Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder

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Random House Publishing Group, 27 de nov. de 2012 - 544 páginas
Antifragile is a standalone book in Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s landmark Incerto series, an investigation of opacity, luck, uncertainty, probability, human error, risk, and decision-making in a world we don’t understand. The other books in the series are Fooled by Randomness, The Black Swan, Skin in the Game, and The Bed of Procrustes.

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, and rumors or riots intensify when someone tries to repress them, many things in life benefit from stress, disorder, volatility, and turmoil. What Taleb has identified and calls “antifragile” is that category of 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. In Antifragile, Taleb stands uncertainty on its head, making it desirable, even necessary, and proposes that things be built in an antifragile manner. The antifragile is beyond the resilient or robust. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better and better.

Furthermore, 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 even 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. And throughout, in addition to the street wisdom of Fat Tony of Brooklyn, the voices and recipes of ancient wisdom, from Roman, Greek, Semitic, and medieval sources, are loud and clear.

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.

Praise for Antifragile

“Ambitious and thought-provoking . . . highly entertaining.”The Economist

“A bold book explaining how and why we should embrace uncertainty, randomness, and error . . . It may just change our lives.”Newsweek

De dentro do livro

Conteúdo

Prologue
3
The Triad or A Map of the World and Things
20
THE ANTIFRAGILE AN INTRODUCTION
29
Overcompensation and Overreaction Everywhere
41
The Cat and the Washing Machine
54
What Kills Me Makes Others Stronger
65
MODERNITY AND THE DENIAL OF ANTIFRAGILITY
81
Tell Them I Love Some Randomness
100
VIA NEGATIVA
301
Time and Fragility
309
Medicine Convexity and Opacity
336
To Live Long but Not Too Long
357
THE ETHICS OF FRAGILITY AND ANTIFRAGILITY
373
29
393
Fitting Ethics to a Profession
407
Conclusion
421

Naive Intervention
110
Prediction as a Child of Modernity
134
A NONPREDICTIVE VIEW OF THE WORLD
141
Senecas Upside and Downside
151
Never Marry the Rock Star
159
OPTIONALITY TECHNOLOGY AND
169
Lecturing Birds on How to Fly
187
When Two Things Are Not the Same Thing
202
History Written by the Losers
217
A Lesson in Disorder
241
Fat Tony Debates Socrates
249
THE NONLINEAR AND THE NONLINEAR
263
The Philosophers Stone and Its Inverse
290
Glossary
427
Appendix I
435
འབལ ིའ ིབབགངཋ
442
Appendix II
447
38
454
Additional Notes Afterthoughts and Further Reading
457
Bibliography
481
43
484
44
497
Acknowledgments
505
49
507
106
519
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Sobre o autor (2012)

Nassim Nicholas Taleb has devoted his life to problems of uncertainty, probability, and knowledge. He spent nearly two decades as a businessman and quantitative trader before becoming a full-time philosophical essayist and academic researcher in 2006. Although he spends most of his time in the intense seclusion of his study, or as a flâneur meditating in cafés, 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.
 
Taleb’s books have been published in forty-one languages.

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