Read Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder Online
Authors: Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The Thalesian and the Aristotelian
How to Be Stupid
Nature and Options
The Rationality
Life Is Long Gamma
Roman Politics Likes Optionality
Next
Chapter 13. Lecturing Birds on How to Fly
Once More, Less Is More
Mind the Gaps
Search and How Errors Can Be Investments
Creative and Uncreative Destructions
The Soviet-Harvard Department of Ornithology
Epiphenomena
Greed as a Cause
Debunking Epiphenomena
Cherry-picking (or the Fallacy of Confirmation)
Chapter 14. When Two Things Are Not the “Same Thing”
Where Are the Stressors?
L’Art pour l’Art, to Learn for Learning’s Sake
Polished Dinner Partners
The Green Lumber Fallacy
How Fat Tony Got Rich (and Fat)
Conflation
Prometheus and Epimetheus
Chapter 15. History Written by the Losers
The Evidence Staring at Us
Is It Like Cooking?
The Industrial Revolution
Governments Should Spend on Nonteleological Tinkering, Not Research
The Case in Medicine
Matt Ridley’s Anti-Teleological Argument
Corporate Teleology
The Inverse Turkey Problem
To Fail Seven Times, Plus or Minus Two
The Charlatan, the Academic, and the Showman
Chapter 16. A Lesson in Disorder
The Ecological and the Ludic
The Touristification of the Soccer Mom
An Antifragile (Barbell) Education
Chapter 17. Fat Tony Debates Socrates
Euthyphro
Fat Tony Versus Socrates
Primacy of Definitional Knowledge
Mistaking the Unintelligible for the Unintelligent
Tradition
The Sucker-Nonsucker Distinction
Fragility, Not Probability
Conflation of Events and Exposure
Conclusion to Book IV
What Will Happen Next?
BOOK V: THE NONLINEAR AND THE NONLINEAR
On the Importance of Attics
Chapter 18. On the Difference Between a Large Stone and a Thousand Pebbles
A Simple Rule to Detect the Fragile
Why Is Fragility Nonlinear?
When to Smile and When to Frown
Why Is the Concave Hurt by Black Swan Events?
Traffic in New York
Someone Call New York City Officials
Where More Is Different
A “Balanced Meal”
Run, Don’t Walk
Small May Be Ugly, It Is Certainly Less Fragile
How to Be Squeezed
Kerviel and Micro-Kerviel
How to Exit a Movie Theater
Projects and Prediction
Why Planes Don’t Arrive Early
Wars, Deficits, and Deficits
Where the “Efficient” Is Not Efficient
Pollution and Harm to the Planet
The Nonlinearity of Wealth
Conclusion
Chapter 19. The Philosopher’s Stone and Its Inverse
How to Detect Who Will Go Bust
The Idea of Positive and Negative Model Error
How to Lose a Grandmother
Now the Philosopher’s Stone
How to Transform Gold into Mud: The Inverse Philosopher’s Stone
BOOK VI: VIA NEGATIVA
Where Is the Charlatan?
Subtractive Knowledge
Barbells, Again
Less Is More
Chapter 20. Time and Fragility
From Simonides to Jensen
Learning to Subtract
Technology at Its Best
To Age in Reverse: The Lindy Effect
A Few Mental Biases
Neomania and Treadmill Effects
Architecture and the Irreversible Neomania
Wall to Wall Windows
Metrification
Turning Science into Journalism
What Should Break
Prophets and the Present
Empedocles’ Dog
What Does Not Make Sense
Chapter 21. Medicine, Convexity, and Opacity
How to Argue in an Emergency Room
First Principle of Iatrogenics (Empiricism)
Second Principle of Iatrogenics (Nonlinearity in Response)
Jensen’s Inequality in Medicine
Burying the Evidence
The Never-ending History of Turkey Situations
Nature’s Opaque Logic
Guilty or Innocent
Plead Ignorance of Biology: Phenomenology
The Ancients Were More Caustic
How to Medicate Half the Population
The “Rigor of Mathematics” in Medicine
Chapter 22. To Live Long, but Not Too Long
Life Expectancy and Convexity
Subtraction Adds to Your Life
The Iatrogenics of Money
Religion and Naive Interventionism
If It’s Wednesday, I Must Be Vegan
Convexity Effects and Random Nutrition
How to Eat Yourself
Walk-Deprived
I Want to Live Forever
BOOK VII: THE ETHICS OF FRAGILITY AND ANTIFRAGILITY
Chapter 23. Skin in the Game: Antifragility and Optionality at the Expense of Others
Hammurabi
The Talker’s Free Option
Postdicting
The Stiglitz Syndrome
The Problem of Frequency, or How to Lose Arguments
The Right Decision for the Wrong Reason
The Ancients and the Stiglitz Syndrome
To Burn One’s Vessels
How Poetry Can Kill You
The Problem of Insulation
Champagne Socialism
Soul in the Game
Options, Antifragility, and Social Fairness
The Robert Rubin Free Option
Which Adam Smith?
The Antifragility and Ethics of (Large) Corporations
Artisans, Marketing, and the Cheapest to Deliver
Lawrence of Arabia or Meyer Lansky
Chapter 24. Fitting Ethics to a Profession
Wealth Without Independence
The Professionals and the Collective
The Ethical and the Legal
Casuistry as Optionality
Big Data and the Researcher’s Option
The Tyranny of the Collective
Chapter 25. Conclusion
Epilogue
Glossary