Review: Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder

Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The central idea of this book is that anything can be categorised into 3 classes.
Fragile: Things that hate disorder (a glass on the table will break when shook)
Robust: Things that are unchanged from volatility. (A rock will be a robust to a certain limit)
Antifragile: Things that gain from disorder. (Living beings, humans included)
Now one of the latest mistakes of humanity is the obsession with predicting volatility and suppressing the risks associated,what the author calls naive intervention. The risk thus gets accumulated and after a period does even more damage( A plane crash once in a while minimizes the chances of future crashes but financial blowups are a result of not allowing certain institutions,like banks, to fail in time)
This naive intervention is particularly interesting in medical science. The suppression of minor stressors and disrespect for the complexity of the biological systems has led to a long history of medical iatrogenics. Medical science has certainly helped to cure the critical conditions of illness but overintervention(as in case of personal doctors who have to do something to justify their profession) causes even non-critical patients to undergo procedures where the downside is far greater than the upside.(Humans are by design Antifragile to a certain limit, what doesn't kill us makes us stronger)
The solution is to bring in the skin in the game. The idea is that those who predict should be held accountable for the losses of people relying on the prediction. People who make taxpayers pay billions by gaming the system and failing should pay their share just as they collect their bonuses.

Progress is Antifragile. Everything progressive about our civilization has come about through experimentation and allowing things to fail on their own. Scientific theories, technology, entrepreneurship all have low success rate given the number of attempts made over time. This is good because it makes sure that only good ideas and practices survive.
We can benifit from volatility by bringing in optionality that is minimising the downside( as Intuitive as this sounds the 'how' of this concept is explained pretty well by the author.)
I liked the book very much. But had to resist to give it 5stars because the author gets too aggressive towards people he disagrees with(rather he disrespects and shames them and by 'them' I mean economists)

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