Antifragile is NNT’s self-proclaimed magnum opus, tying ideas from The Black Swan and Fooled by Randomness into a unified framework. Accordingly, it has everything we’ve come to expect from NNT: a near-delusional sense of self-importance, frequent bitterness (admittedly, oftentimes humorous), some neat ideas, and a rampant overreaching of these ideas.
My belief is that there are important ideas and there are unimportant ideas, but there are no ideas so important that they explain everything. The world is far too complex for that. Yet when you have an antifragile hammer, everything in the world becomes a nail.
The book is about convexity and optionality. The core idea is that any time you have an asymmetric payoff, you want volatility – you benefit from disorder (and time) and are thus “antifragile”. This is an important idea: limited downside with uncapped upside is something we should seek both in investment and life – too many people focus on short term results without considering the entire distribution of outcomes that they are exposed to as a result of their decisions. But it’s also important to remember that options have a finite value – something which NNT seems to selectively ignore.
A significant chunk of the book involves Taleb abstracting his ideas of antifragility to the realm of medicine – given his lack of credentials in this area, I’m not sure this is warranted. He is staunchly against what he calls the “interventionist” philosophy of medicine and essentially abides by Nietzche: “what doesn’t kill me makes me stronger”. The advice seems occasionally sensible (avoid unnatural medication that promises small benefits in exchange for unknown/unknowable consequences, e.g thalidomide), but at other times he seems purposely belligerent, bordering on ignorant (e.g don’t use ice packs for swelling because there’s no evidence it works).
His discussion of “interventionism” extends beyond medicine to technology and society. The main premise is that natural things are good because they have survived the test of time (which is the ultimate destroyer of fragility). Frustratingly, Taleb concedes that some technology has been beneficial (and strongly praises Silicon Valley), but spends little time demarcating what makes some non-natural things good and others bad.
Another weird Talebism: NNT believes in exclusively(?) reading old books. His justification is the Lindy effect – the idea that the life expectancy of something is proportional to its age (if they are still relevant after so many years, they must be worth reading). My own thinking has slowly converged on this, e.g focussing on “evergreen” podcast content rather than current affairs podcasts, but I reject the extreme to which Taleb takes it. He suggests, for instance, that we should learn calculus by reading Principia Mathematica. A counterpoint: modern perspectives on old concepts are valuable because modern authors have the advantage of seeing how the concept is truly contextualised – in a way, this is as antifragile as the bottom-up villages in Switzerland that Taleb praises.
The main reason to read Antifragile is that (for better or worse) lots of pseudo-intellectuals have read it – it’s the kind of thing that could come up at a dinner party. But the concepts are semi-original at best, and while the writing style is occasionally entertaining, Taleb's pugnacity severely detracts from the book.