Cracking open Nassim Taleb's "Antifragile"

A friend recently recommended "Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder." Already, I can see there will be many resonances between the Mistake Bank project and Taleb's book. First off, a definition. Taleb coins the term antifragility to mean something that's the opposite of fragility - beyond robustness or resilience. He writes, "The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better.... The antifragile loves randomness and uncertainty, which also means - crucially - a love of errors a certain class of errors." I couldn't have written it better myself.

Here are a few delicious tidbits I've found already. Just in these brief snippets, you can already see that "Antifragile," is a book of philosophy as much as anything else:

In short, the fragilista (medical, economic, social planning) is one who makes you engage in policies and actions, all artificial, in which the benefits are small and visible and the side effects potentially severe and invisible.

Just reading the above passage brought to mind the AIG credit default swap scheme - in which one of the world's largest insurers sold, for nickels and dimes, insurance against a very unlikely event - the mass default of mortgage loans. Of course, when that event occurred, the nickels and dimes were long spent, and the tens of billions of liabilities to be paid would have brought the company toppling down (and perhaps our economy), except for unprecedented financial intervention by the federal government.

Taleb and I also have had similar experiences when writing about a subject that we have found interesting for many years:

I write about probability with my entire soul and my entire experiences in the risk-taking business; I write with my scars, hence my thought is inseparable from autobiography.

Taleb also lays out a table comparing examples of "fragile," "robust," and "antifragile" institutions in politics, business, academics, etc. He describes it thus:

On the left, in the fragile category, the mistakes are rare and large when they occur, hence irreversible; to the right the mistakes are small and benign, even reversible and quickly overcome. They are also rich in information. So a certain system of tinkering and trial and error would have the attributes of antifragility. If you want to become antifragile, put yourself in the situation "loves mistakes" - to the right of "hates mistakes" - by making them numerous and small in harm.

Taleb and I are coming from two different starting points, but ending up in a similar place. Smart mistakes are cheap and informative. Dumb mistakes are costly and keep us in ignorance. I can't wait to keep reading "Antifragile."