Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (2 page)

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Authors: Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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The Thalesian and the Aristotelian

How to Be Stupid

Nature and Options

The Rationality

Life Is Long Gamma

Roman Politics Likes Optionality

Next

Chapter 13. Lecturing Birds on How to Fly

Once More, Less Is More

Mind the Gaps

Search and How Errors Can Be Investments

Creative and Uncreative Destructions

The Soviet-Harvard Department of Ornithology

Epiphenomena

Greed as a Cause

Debunking Epiphenomena

Cherry-picking (or the Fallacy of Confirmation)

Chapter 14. When Two Things Are Not the “Same Thing”

Where Are the Stressors?

L’Art pour l’Art, to Learn for Learning’s Sake

Polished Dinner Partners

The Green Lumber Fallacy

How Fat Tony Got Rich (and Fat)

Conflation

Prometheus and Epimetheus

Chapter 15. History Written by the Losers

The Evidence Staring at Us

Is It Like Cooking?

The Industrial Revolution

Governments Should Spend on Nonteleological Tinkering, Not Research

The Case in Medicine

Matt Ridley’s Anti-Teleological Argument

Corporate Teleology

The Inverse Turkey Problem

To Fail Seven Times, Plus or Minus Two

The Charlatan, the Academic, and the Showman

Chapter 16. A Lesson in Disorder

The Ecological and the Ludic

The Touristification of the Soccer Mom

An Antifragile (Barbell) Education

Chapter 17. Fat Tony Debates Socrates

Euthyphro

Fat Tony Versus Socrates

Primacy of Definitional Knowledge

Mistaking the Unintelligible for the Unintelligent

Tradition

The Sucker-Nonsucker Distinction

Fragility, Not Probability

Conflation of Events and Exposure

Conclusion to Book IV

What Will Happen Next?

BOOK V: THE NONLINEAR AND THE NONLINEAR

On the Importance of Attics

Chapter 18. On the Difference Between a Large Stone and a Thousand Pebbles

A Simple Rule to Detect the Fragile

Why Is Fragility Nonlinear?

When to Smile and When to Frown

Why Is the Concave Hurt by Black Swan Events?

Traffic in New York

Someone Call New York City Officials

Where More Is Different

A “Balanced Meal”

Run, Don’t Walk

Small May Be Ugly, It Is Certainly Less Fragile

How to Be Squeezed

Kerviel and Micro-Kerviel

How to Exit a Movie Theater

Projects and Prediction

Why Planes Don’t Arrive Early

Wars, Deficits, and Deficits

Where the “Efficient” Is Not Efficient

Pollution and Harm to the Planet

The Nonlinearity of Wealth

Conclusion

Chapter 19. The Philosopher’s Stone and Its Inverse

How to Detect Who Will Go Bust

The Idea of Positive and Negative Model Error

How to Lose a Grandmother

Now the Philosopher’s Stone

How to Transform Gold into Mud: The Inverse Philosopher’s Stone

BOOK VI: VIA NEGATIVA

Where Is the Charlatan?

Subtractive Knowledge

Barbells, Again

Less Is More

Chapter 20. Time and Fragility

From Simonides to Jensen

Learning to Subtract

Technology at Its Best

To Age in Reverse: The Lindy Effect

A Few Mental Biases

Neomania and Treadmill Effects

Architecture and the Irreversible Neomania

Wall to Wall Windows

Metrification

Turning Science into Journalism

What Should Break

Prophets and the Present

Empedocles’ Dog

What Does Not Make Sense

Chapter 21. Medicine, Convexity, and Opacity

How to Argue in an Emergency Room

First Principle of Iatrogenics (Empiricism)

Second Principle of Iatrogenics (Nonlinearity in Response)

Jensen’s Inequality in Medicine

Burying the Evidence

The Never-ending History of Turkey Situations

Nature’s Opaque Logic

Guilty or Innocent

Plead Ignorance of Biology: Phenomenology

The Ancients Were More Caustic

How to Medicate Half the Population

The “Rigor of Mathematics” in Medicine

Next

Chapter 22. To Live Long, but Not Too Long

Life Expectancy and Convexity

Subtraction Adds to Your Life

The Iatrogenics of Money

Religion and Naive Interventionism

If It’s Wednesday, I Must Be Vegan

Convexity Effects and Random Nutrition

How to Eat Yourself

Walk-Deprived

I Want to Live Forever

BOOK VII: THE ETHICS OF FRAGILITY AND ANTIFRAGILITY

Chapter 23. Skin in the Game: Antifragility and Optionality at the Expense of Others

Hammurabi

The Talker’s Free Option

Postdicting

The Stiglitz Syndrome

The Problem of Frequency, or How to Lose Arguments

The Right Decision for the Wrong Reason

The Ancients and the Stiglitz Syndrome

To Burn One’s Vessels

How Poetry Can Kill You

The Problem of Insulation

Champagne Socialism

Soul in the Game

Options, Antifragility, and Social Fairness

The Robert Rubin Free Option

Which Adam Smith?

The Antifragility and Ethics of (Large) Corporations

Artisans, Marketing, and the Cheapest to Deliver

Lawrence of Arabia or Meyer Lansky

Next

Chapter 24. Fitting Ethics to a Profession

Wealth Without Independence

The Professionals and the Collective

The Ethical and the Legal

Casuistry as Optionality

Big Data and the Researcher’s Option

The Tyranny of the Collective

Chapter 25. Conclusion

Epilogue

Glossary

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