Skip to content

Monthly Archives: January 2013

Book Review: Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder by Nassim Nicholas Taleb – Blogcritics Books

Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder by Nassim Nicholas Taleb looks at life according to a Stoic philosophy which is indifferent to pleasure or pain. The concept of antifragility domesticates uncertainty and examines the future with a robust rationality devoid of too much emotional attachment. The main thrust of antifragility teaches that systems benefit from […]

Nassim Taleb’s ‘Antifragile’ Celebrates Randomness In People, Markets – Forbes

But in Antifragile, Taleb goes beyond this “square peg in a round hole” argument to a larger critique of “soccer moms” (both figurative and literal) who naively attempt to make the world safer by “sucking randomness out to the last drop.” Doing this provides the illusion of safety while actually making us less resilient and […]

Expansion on Book IV of ANTIFRAGILE

(Expansion on Book IV of ANTIFRAGILE) A drivers license is something binary: Pass/Fail. Nobody is foolish enough to try to get high scores in it to improve his CV with a “drivers license from the prestigious center X, summa cum laude”. We understand the nonlinearity there; and we get the point that failing the test […]

Did Davos Steal Its Theme From an Author Who Hates Davos? – Global – The Atlantic Wire

The big idea guiding this year’s World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland is “Resilient Dynamism.” That might not mean much to rubes like us, who don’t get invited to schmooze with other plutocrats and chat amicably about the state of global economy. But to the thought leaders who pay close attention to these summits, Davos […]

Natural disasters: Counting the cost of calamities | The Economist

Referenced in Antifragile pg. 470 Such multi-billion-dollar natural disasters are becoming common. Five of the ten costliest, in terms of money rather than lives, were in the past four years see map. Munich Re, a reinsurer, reckons their economic costs were $378 billion last year, breaking the previous record of $262 billion in 2005 in […]