Antifragile

Antifragile by Nassim Taleb is an interesting book. These selected concept notes were published in 2020.

Antifragile – systems that increase in capability to thrive as a result of stressors, shocks, volatility, noise, mistakes, faults, attacks, or failure

The main idea of the book is presented above. Some other concepts I’ve put in Obsidian (Zettelkasten) so I can find them connected to other things.

Here is a more generic summary:

• Lindy effect: things (non-alive) that have survived to this day, will survive longer than a thing that is younger (e.g. a book that is in print for long, will probably outlive a newer book)
• Barbell strategy: strategy that focusses on two extremes, from finance, can also be applied to personal goals or work goals (very high and very low risk)
• Via negativa: what to avoid or not do
• Skin in the game: need to take a risk (personally) to do something (Taleb argues that otherwise you won’t have the right incentive)
• Green Lumber Fallacy: understanding the wrong thing, or not understanding/knowing about the underlying/practical considerations
• Also lots of talk about concave and convex relationships versus them being linear. This could also explain second order effects as sometimes only one more thing needs to happen before the graph shoots up versus trickles up

For another view, see the Astral Codex Ten review.