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Antifragile
A review of

Antifragile

Things That Gain from Disorder


Don’t Expect Answers

by David Meyer

Best-selling author of The Black Swan and brilliant iconoclast Nassim Nicholas Taleb explains – or doesn’t – why fearing volatility paralyzes thinking and systems.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb is a distinguished professor of risk engineering at New York University Polytechnic School of Engineering, a distinguished research scholar at Said Business School at Oxford and the best-selling author of The Black Swan, among many other works.

As befits an author of his credentials, Taleb’s book is brilliant, confusing, idiosyncratic, useful and irritating – sometimes all at once. Everyone understands that if something is fragile, it breaks. Taleb’s core idea – profound and almost revolutionary – is that while fragility poses a danger to complex systems and is a growing menace to the increasingly interrelated global economy, the opposite of fragile is not, for example, robust or sturdy.