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    Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder
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    Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder
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    Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder
    Audiobook16 hours

    Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder

    Written by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

    Narrated by Joe Ochman

    4/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    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, 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.

    Includes a bonus PDF of supplemental charts and graphics


    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
     
    "Revelatory . . . [Taleb] pulls the reader along with the logic of a Socrates."-Chicago Tribune
     
    "Startling . . . richly crammed with insights, stories, fine phrases and intriguing asides . . . I will have to read it again. And again."-Matt Ridley, The Wall Street Journal
     
    "Trenchant and persuasive . . . Taleb's insatiable polymathic curiosity knows no bounds. . . . You finish the book feeling braver and uplifted."-New Statesman
     
    "Antifragility isn't just sound economic and political doctrine. It's also the key to a good life."-Fortune
     
    "At once thought-provoking and brilliant."-Los Angeles Times
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateNov 27, 2012
    ISBN9780739370704
    Unavailable
    Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder

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    Reviews for Antifragile

    4/5

    578 ratings38 reviews

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    • 3/5
      Difficult to review this one. The thesis is great, and stories are as well - but there's a lot of condescension and braggadocio to wade through. This is one that may not translate well to audiobook.
    • 2/5
      Overlooking some of the critical reviews of Taleb's writing style, I decided to read "Antifragile" in hopes of learning ground-breaking and fascinating ideas. Unfortunately, I was disappointed. Taleb's core idea is that there exist many systems or things that gain from small amounts of noise, randomness, or exogenous shocks, and he gives this trait the name "antifragile" (to distinguish it from "robustness," which is the quality of things that resist shocks but do not benefit from shocks).Apart from the reasonable observation that "antifragility" is a property that some systems have, and it deserves a name, Taleb's ideas are not really unexpected or revolutionary. It's not hard to think of plenty of examples of antifragile systems (e.g. weight-lifting can make you stronger over time, evolution will better-optimize a species for a changing environment if that species experiences small environmental changes periodically, the Star Trek Borg adapt to attacks used against them, etc.). The implications of antifragility that Taleb discusses seem reasonably obvious, at least as far as I got in the book.I admit that I didn't finish the book. Taleb's writing style turned me off. Taleb comes across as immature and pompous, spending far too many words attacking academics (and other groups he despises) with childish insults that do more to undermine Taleb's own credibility than that of the groups he attacks. Aside from making Taleb seem like an schoolyard bully, these insults slow down the book and dilute Taleb's presentation of his ideas.If you are interested in reading a book about antifragile systems that provides wonderful insight, I recommend "The Origin of Wealth" by Eric Beinhocker, an examination of evolution as a substrate-independent algorithm for improving and optimizing systems to external conditions. Beinhocker's thinking is more sophisticated that that of Taleb, and Beinhocker's presentation is both clearer and more pleasant to read.
    • 5/5
      A Masterpiece on decision making, ethics, modernity, prophecy and ultimately life. Thank you Mr. Taleb
    • 4/5
      This book (and its author) is an enigma to me. I can't say whether I loved it or hated it, because it was really some of each. Sometimes the tone was incredibly condescending, and at other times subdued, open and conciliatory. Sometime the content was very opaque to me, and other times it was clear. It could be an uncomfortable read at times, but that may be the book's greatest contribution. There's a lot here for me to digest and reflect upon, and that may be what tips the balance in its favor. It probably requires multiple readings to really comprehend the message(s).
    • 4/5
      Awesome Book! Provides an incredibly accurate view of the world in which we live. Must reading for Everyone.
    • 4/5
      Let me start by saying that I wholeheartedly agree with the concept and practice of antifragility. I think it's too important of an idea to let get swept aside in our modern era of globalization. But this idea needs a better messenger. The author writes like he has a chip on his shoulder, like he's having a ongoing argument with his peers and this book is his side of the story. The writing feels like he's trying to prove more than his point. I don't know. Maybe there's a language and/or cultural barrier. I know this author wrote Fooled By Randomness and the immensely popular Black Swan, but apart from that I don't anything about Nassim Nicholas Taleb. There might be more to the story.
    • 3/5
      Having read Black Swan and Fooled by Randomness a while ago now I was looking forward to this ones as Taleb has a towering mind.

      The basic premise in this book is that we all need to be more anti fragile, that is more resistant and resilient to shocks both large and small. He gives the example of small animals being able to absorb the shock from a drop, but large animals suffering because of their size. He favours the artisan producer rather than the mega corporation, and have a massive distrust of large corporations and their marketing.

      He argues in here that the current systems, be it banks, governments and academia are all fragile, that is very susceptible to external shocks, and that the systems are geared to magnify these risks. An example if the banking crisis, where the risks taken got greater and greater, and yet those at the banks were bailed out. He thinks that making the traders and banker personally liable will have a major improvement to the global financial market.

