Nassim Taleb on Antifragility at Google
January 08, 2013 at 16:10 PM EST
Authors @ Google presents Nassim Taleb, discussing the concepts from his latest book, Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder.
Here, Taleb offers his view that the opposite of fragility is not "robustness", as commonly supposed, but anti-fragile. Where things that are fragile need to be handled with care and tranquility, things that are anti-fragile benefit from volatility.
According to Taleb, fragility and anti-fragility can be measured, whereas risk cannot (in spite of what Ivy League academics may think). You'll hear why some risks are tolerable in relation to their expected benefits and why some fragile systems are vulnerable to "prediction error" and hidden, intolerable risks which vastly outweigh their associated benefits.
Using the example of Seneca, a wealthy Stoic philosopher who often imagined himself to be poor, Taleb suggests we should always try to have more upside than downside from random events - "and then you're anti-fragile".
So let's hear it for a world of "many highway exits and options". It sounds a lot better than our current world of top-down planning by the supposed elites.
Related posts:
1. Nassim Taleb on Antifragility at Princeton.
2. Econtalk interview with Nassim Taleb on Antifragility.