Genre: Nonfiction/Researched/Philosophy
Page Count: 425 pages
Over twenty-four chapters and seven books long, Taleb’s ‘Antifragile’ is a thrilling, fierce, and successfully comprehensive attempt to debunk the ‘rational’ myths of the our modern and ‘fragile’ world. The importance of Taleb’s this particular book is described by Taleb himself in the prologue, saying that this book is the concluding and summarizing work of his previous two books ‘Fooled by Randomness’ and his world-wide famous ‘Black Swan’; a book that has fascinated him all his life, and has been the ultimate aim of his previous works.
Yet once again, disappointed by my instinctive feelings about a book and naïve habit of not researching about the book I purchase or read so not to spoil the fun of the book, I read this book in the wrong order. I didn’t read ‘The Black Swan’ because I thought I needed some antifragility in life right now, and mistook this book for a self-help one. However, while the topics and contents of this book are more scientific and applicable in a wider sense of the whole world, the readers also can relate the lessons from this book to his personal and social life. Just don’t think this book would toughen you up in any particular way; it’s not about you.
Opening the book, I was surprised by how academic it looked. Never before had I come across a book that looked so much like a ‘textbook’ – being portioned into further books, and containing several chapters. But while it looks a bit overwhelming at the first glance, reading it is totally another experience. It may look like a textbook, but it reads like a thriller!
Starting off, this book has one of the, or the, most engaging and useful-to-book prologues ever. The prologue of this book not only explains the foreign idea of ‘antifragility’ in a simple way, but does so in light of the context of the book. Idea explained, check; readers engaged, check; and book foresighted, check. Then you start reading the book, and quickly realize how defiant, new, and even rebellious this book is. It criticizes and defames the very notion of our modern world – naïve safety, or over-certainty.
If anything, this book deeply and fiercely roots for embracement of the volatility, uncertainty, and disorder. Taleb has some very telling and new-and-counter-to-mind ideas to tell us in this book.
It starts with the introduction to the antifragile (a word that doesn’t or didn’t exist), and how opposite it is to our fragile and modern world. Hydra, a snake who gets two heads when one gets cut off, loves harm and represents antifragility. Further chapters of ‘Book I’ explains how inherent antifragility is to Mother Nature, and how devastatingly and naively are we moving away from it. In chapter ‘what kills me makes me stronger’ (such playful-to-original-source chapter names are to be expected throughout this book) Taleb introduces the layers of antifragility and how some of us are antifragile at the expense of others. In ‘Book II’ Taleb shows the pettiness of our modern world and its denial of the antifragility.
‘Book III’ presents a ‘nonpredictive view of the world’ where Taleb brilliantly relates Seneca’s philosophy as a model for an antifragile life along with its benefits. The lengthy ‘Book IV’ is both fun and boring at times, and talks about the intelligence of antifragility and how it is best to let nature run its course. This book also has some fun philosophical chapters where Fat Tony debates Socrates. Some of the chapters do get boring, but Taleb is quick and precise in his contents, and even tells the readers that they can skip certain chapters, so it’s never completely disengaging. ‘Book V’ talks about nonlinearity and convexity (didn’t enjoy reading much of it) and ‘Book VI’ (my favorite) talks about ‘via negativa’, the simple and most practical and revealing technique of ‘subtractive knowledge’. In this book, the readers realize, once again, the genius of Taleb and his book. ‘Book VII’ closes the book with chapters and arguments on ethics, and how we’ve made unethical things ‘legal’.
Full of maxims, equations and tables, while being relevant, novel, comprehensive, telling, articulate, and thrilling at the same time, ‘Antifragile’ is a book of huge importance as it shows where our modern world is being its own demise. Valuable both at wider and personal level, almost everyone can learn important and perspective-shifting lessons from Taleb in this thrilling book.
Ratings: 5/5 ***** (September 30, 2020)