      Some of this was very hard to read, occasionally unreadable, and I think that the number of examples could have been reduced. A stronger editor would have been able to wrestle this into a much more readable book, and the arguments would have been stronger.
    • 1/5
      So repetitive and self-righteous I couldn't finish it.I really wanted to like this book, because I am fascinated by its thesis. The idea that certain systems (perhaps ideal systems) are strengthened by strain, the way muscles build over time in a deliberate training program.But Taleb's book is so preoccupied with his own story, his grievances, and settling scores that I found it unlistenable. It's never a good sign when someone writing a book devotes significant passages to arguing that he is not an academic and to attacking the straw man of academics.Read a summary, skip the book.
    • 5/5
      This book should be every humanist's bedtime reading. A 10 star rating.
    • 5/5
      Outrageous thinking - so original and yet very ancient. The author uses a "doer" versus "talker" comparison and he is quite the doer. His writing can be entertaining and blunt, but often confusing. I think he would be proud of having one idea, the opposite of fragile is not robust but rather a quality that we don't have a name for so he calls it antifragile. Imagine a package that has a label on it saying "Treat this package very roughly" and the delivery is improved if the package is quite beaten on. That is antifragile. He made a living as an options trader and he knows how volatility can pay off. I recommend this book if you want to be exposed to some quite different thinking.
    • 5/5
      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.

      2 people found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Inspiring manifesto, an opus magnus chock-full of brilliant observations and transformative, cross-disciplinary ideas grounded in the author's experience in risk management and deep knowledge of volatility, probability, and randomness.
    • 5/5
      really got me thinking
    • 5/5
      Fun, thought provoking
    • 4/5
      More of a book length version of the writers personal philosophy, but intriguing none-the-less.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Fascinating original ideas. Thought provoking arguments. Totally change the way I see the world.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      When you first start reading Nassim Nicholas Taleb, you wonder whether he is some kind of a mad man, or at least one of these fragilista bullshitter whose stories populates this book. Then you realize that is is just how he writes. This is the latest tome in his Incerto series, all of them deserving of being read slowly and carefully, even though he does have a tendency to repeat his points somewhat, not as bad as most business books. The others do it to fill pages because they are lacking in substance, Taleb does it because he wants his points to get across. This is a summation of the Incerto series, he has explained many of the phenomenon in the previous books, in spades, but this is the grand summation as well as the presentation of his idea of antifragility. I am not going to go into a quick summary of the idea in a book review. It would be inadequate as well as being incredibly disrespectful to the author. His ideas are kind of out there but they are intriguing and they definitely gets you to think, which afterall is why why read ponderous tomes on how to deal with events, both economic and political. Mr. Taleb has literally opened up his thoughts to us and he has invited us into his very unique and fascinating world and how he arrived at the ideas and I for one love the insight. His writing style will put some off from writing. I read his words in the voice of my PHD adviser: imperious, a touch arrogant, definitely self confident, and with a sense of bemused detachment. It was the perfect tone.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      What is the opposite of fragile? We might come up with words like strong, stable or robust, but professional contrarian Nassim Nicholas Taleb disagrees. If what is fragile weakens under pressure, then the opposite would be something that becomes stronger under pressure. That which is strong, stable or robust merely withstands the pressure. So Taleb coins the word antifragile in his 2012 book “Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder.”This book follows in the footsteps of his best known work “The Black Swan” in which he points out that unexpected things happen. Just because most swans are white doesn't mean some can't be black. Hurricane Florence, the 9-11 attacks and the 1929 stock market crash are examples of black swans. If “The Black Swan” was short on practical advice, “Antifragile” is loaded with it, covering what we should eat, when we should seek medical care, what we should read, how we should get an education and how we should make our living, among other topics.Taleb has little use for economists, big business, college professors and other intellectuals, politicians, doctors and virtually anyone who claims to be only trying to help. "This is the tragedy of modernity: as with neurotically overprotective parents, those trying to help are often hurting us the most," he says. Thus he ignores modern advice, except to ridicule it, and consults the wisdom of the past, such as Seneca, Cato the Elder and the Bible. That such writings still exist and remain helpful proves to Taleb that they are antifragile.One finds wisdom here too, but also a bit of hypocrisy. After all Taleb, like those he criticizes, is only trying to help.
    • 1/5
      The author somehow is able to pull off sounding like an arrogant prick and simultaneously like an insecure whiner. The rare examples when the author wrote something that was true or significant do not offset the hundred of pages of unsubstantiated assertions and purely fabricated nonsense.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 1/5
      I don't necessarily disagree with Taleb's arguments, but I completely disagree with his arrogant delivery. I started, got fed up with his attitude, then skimmed.

