Book Summary : Antifragility by Nassim Nicolas Taleb

Antifragile by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Things that can gain from disorder

Between Democles and Hydra

1. Story of the "Sword of Damocles" - with great fortune and power also comes great danger. You cannot rise and rule, without facing continuous danger. Someone will be working towards toppling you. Like the sword, danger will be silent, inexorable and discontinuous. It will fall abruptly after long periods of quiet , perhaps at the very moment, one has gotten used to it and forgotten about its existence. Black swans will be out there to get you as you now have much more to lose, a cost of success.
2. Hydra - a serpent like creature with numerous heads. Each time a head is cut off, two grow back up. Hydra represents antifragility. 
3. apophatic - what cannot be explicitly said or directly be described in our current vocabulary

Overcompensation and Over-reaction everywhere

1. The excess energy released from over-reaction to setbacks is what innovates
2. Sophistication is born out of hunger
3. How to win a horse race : It is said that the best horses lose when they compete with the slower ones, and win against better rivals. Undercompensation from the absence of a stressor, inverse hormesis, absence of challenge, degrades the best of the best.
4. It is a well known trick that if you need to get something urgently done, give the task to the busiest person in office. Most humans manage to squander their free time as free time makes them dysfunctional, lazy and unmotivated. The busier they get, the more active they are at other tasks.
5. Mechanism of overcompensation makes us concentrate better in the modicum of background noise
6. Redundancy is ambiguous because it feels like a waste if nothing unusual happens. But something unusual happens usually. 
7. A system that overcompensates is necessarily in overshooting mode, building extra capacity and strength in anticipation of the worst outcome and in response to information about the possibility of a hazard.
8. Lucretis problem - a fool who believes that the tallest mountain the world will be equal to the tallest one he has observed. Analysts take the worst historical recession, the worst war, the worst historical move in interest rates, or the worst point in unemployment as the exact estimate of the worst future outcome. 
9. Fukushima nuclear reactor which experience catastrophic failure in 2011 during the tsunami was built to withstand the worst past historical earthquake. Alan greenspan during his apology to the congress said "It never happened before". Assuming worst harm is possible. 
10. Books and ideas are antifragile and get a lot of nourishment from attacks
11. Some jobs and professions are fragile to reputational harm, something that in the age of the internet cannot be controlled - these jobs arent worth having. You do want to control your reputation, you wont be able to do it by controlling information flow. Focus on altering your exposure, put yourself in a situation to benefit from antifragility of information. - He demonstrates that the authors profession benefits from the antifragility of information. 
12. With a few exceptions, those who dress outrageously are robust or even antifragile in reputation. Those who dress in suits are fragile to information about them. 

The cat and the washing machine

1. Causal opacity : In complex systems, it is hard to see the arrow from cause to consequence, making much of the conventional method of analysis, in addition to standard logic inapplicable. 

What kills me makes others stronger

1. Antifragility for one is fragility for someone else. Fail for others to succeed, one day you might get a thank you note.
2. The fragility of every startup is necessary for the economy to be antifragile, and thats what makes entrepreneurship work : fragility of the individual entrepreneurs and their necessarily high failure rate. 
3. Individual stocks may be fragile and that is what makes index funds antifragile
4. There is tension between nature and individual units. Organisms need to die for nature to be antifragile - nature is opportunistic, ruthless and selfish and takes advantage of stressors, randomness, uncertainty and disorder. 
5. Systems subject to randomness - and unpredictability build a mechanism beyond the robust to opportunistically reinvent themselves each generation, with a continuous change of population and species. 
6. Evolution benefits from randomness in two ways : randomness in mutations and randomness in the environment - both act in similar ways to change the traits of next generations
7. Nature is antifragile upto a point - if a calamity kills life on earth, completely, the fittest will not survive. 
8. Someone who has made several errors, though not the same error twice, is more reliable than someone who has not made any
9. For the economy to be antifragile and to undergo evolution, every single individual business must necessarily be fragile. 
10. Economy as a collective wants them to not survive, rather to take a lot of imprudent risks themselves and be blinded by the odds. Their respective industries improve from failure to failure. The want local overconfidence and not global overconfidence. Their failure should not impact others. 
11. Government bailout is a form of transferring fragility from the collective to the unfit.
12. Nietzsche's "what doesnt kill me makes me stronger" -> "what did not kill me did not make me stronger, but spared me because I am stronger than others; but it killed others and now the average population is stronger because the weak are gone" -> this is transfer of antifragility from the individual to the system
13. Nature wants the aggregate to survive, not every species
14. Every species wants the organisms to be fragile so that evolutionary selection can take place
15. Heroism and the respect it commands, is a form of compensation by society for those who take risks for others. 

Modernity and the denial of antifragility 

Other recommended books by the same author

1. Skin in the game
2. The Black Swan