Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (98 page)

Generous comments and help: Peter Nielsen, Rory Sutherland, Saifedean Ammous, Max Brockman, John Brockman, Marcos Carreira, Nathan Myhrvold, Aaron Brown, Terry Burnham, Peter Boettke, Russ Roberts, Kevin Horgan, Farid Karkaby, Michael Schrague, Dan Goldstein, Marie-Christine Riachi, Ed Frankel, Mika Kasuga, Eric Weinstein, Emanuel Derman, Alberto Mingardi, Constantine Sandis, Guy Deutscher, Bruno Dupire, George Martin, Joelle Weiss, Rohan Silva, Janan Ganesh, Dan Ariely, Gur Huberman, Cameron Williams, Jacques Merab, Lorenzo Savorelli, Andres Velasco, Eleni Panagiotarakou, Conrad Young, Melik Keylan, Seth Roberts, John McDonald, Yaneer Bar-Yam, David Shaywitz, Nouriel Roubini, Philippe Asseily, Ghassan Bejjani, Alexis Grégoire Saint-Marie, Charles Tapiero, Barry Blecherman, Art De Vany, Guy Riviere, Bernard Oppetit, Brendon Yarkin, and Mark Spitznagel; and my online helpers Jean-Louis Reault, Ben Lambert, Marko Costa, Satiyaki Den, Kenneth Lamont, Vergil Den, Karen Brennan, Ban Kanj, Lea McKay, Ricardo Medina, Marco Alves, Pierre Madani, Greg Linster, Oliver Mayor, Satyaki Roy, Daniel Hogendoorn, Phillip Crenshaw, Walter Marsh, John Aziz, Graeme Blake, Greg Linster, Sujit Kapadia, Alvaro De La Paz, Apoorv Bajpai, Louis Shickle, Ben Brady, Alfonso Payno de las Cuevas, “Guru Anaerobic,” Alexander Boland, David Boxenhorn, Dru Stevenson, and Michal Kolano. I am certain I have forgotten many more.

BY NASSIM NICHOLAS TALEB

INCERTO
,
an investigation of opacity, luck, uncertainty, probability, human error, risk, and decision making when we don’t understand the world, expressed in the form of a personal essay with autobiographical sections, stories, parables, and philosophical, historical, and scientific discussions in nonoverlapping volumes that can be accessed in any order.

ANTIFRAGILE (THIS VOLUME)

THE BLACK SWAN
(2007, 2010), on how high-impact but rare events dominate history, how we retrospectively give ourselves the illusion of understanding them thanks to narratives, how they are impossible to estimate scientifically, how this makes some areas—but not others—totally unpredictable and unforecastable, how confirmatory methods of knowledge don’t work, and how thanks to Black Swan–blind “faux experts” we are prone to building systems increasingly fragile to extreme events.

FOOLED BY RANDOMNESS
(2001, 2004), on how we tend to mistake skills for luck, how randomness does not look random, why there is no point talking about performance when it is easier to buy and sell than fry an egg, and the profound difference between dentists and speculators.

THE BED OF PROCRUSTES (PHILOSOPHICAL APHORISMS)
(2010)

INCERTO’S TECHNICAL COMPANION
(freely available electronic volume) consisting of academic-style papers, miscellaneous notes, and (very) technical remarks.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

N
ASSIM
N
ICHOLAS
T
ALEB
has devoted his life to problems of uncertainty, probability, and knowledge and has led three careers around this focus, as a businessman-trader, a philosophical essayist, and an academic researcher. Although he now spends most of his time either working in intense seclusion in his study, or as a flâneur meditating in cafés across the planet, he is currently Distinguished Professor of Risk Engineering at New York University’s Polytechnic Institute. His main subject matter is “decision making under opacity,” that is, a map and a protocol on how we should live in a world we don’t understand.
His books
Fooled by Randomness
and
The Black Swan
have been published in thirty-three languages.
Taleb believes that prizes, honorary degrees, awards, and ceremonialism debase knowledge by turning it into a spectator sport.