      2 people found this helpful

    • 4/5
      Not sure I can distill my thoughts on this one without more time and perhaps a revisit to key parts. Taleb's central idea is certainly intriguing and seems cohesive and perhaps even correct, but his presentation, while entertaining, makes it difficult to judge on its own merits. Nonetheless, I'd highly recommend reading this one. Just know that you may waffle between loving and hating it at various points.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      Taleb is a tail event of his own, a challenge to the accepted methodologies using prediction through point estimates and reliance on squares-based statistics as input to linear models. The right way to avoid bigger crises - financial and otherwise - is to encourage systems that benefit from volatility and feedback mechanisms. For example, "Depriving political (and other) systems of volatility harms them, causing eventually greater volatility of the cascading type" (p. 81). Along the way, he tears apart major theories in economics and finance, introduces some street-smart characters who really run the world, and sketches out an aura around himself that the reader might like and might not. In either case, Taleb won't care; he would much rather the reader accept his ideas for the sake of us all.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 3/5
      Nassim Nicholas Taleb comes off as an asshole. Much of what he asserts as new or original material is simply redefining concepts like resilience or robustness as slightly less than I had learned them, although that may have more to do with my time spent in social work. Nevertheless, there are some decent points in this book. I think I'd give Taleb's work about as much shrift as Simon Sinek's, and in much the same way - read (or watch) a summary and you'll probably come away as enlightened as you would having mauled the corpus entire.
    • 5/5
      It has been said that, when we hear the truth uttered, something inside us says "Yes, I know this is true." That's what it was like listening to this book. Both times.

      2 people found this helpful

    • 3/5
      I just completed “Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder,” by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

      Nassim gave a strategic introduction to his book, point out how critical receptions would benefit him - so here you go Nassim.

      I was very resistant to pickup the book. Someone’d been recommending it to me for a long time, but I just refused to read it because of the title; antifragile just sounded like a dumb word to me, a cheap form of marketing.

      But then when my book portfolio freed up, I decided to read it anyways. I was right about the title. The entire book was full of jargon that just seemed kind of paranoid and insider to me. Most of the words I never became familiar with, even though they were repeated many times.

      Nassim seems to be onto something, but his culture is so divergent from my own that I had a very hard time finding common context. I only got about twenty percent of his references in the book. The rest came from classics, that were probably perfectly good examples. Except, because I had no familiarity with them, they further confused his points. Nassim points out in the book that, “much of what other people know isn’t worth knowing;” I couldn’t agree more in the choice of his examples.

      Nassim’s framing is very imprecise. He uses the word antifragile as the title of fragile. What does it mean? That’s unknown, and undefined. It’s just not fragile. Then, how does he describe this word? As things that gain from disorder. What is disorder? The lack of order. Again, instead of defining the thing in the definition, he repeats what it isn’t. So right from the cover I’m left knowing what he isn’t talking about, but not any more than that.

      Eventually, after he talks about the concept for a while, he introduces his triad. First, triad is a technical term, and what he defines as a triad [fragile, robust, antifragile] is actually a spectrum - don’t get mislead by the name. But so with this spectrum idea, I could start to catch his drift. Some things are hurt by volatility. Some things are left untouched. And some things gain from volatility. This is an interesting idea, but could only gain value with application.

      Nassim continues for the rest of the book without talking about a single good application of the idea of antifragility. There are a few reasons that this is the case:

      1) Antifragility oscillates through scales of a fractal. Say we take a subset of a system - like a politician. Increasing their fragility deceases the fragility of the system that they’re a part of. Nassim doesn’t discuss this interesting dynamic - that it matters where you optimize antifragility.

      2) The entire book seems devoid of purpose. Although Nassim says that he’s a religious man, I couldn’t identify how. Is he an environmentalist? Maybe he’s motivated by aesthetics? Or possibly he likes to bask in the oneness of existence? He doesn’t state his motivations in the book, so we’re left with a hollow shell of this theory of antifragility, unsure how it leads to any deeper sense of meaning.

      3) I grew up in a culture of antifragility. It’s such a fundamental part of who I am that it took me a while to understand what we was talking about. There are probably thousands of great examples of antifragility, but he doesn’t reference them. This lead us to think that he doesn’t actually live the concept, for if he did, he would have bumped into some of these things.

