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Books

Antifragile by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Eleni Panagiotarakou benefits from Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s attack on the follies of over-cautiousness.

Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (2012), alongside Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets (2005) and The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (2007) completes Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s trilogy on disorder. Whereas Fooled by Randomness focused on our underestimation of chance, and The Black Swan on rare events and our failure to predict them, the focus of Antifragile is on things that gain from the ‘disorder cluster’, which includes elements such as randomness, volatility, uncertainty, disturbances, and stressors – in other words, antifragile things are things that positively benefit from being subject to a little chaos.

One of Taleb’s starting arguments here is the idea that we live in a world which, due to its complexity, not only we do not understand, but could not possibly hope to understand. Rather than despair at this truth, Taleb proposes that we accept, love, and learn to thrive in it: amor fati. This sentiment is captured in the Prologue, ‘How to Love the Wind’, where one reads the rousing poetic call: “Wind extinguishes a candle and energizes fire.

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