{"id":3750,"date":"2014-09-15T00:00:52","date_gmt":"2014-09-15T07:00:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/learnbyblogging.com\/?p=3750"},"modified":"2014-09-14T17:38:26","modified_gmt":"2014-09-15T00:38:26","slug":"book-review-antifragile-things-that-gain-from-disorder-by-nassim-nicholas-taleb","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/learnbyblogging.com\/?p=3750","title":{"rendered":"Book Review: &#8220;Antifragile &#8211; Things That Gain from Disorder&#8221; by Nassim Nicholas Taleb"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" src=\"\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/aoFvYY23YkA\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Nassim Nicholas Taleb has a real winner in this book. This is a consummation of all the thoughts and beliefs, including the book &#8220;The Black Swan&#8221; he authored. I had <a href=\"https:\/\/learnbyblogging.com\/?p=51\">a review on that book.<\/a>. There are numerous concepts that Taleb presented which I will not attempt to summarize; I&#8217;ll just cover my key learning\/takeaways:<\/p>\n<p><strong>My key takeaways:<\/strong><br \/>\n1. Being anti-fragile means the more you get beaten the better you get. It&#8217;s not just being &#8220;robust&#8221; or &#8220;rigorous&#8221; but thrive on the punches being thrown at you. It&#8217;s an antidote to the &#8220;Black Swan&#8221; events, like Mother Nature.<br \/>\n2. The strategy of being anti-fragile as applied to your livelihood or survival is to have a barbell strategy &#8211; a steady risk-adverse job with consistent income while pursuing a risk-seeking opportunity on the side. I interpret it as having a dual-path income streams: one that pays the bill and another that has a potentially huge upside. I believe this can be applied to your investment portfolio as well.<br \/>\n3. Via Negativa is an interesting chapter about taking things away to increase your anti-fragility.<br \/>\n4. &#8220;Never trust the words of a man who is not free.&#8221; Trust a mobster (e.g. Meyer Lansky) but not a civil servant (e.g. Lawrence of Arabia).<br \/>\n5. On ethics, &#8220;If you see fraud and do not say fraud, you are a fraud.&#8221;<br \/>\n6. Fat Tony&#8217;s character is rather interesting &#8211; he&#8217;s an epitome of the author himself. I like his straightforward and take no-prisoner style.<br \/>\n7. Redundancy is a form of anti-fragility; it gives you the option to be opportunistic. Like having extra oil reserve can be profitable during a oil squeeze.<br \/>\n8. Post-traumatic growth may allow a person live up more than his\/her potential after subjecting to traumatic stress &#8211; like author&#8217;s lifting weight and turning into a &#8220;bodyguard.&#8221;<br \/>\n9. Some criticism (stresser) can be validating your position &#8211; it means you&#8217;re generating envy from others. A corporation or government may be fragile when they try to &#8220;instill&#8221; confidence &#8211; unlike a book author can generate publicity by making a news, e.g. beating up an economist.<br \/>\n10. What kills me make others stronger &#8211; like plane crashes result in better design for all travelers due to the lessons learned in designing a safer product.<br \/>\n11. Evolution like randomness (like random mutations) to a certain point.<br \/>\n12. Organic products tend to be more reliable than the mechanical.<br \/>\n13. Bottom-up governing (like Switzerland) is more anti-fragile than the top-down bureaucracy due to randomness that strengthen the structure. A taxi-cab driver&#8217;s income has more variation than a civil servant or bank worker (or a turkey until before the Thanksgiving) but it&#8217;s more anti-fragile.<br \/>\n14. Iatrogenics is doing more harm when trying to be helpful like certain medicines and Fed&#8217;s policy during 2007 to iron out the &#8220;boom-bust cycle,&#8221; and etc. Sometimes, procrastination (like seeing a doctor while healthy or for an elective procedure) may be a good thing.<br \/>\n15. Forecasting or trusting the forecast could be downright harmful to the risk-takers.<br \/>\n16. Having the &#8220;optionality&#8221; (like going to a &#8220;drop-in&#8221; party, not obligation, or living in a rent-controlled apartment) allows one to be antifragile. In author&#8217;s term, option = asymmetry (benefits more than losing) + rationality (keeping what&#8217;s good and ditching the bad). &#8220;Life is long gamma&#8221; = Life benefits from volatility and variability.<br \/>\n17. Author&#8217;s dislike of academia is clear throughout the book. He doesn&#8217;t believe it fosters innovation and antifragility except for the administrators and the professors themselves.<\/p>\n<p>Overall, this is a real masterpiece. It&#8217;s funny and full of ideas that make you think once you get over Taleb&#8217;s sense of humor and his abrasiveness. It&#8217;s a must read for everyone for his\/her career, investment, and how he\/she perceives the world and the systems driving it.<\/p>\n<p><iframe<\/iframe><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Nassim Nicholas Taleb has a real winner in this book. This is a consummation of all the thoughts and beliefs, including the book &#8220;The Black Swan&#8221; he authored. I had a review on that book.. There are numerous concepts that Taleb presented which I will not attempt to summarize; I&#8217;ll just cover my key learning\/takeaways: &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/learnbyblogging.com\/?p=3750\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Book Review: &#8220;Antifragile &#8211; Things That Gain from Disorder&#8221; by Nassim Nicholas Taleb<\/span> <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3750","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/learnbyblogging.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3750","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/learnbyblogging.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/learnbyblogging.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/learnbyblogging.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/learnbyblogging.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3750"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/learnbyblogging.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3750\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3886,"href":"https:\/\/learnbyblogging.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3750\/revisions\/3886"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/learnbyblogging.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3750"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/learnbyblogging.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3750"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/learnbyblogging.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3750"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}