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Antifragile: How to Live in a World We Do Not
Taleb accepts the inconsistencies and incoherence that expose the myth of “coherence” in the world. As he argues through his concept of “antifragility”, the power of the institutional discourse to form the individual's unconscious and thereby construct the subject is clearly the role of repressive and ideological structures. He takes a stand against such indissoluble reality and sees the working of evolution and growth in the very nature of our existence and our ideas, in culture, political systems, in economic success, in corporate survival: “The antifragility loves randomness and uncertainty, which also means, crucially, a love of errors,” thus allowing us to deal with the unknown without understanding it fully. In other words, a flaneur in research or business “looks for optionality”, a kind of non-narrative approach to life. Taleb's motive behind enunciating such a provocative philosophy is to “domesticate, even dominate, even conquer, the unseen, the opaque, and the inexplicable.” Clearly, we can believe in the fact that many things benefit from shocks and evolve when faced by disorder or randomness; love of adventure and the daring to take risks move humanity towards growth: “Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better.” It is the value-at-risk metric or the “bullshit detector,” that becomes the integral part of forward movement or the sense of adventure. Markets and economic systems cannot regiment you to fit rigid systems like the mythical Procrustean Bed where Procrustes accommodates his guests by hacking their limbs to fit the size of the bed. The book is witty as well as confrontational by an out-of-the box philosopher economist. When a restaurant fails, other restaurants are not affected but gain from the mistakes the failed restaurant made. Thus, the restaurant business is antifragile. On the other hand, when one bank fails it has a cascading effect on the complete banking system, and thus its fragility. Antifragility is based on every failed idea which becomes a lesson learnt for the next step or towards enhancement of knowledge. Taleb reiterates in the book, just as “there is no such thing as a failed soldier, dead or alive (unless he acted in a cowardly manner), likewise there is no such thing as a failed entrepreneur or failed scientific researcher.” Every error makes the system sturdier, and it is incorrect of human nature to consider that there is order where there is chaos. In a world replete with “black swans” or events which are decidedly improbable but have drastic consequences, we need to face up to the “unfragility” of existence. No one could be more accomplished to write on risk and randomness than Nassim Taleb, who is Professor of Risk Management at New York University.
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nassim Nicholas
As he believes, “We are better at doing rather than thinking, thanks to antifragility.” Is it not true that “there are even financial contracts that are antifragile as they are explicitly designed to benefit from the market volatility?” Thus to thrive in an uncertain world, Taleb emphasises the essential feature of turmoil or disorder that benefits many things in life: “Human bones get stronger when subjected to stress and tension.” In his now famous book The Black Swan, Taleb had argued about the unpredictability of all events. In this sequel, he stands up for the desirability and necessity of the uncertainty principle. Innovation is not possible without trial and error; life's decisions and all social planning or going into a war or financial enterprise become possible only in the face of the unsure and the unpredictability of events. It's like the “flaneur,” which signifies someone, “who unlike a tourist, makes a decision opportunistically at every step to revise his schedule (or his destination) so he can imbibe things based on new information obtained.” 