I must be slacking. I knew this event was scheduled but I hadn’t seen the video until today!
ZURICH.MINDS 2011, Antifragility. Talk with Rolf Dobelli
Video! Nassim Taleb Zurich Minds 2011
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Tag Archives: antifragility
Re: NNT Princeton Event
Reader Jonc wrote with a report from the recent Princeton lecture. He graciously allowed me to reprint his letter here:
Dear John
I attended the event with South Jersey artist Nancy Jackson.. The audio visual gremlins normally present were not at this presentation of NNT’s concept of Antifragility… they were at both the Stevens and Columbia versions. At His appearance at the Harvard Club for the Black Swan of Cairo he was not only hard to hear but nearly invisible to the paying attendees… At Dodds Auditorium, all 100 or so attendees could hear almost every word… HOWEVER, The graphic of the hydra was more reminiscent of a pudgy Muppet than the fearsome 9 headed serpent with poisonous halitosis of the long dead swamp dweller of Lerna in Argolis…
Unlike either the Stevens or the Columbia audiences… (Except for the reserved seating section of students) the Princeton audience looked like it was gathered from the local AARP Mailing list… Taleb’s esteemed Princeton collaborator Daniel Kahneman was not to be seen.
There was a Ivy like subdued resistance to the convention tipping concept in the audience … The Q&A pushback was inept, feeble and somewhat desperate… Resistance was futile… If all is normal Ivy the Princeton Resistance is now in their campus lair dipping verbal arrows in Hydra venom for more aggressive written attacks on NNT and his antifragility concept from a safer distance …
For irony among the honored photographs of heroes hung on the wall of honor of The WWS Dodds Auditorium where this presentation was made, were Paul Krugman and Allen Binder…
Just my 2 cents,
JoncPS I purchased my 57th copy of The Black Swan and had NNT autograph it for Nancy..
And later…
The Daily Princetonian piece you used is correct as far as it goes but does not mention any Q&A… NNT has both supporters and detractors at Princeton…Many of the detractors have vested career interests in the status quo..
I was there early and stayed late to listen to the murmuring…NNT had less faculty support in the room than usual… He was in the land of Krugman and Binder after all…
Taleb at Princeton April 10, 2012
No sign of a recording as of yet. Will post as soon as one comes available.
Taleb opened his lecture with a question: “What is the opposite of fragile?”After a few attempted answers from the audience, Taleb explained that there is no antonym for fragile in common English. He introduced the term “antifragile” as one of the terms he uses to view the stability of systems — financial, political or otherwise — the other most important term being “fragile.” Fragile systems, he explained, have a higher risk of “downside,” meaning that that the introduction of a new variable is more dangerous, while antifragile systems, by contrast, are more resilient.
Photo by Margaret Hua
via Taleb lectures on market fragility – The Daily Princetonian.
Antifragility, Sept 2012
Not sure if this is new, but it’s the first time I’ve seen it. New book title and approx. release date.
Antifragility, Sept 2012, Random House (US) & Penguin (UK)
Genes | Free Full-Text | Antifragility and Tinkering in Biology and in Business Flexibility Provides an Efficient Epigenetic Way to Manage Risk
Abstract: The notion of antifragility, an attribute of systems that makes them thrive under variable conditions, has recently been proposed by Nassim Taleb in a business context. This idea requires the ability of such systems to ‘tinker’, i.e., to creatively respond to changes in their environment. A fairly obvious example of this is natural selection-driven evolution. In this ubiquitous process, an original entity, challenged by an ever-changing environment, creates variants that evolve into novel entities. Analyzing functions that are essential during stationary-state life yield examples of entities that may be antifragile. One such example is proteins with flexible regions that can undergo functional alteration of their side residues or backbone and thus implement the tinkering that leads to antifragility. This in-built property of the cell chassis must be taken into account when considering construction of cell factories driven by engineering principles.