A reader could easily run out of adjectives to describe Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s new book Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder. The first ones that come to mind are: maddening, bold, repetitious, judgemental, intemperate, erudite, reductive, shrewd, self-indulgent, self-congratulatory, provocative, pompous, penetrating, perspicacious and pretentious.
Antifragile is a kind of sequel or logical follow-on to Mr Taleb’s best-selling 2007 book The Black Swan and his earlier book Fooled by Randomness. In those and other writings he has argued that “Black Swans” – large, improbable and highly consequential events like World War I or the rise of the Internet – are not predictable. Despite human beings’ taste for rational patterns of cause and effect, and their eagerness to impose narratives on the world, he observed, it’s impossible to calculate the risks of Black Swan events or predict their occurrence.
In the world today, he says in Antifragile, “Black Swan effects are necessarily increasing, as a result of complexity, interdependence between parts, globalisation and the beastly thing called ‘efficiency’ that makes people now sail too close to the wind”. So how to deal with the dangers posed by this proliferation of uncertainty and volatility?
Mr Taleb contends that we must learn how to make our public and private lives (our political systems, our social policies, our finances) not merely less vulnerable to randomness and chaos, but “antifragile” — poised to benefit or take advantage of stress, errors and change, the way, say, the mythological Hydra generated two new heads, each time one was cut off.
In Mr Taleb’s view, “We have been fragilising the economy, our health, political life, education, almost everything” by “suppressing randomness and volatility”, much the way that “systematically preventing forest fires from taking place ‘to be safe’ makes the big one much worse”. In fact, he says, top-down efforts to eliminate volatility (whether in the form of “neurotically overprotective parents” or the former Fed chairman Alan Greenspan’s trying to smooth out economic fluctuations by injecting cheap money into the system) end up making things more fragile, not less. Overtreatment of illness or physical problems, he suggests, can lead to medical error, much the way that American support of dictatorial regimes “for the sake of stability” abroad can lead to “chaos after a revolution”.
This is the central argument – the naked Christmas tree, as it were – in this highly discursive book, which proceeds to hang every sort of intellectual garland and philosophical ornament on its branches. Not only is Antifragile wildly ambitious and multidisciplinary, addressing issues of politics, economics, social policy, philosophy and medicine, but it also suffers from a kind of attention-deficit disorder, jumping from subject to subject, while continually looping back on itself. It’s a book that could have benefited enormously from some judicious editing.
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Mr. Taleb – who has worked as a derivatives trader and quantitative analyst, and who holds the title of distinguished professor of risk engineering at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University – writes with great certainty and vigour. At his best he serves up provocative theories that encourage us to look at the world anew. He reminds us of the limits of Enlightenment reason, goads us into thinking about why small might be less fragile than big (a rule, he implies, that applies to animals and corporations alike) and gives us a renewed appreciation of practical knowledge (of the sort possessed by engineers and entrepreneurs) as opposed to the sort of academic knowledge acquired in school.
Unfortunately, he delivers such lessons with bullying grandiosity. He boasts about being able to dead lift 330 pounds and about being an “an intellectual who has the appearance of a bodyguard”. He also boasts about uncovering ideas in the philosopher Seneca’s work that no other commentators have recognised.
Often the narrative hops and skips from broad-stroke hypotheses to personal anecdotes, from contrarian attacks on people Mr Taleb disdains (including many academics, doctors and journalists) to PowerPoint-like taxonomies, enumerating the differences between, say, concave nonlinearity and convex nonlinearity, or the artisanal and the industrial.
Antifragile is also riddled with contradictions. Mr Taleb offers predictions about the future, though he keeps talking about the unreliability of predictions. He repeatedly attacks theorists and academics as the sorts of people who would presume to “lecture birds on how to fly”. And yet he’s an academic himself (whose main subject matter, his book jacket tells us, is “decision making under opacity”), and the book he’s written is nothing if not one big, hyperextended, overarching theory about how to live in a random and uncertain world.
©2012 The New York Times News Service
ANTIFRAGILE
Things That Gain From Disorder
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Random House; 519 pages; $30