      Antifragility in the real world:
      *Gurdjieff: “conscious labor and intentional suffering”
      *Christianity: The way of the cross - enlightenment through suffering
      *Spirituality in general
      *Education: Waldorf, Essential Schools, GaiaU
      *Entrepreneurialism
      *Calvin and Hobbes: “it builds character”
      *Art
      *Systems Thinking
      *Permaculture
      *Chaos Theory
      *Resistance
      *Radicalization

      Nassim does talk some about entrepreneurialism, but he spends more time talking about standing up for the weak, and about why artisans are nice and big corporations aren’t. There isn’t any problem with this, but it doesn’t have to do with antifragility.

      As Nassim has a background in finance, I was really looking forward to seeing how he applies the idea of antifragility in designing financial systems, but he never got there.

      There’s a point where Nassim correlates size to fragility. Size doesn’t scale with fragility. Yes, if you increase the size a fragile system, it becomes more fragile. But this is the same with antifragile systems. Take gene pools for example - a gene pool with a thousand members will be less antifragile than a gene pool with a million members.

      In summary, I think that the concept of antifragility is a good one, but Nassims book doesn’t explain what antifragility is nor how it can be used. Hopefully someone will pickup where he left off and do something meaningful with the concept.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      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.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 3/5
      a hoot of a read. loved it.
    • 4/5
      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.
    • 5/5
      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.

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    • 4/5
      Extreme empirical skeptic Nassim Taleb strikes again, but this time he offers us some solutions to go along with his ranting. In this latest installment of his series of books critiquing modernity's mismanagement of risk, Taleb puts forth his concept of antifragility, those things that not just resist being damaged from disorder but actually gain from it. Drawing inspiration from nature, Taleb tells us that our modern social edifices have become too mechanistic and must become like the organisms evolution has shaped through bricolage trial and error. While clockwork mechanisms operate in a narrow domain and break if taken outside their comfort zone, organic complex-adaptive systems become stronger when faced with stressors. He wants us to stop placing so much emphasis on brittle theoretical knowledge which seems to work in simple isolated conditions divorced from messy reality but fail on contact with the Extremistan conditions of the real world. Instead of theory, we need to emphasize phenomenology, the actual doing of things and seeing what works, making decisions not on the platonic ideas of true/false or right/wrong but on the cost-benefit analysis of real world results.The key to antifragile systems, according to Taleb, is convexity. Convex functions are asymmetric in that they limit the downsides but keep open the upsides, so that with high volatility the system can actually reap high rewards and benefit from variability. Convex systems thrive in Extremistan Concave functions are the opposite, they can thrive in Mediocristan, but will blow up in Extremistan where black swans come along and negate any and all gains previously accrued. Concavity is not sustainable, convexity is. The exemplar of convexity is optionality. Taleb uses an anecdote about the pre-socratic philosopher Thales as an example of optionality. Thales leased olive presses using an option contract, so that he has the right, but not the obligation, to use them. If the season is bountiful, he will use his right and profit, if the season turns out to be bad, he has the option to not lease the presses and avoid incurring any losses. Optionality turns a win-lose situation into a win-break even situation, if things work out you win, if they don't you break even or suffer minimal inconvenience. The downside is limited, the upside is unlimited. This is the essence of antifragility.Taleb describes many other concepts that are synergistic with antifragility in order to derive heuristics to abide by. The Lindy effect gives us a heuristic to expect that older technologies and ideas will last longer than newer ones (on average). Iatrogenics gives us a heuristic to first do no harm by removing harmful things from systems instead of adding on supposedly beneficial things to them. The green lumber fallacy gives us a heuristic to do what works based on cost/benefit analysis in practice without erroneously theorizing why they work and coming up with postdictive fantasies. The heuristic 'small is beautiful' gives us a bias for smaller and more decentralized systems compared with the fragility of bigger and more centralized ones. Finally, the 'skin in the game' heuristic gives a solution to the agency problem by making sure those that take risks that can harm others are personally liable when things go wrong. Taleb uses examples from many domains and colorful anecdotes throughout history to defend these heuristics and get these points across. I think the overall message of the book is incredibly important and insightful, but my biggest criticism of Taleb is his extreme discounting of the possibility to actually understand complex systems. I agree that there is an aspect of irreducible uncertainty to such systems that cannot be overcome, but there are still ways to use our advancing knowledge of complex-adaptive systems to turn black swans into gray swans (to use Taleb's own idea from his book The Black Swan). I understand that Taleb's main concern is for things to not blow up and for people to first just do things that work in practice, but he is too conservative and skeptical with his epistemological approach. Maybe it is just hyperbolic rhetoric to hammer in his ideas that would otherwise not get the attention they deserve, which is fine, but I'd prefer a middle ground where Taleb's ideas can inform and improve our scientific processes, preserving our ability to create theoretical models of the world instead of abandoning it outright. Nassim Taleb is polarizing, his ideas doubly so, but I find myself on his side more often than not and recommend this book highly.