Read This!

The subtitle of Nassim Taleb’s new book describes what it’s all about. But then he sharpens the pencil: “…or, rather, how to not be afraid to work with things we patently don’t understand, and, more principally, in what manner we should work with these.

In the The Black Swan he showed that life was highly surprising, much more surprising than the risk specialists who tried to map risk on a normal distribution curve.  Now he takes direct aim at the industry and its practitioners:  ”It is easier to figure out if something is fragile than to predict the occurrence of an event that may harm it. Fragility can be measured; risk is not measurable (outside of casinos or the minds of people who call themselves ” risk experts.” – my emphasis).

There is a message of hope: ” … we do not need to understand the future probability of events, but we can figure out the fragility to these events.”

Antifragility describes how it is possible ” to live happily in a world (we) don’t understand.”

Next time!