Author: Nassim Nicholas Taleb is a Lebanese American philosopher, essayist, scholar, statistician and former derivatives trader, whose work mainly concerns problems of randomness, probability, and uncertainty.
Book: I think that this book is impossible to summarize, however, I will try to share some important ideas he presents: (i) Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better. Antifragility comes from the fragility of its parts. (ii) it is hard to see the arrow from cause to consequence, making much of conventional methods of analysis, in addition to standard logic, inapplicable. (iii) 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. (iv) We tend to over-intervene in areas with minimal benefits (and large risks), and under-intervene in areas where it’s necessary, like emergencies. (v) Expert problems (the expert knows a lot but less than he thinks he does) often bring fragilities, and acceptance of ignorance is the reverse + they put you on the wrong side of asymmetry.
Opinion: This is my favourite book from Taleb, and it got even better when reading for the second time. I enjoyed both his writing style (full of ironies/insults/disrespects), big ideas (randomness, risk, uncertainty, antifragility) and smaller ideas (Stiglitz Problem, Ludic Fallacy, Iatrogenic, Soviet-Harvard Illusion, etc.). You will find many critics of this book, however, most of them are just nonsense. They criticize the book because (i) they do not like Taleb’s peculiar personality/they are blocked on Twitter. (ii) They "find" obvious exceptions to his ideas – They don’t understand when an exception adds information and (iii) they claim that the main idea is quite simple. All of them are just nonsense. You may like or dislike Taleb and you may agree or not with all his ideas, however, one must admit that this book is a masterpiece.
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