts on-going, but paying off massively when the suckers all make a move (which is interestingly also paralleled in a story of Greek philosopher Thales of Miletus, who, having been challenged to, essentially, “put his money where his mouth is”, created the first “option” deal on record, paying all the olive-press owners in the area a small amount to have rights to use their presses preferentially at some time in the future, having accurately predicted a large harvest that season). Much like the “sucker/non-sucker” dichotomy, there's also the “turkey/non-turkey” split. This story is based on the trust the turkey has for the farmer … it goes a thousand days being well fed and cared for … until the day the axe comes out. This concept also comes up in showing fragility vs. antifragility in careers, with the story of two brothers, one of whom is a corporate executive, living a life with much of the variability smoothed out, and another who is a taxi driver whose days are up and down, but always providing actionable feedback, and averaging out over time. One day the first brother is downsized (like the turkey), and faced with dire prospects, while (barring truly extreme occurrences) the second brother can weather most conditions that come his way.

Antifragile is not an easy read, on several levels. As noted above, it does veer off into technical aspects of some fairly obscure arenas, and Taleb introduces very unusual terms, perhaps defining them initially, but subsequently as a basic element (the word flâneur is one that had me flipping back to the glossary on several occasions) … making me wish that the Glossary (which is a fascinating read in itself) had appeared at the front of the book. Taleb is also unwilling to suffer either fools or those he considers frauds (and worse), and seems to have little compunction on calling them out, by name, with a good deal of venom (even to the point of coining various “Ethical Problems” with some of the more notable miscreants' names). It was also, to my reading, not particularly linear, floating in and out of historical, economic, political, academic, and street realms, with not much of a discernible “arc”. Frankly, I kept hoping that he'd detail Fat Tony's secrets, but if they're in there, they're in a meta level that I must not have connected enough of the dots to get!

I have an ARC (advanced reading copy) of this, so can't speak to the final version, but it's relatively new (publication date last November), and the on-line big boys have it at nearly half off at the moment. If you're interested in a challenging book that will get you to think about stuff that you have likely not thought much about, I'd say give it a go … but with the above caveats on it not being an easy read.

CMP.Ly/1

A link to my "real" review:
BTRIPP's review of Nassim Nicholas Taleb's Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder (1195 words)

It took me five months to read, mostly because I didn't want it to end. Once you grasp the elegance of Taleb's thesis -- that everything gains or loses from volatility -- the rest is just a semi-autobiographical collection of aphorisms meditating on the nature of the world and our place in it. I found myself reading it in small chunks, just to remind myself of the at once profound and hilariously true-to-life wisdoms within.

Taleb's concept of anti-fragility (or convexity) is simple, yet not easily grasped thanks to our default Western way of thinking about things. Taleb's willingness to engage with his critics in his characteristically lively manner makes an otherwise unfortunate (and serious) matter as enjoyable as it can be empowering (or depressing, as you care to look at it).

Not simply worth the read -- this should be mandatory. ( )

This is a wide-ranging book. It is not a systematic analysis of factors affecting economics or just life in general. But, it represents a philosophy of we can live with uncertainty and randomness and not be in a state of shock. Fragility likes quiet and order, but is only part of the real world. The concept of fragility speaks to a volatile world, where we cannnot linearly project what may be coming or even what comes next.

I can relat to some of this. Many years ago, was trying to figure out social and economic factors that has led to some precipitous declines in public transit ridership since World War II. When I compared data from the 1970 census on means of transportation to work to that of the 1960 census, only one metropolitan area in the U.S. had an incrase in the proportion of people using public transportation. That was Las Vegas, which had grown into a real city in the intervening ten years, and it became truly meaningful to ride buses up and down the Strip.

I began to realize that non-linearity was present in my data, and that catastrophe (think, Rene Thom) also contributed. I did not have computers of any consequence in the mid-1970's when I was thinking about these kinds of things. But now we have people like Nassim Taleb who is trying to push us into a different way of thinking about disorder and risk.

Taleb puts many stories into his book, so it is not at all dry. Sometimes, in his attempt to be far-reaching, some concepts get a little lost. My review did not have an index, and I found I wanted to flip around the book in some kind of organized randomness to follow some of Taleb's thoughts. I then waited until I could check out another copy of this book from my local library, so I could get a fuller appreciation of "Antifragile".

Taleb has a chapter named, The Cat and the Washing Machine. His point is that many presumably man-made activities, they began to act more like cats, than washing machines. Tha is, they take on a life of their own. We had a cat that would make surprise jumps into the dryer or washing machine, so I was wishing he played out more with this metaphor. I was hoping that the index might give me a pointer to further information before I got there by a linear reading of the book. But cats and washing machines are not mentioned in the index. And I had to think of what Taleb is doing: building an argument, not by deduction, and by his sloppier but more poignant inductive method.

So, you can read "at" this book, and get benefits from it. ( )

I've been reading this book, Antifragile, for almost four weeks. I call it reading. I've turned all the pages. I've read all the words. That's reading, right?

Or is it?

I started off pretty well, somehow managing to get my brain around the whole idea of antifragile, a word the author, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, admits he made up. There is no real word in English that properly names this idea. Everyone understands the idea of fragile, something that is destroyed when stressed. But the opposite of fragile is more than just something that survives difficulties. Antifragility, Taleb tells us, is the idea of a phenomenon that goes beyond mere resilience; antifragility is the idea of something that actually improves with difficulties and uncertainty.

Taleb gives us lots of great examples of things that are antifragile: "...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."

I'm high-five-ing him, right and left...love this idea of antifragile, Taleb.

That was the Prologue, however. Round about the second or third page of Chapter 1, I find that I'm reading along, with no idea what Mr. Taleb is explaining. He tries, he really does, and now and then I read a paragraph and think I'm back on the highway. The Soviet-Harvard Department of Ornithology, for example. (How well do I know that department, the people who lecture to birds about proper techniques for flying, observe and write reports about the birds' flying abilities, and then seek funding to ensure that the lectures will continue!) But, soon I'm back driving in the dark again.

I don't know if I really read this book. Can I add it to my 2013 Book Log? Does it count? Please don't ask me to summarize it or outline it or (heaven forbid!) don't test me on it.

But if I didn't really read it, why did I like it so much? And why can't I stop thinking about it?

Maybe what I did when I read Antifragile was antireading. Maybe antireading is the kind of reading where you turn the pages and read the words, but understand only a smidgen of what's there, and then you think about it for weeks, and come back to the book again and again, and maybe try to reread it, and it tweaks your map about this life, even through you really didn't understand much of what you read to begin with.

Maybe antireading is the best kind of reading of all. ( )