Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder

Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter Summaries and Map
	Prologue
	APPENDIX :      The Triad, or A Map of the World and Things Along the Three Properties
	BOOK I: THE ANTIFRAGILE: AN INTRODUCTION
	Chapter 1.   Between Damocles and Hydra
	Half of Life Has No Name
	Please Behead Me
	On the Necessity of Naming
	Proto-Antifragility
	Domain Independence Is Domain Dependent
	Chapter 2.   Overcompensation and Overreaction Everywhere
	How to Win a Horse Race
	Antifragile Responses as Redundancy
	On the Antifragility of Riots, Love, and Other Unexpected Beneficiaries of Stress
	Please Ban My Book: The Antifragility of Information
	Get Another Job
	Chapter 3.   The Cat and the Washing Machine
	The Complex
	Stressors Are Information
	Equilibrium, Not Again
	Crimes Against Children
	Punished by Translation
	Touristification
	The Secret Thirst for Chance
	Chapter 4.   What Kills Me Makes Others Stronger
	Antifragility by Layers
	Evolution and Unpredictability
	Organisms Are Populations and Populations Are Organisms
	Thank You, Errors
	Learning from the Mistakes of Others
	How to Become Mother Teresa
	Why the Aggregate Hates the Individual
	What Does Not Kill Me Kills Others
	Me and Us
	National Entrepreneur Day
	BOOK II: MODERNITY AND THE DENIAL OF ANTIFRAGILITY
	Chapter 5.   The Souk and the Office Building
	Two Types of Professions
	Lenin in Zurich
	Bottom-up Variations
	Away from Extremistan
	The Great Turkey Problem
	Twelve Thousand Years
	War, Prison, or Both
	Pax Romana
	War or No War
	Chapter 6.   Tell Them I Love (Some) Randomness
	Hungry Donkeys
	Political Annealing
	That Time Bomb Called Stability
	The Second Step: Do (Small) Wars Save Lives?
	What to Tell the Foreign Policy Makers
	What Do We Call Here Modernity?
	Chapter 7.   Naive Intervention
	Intervention and Iatrogenics
	First, Do No Harm
	The Opposite of Iatrogenics
	Iatrogenics in High Places
	Can a Whale Fly Like an Eagle?
	Not Doing Nothing
	Non-Naive Interventionism
	In Praise of Procrastination—the Fabian Kind
	Neuroticism in Industrial Proportions
	A Legal Way to Kill People
	Media-Driven Neuroticism
	The State Can Help—When Incompetent
	France Is Messier than You Think
	Sweden and the Large State
	Catalyst-as-Cause Confusion
	Chapter 8.   Prediction as a Child of Modernity
	Ms.   Bré Has Competitors
	The Predictive
	Plus or Minus Bad Teeth
	The Idea of Becoming a Non-Turkey
	No More Black Swans
	BOOK III: A NONPREDICTIVE VIEW OF THE WORLD
	Chapter 9.   Fat Tony and the Fragilistas
	Indolent Fellow Travelers
	The Importance of Lunch
	The Antifragility of Libraries
	On Suckers and Nonsuckers
	Loneliness
	What the Nonpredictor Can Predict
	Chapter 10. Seneca’s Upside and Downside
	Is This Really Serious?
	Less Downside from Life
	Stoicism’s Emotional Robustification
	The Domestication of Emotions
	How to Become the Master
	The Foundational Asymmetry
	Chapter 11. Never Marry the Rock Star
	On the Irreversibility of Broken Packages
	Seneca’s Barbell
	The Accountant and the Rock Star
	Away from the Golden Middle
	The Domestication of Uncertainty
	BOOK IV: OPTIONALITY, TECHNOLOGY, AND THE INTELLIGENCE OF ANTIFRAGILITY
	Do You Really Know Where You Are Going?
	The Teleological Fallacy
	America’s Principal Asset
	Chapter 12. Thales’ Sweet Grapes
	Option and Asymmetry
	The Options of Sweet Grapes
	Saturday Evening in London
	Your Rent
	Asymmetry
	Things That Like Dispersion
	The Thalesian and the Aristotelian
	How to Be Stupid
	Nature and Options
	The Rationality
	Life Is Long Gamma
	Roman Politics Likes Optionality
	Next
	Chapter 13. Lecturing Birds on How to Fly
	Once More, Less Is More
	Mind the Gaps
	Search and How Errors Can Be Investments
	Creative and Uncreative Destructions
	The Soviet-Harvard Department of Ornithology
	Epiphenomena
	Greed as a Cause
	Debunking Epiphenomena
	Cherry-picking (or the Fallacy of Confirmation)
	Chapter 14. When Two Things Are Not the “Same Thing”
	Where Are the Stressors?
	L’Art pour l’Art, to Learn for Learning’s Sake
	Polished Dinner Partners
	The Green Lumber Fallacy
	How Fat Tony Got Rich (and Fat)
	Conflation
	Prometheus and Epimetheus
	Chapter 15. History Written by the Losers
	The Evidence Staring at Us
	Is It Like Cooking?
	The Industrial Revolution
	Governments Should Spend on Nonteleological Tinkering, Not Research
	The Case in Medicine
	Matt Ridley’s Anti-Teleological Argument
	Corporate Teleology
	The Inverse Turkey Problem
	To Fail Seven Times, Plus or Minus Two
	The Charlatan, the Academic, and the Showman
	Chapter 16. A Lesson in Disorder
	The Ecological and the Ludic
	The Touristification of the Soccer Mom
	An Antifragile (Barbell) Education
	Chapter 17. Fat Tony Debates Socrates
	Euthyphro
	Fat Tony Versus Socrates
	Primacy of Definitional Knowledge
	Mistaking the Unintelligible for the Unintelligent
	Tradition
	The Sucker-Nonsucker Distinction
	Fragility, Not Probability
	Conflation of Events and Exposure
	Conclusion to Book IV
	What Will Happen Next?
	BOOK V: THE NONLINEAR AND THE NONLINEAR
	On the Importance of Attics
	Chapter 18. On the Difference Between a Large Stone and a Thousand Pebbles
	A Simple Rule to Detect the Fragile
	Why Is Fragility Nonlinear?
	When to Smile and When to Frown
	Why Is the Concave Hurt by Black Swan Events?
	Traffic in New York
	Someone Call New York City Officials
	Where More Is Different
	A “Balanced Meal”
	Run, Don’t Walk
	Small May Be Ugly, It Is Certainly Less Fragile
	How to Be Squeezed
	Kerviel and Micro-Kerviel
	How to Exit a Movie Theater
	Projects and Prediction
	Why Planes Don’t Arrive Early
	Wars, Deficits, and Deficits
	Where the “Efficient” Is Not Efficient
	Pollution and Harm to the Planet
	The Nonlinearity of Wealth
	Conclusion
	Chapter 19. The Philosopher’s Stone and Its Inverse
	How to Detect Who Will Go Bust
	The Idea of Positive and Negative Model Error
	How to Lose a Grandmother
	Now the Philosopher’s Stone
	How to Transform Gold into Mud: The Inverse Philosopher’s Stone
	BOOK VI: VIA NEGATIVA
	Where Is the Charlatan?
	Subtractive Knowledge
	Barbells, Again
	Less Is More
	Chapter 20. Time and Fragility
	From Simonides to Jensen
	Learning to Subtract
	Technology at Its Best
	To Age in Reverse: The Lindy Effect
	A Few Mental Biases
	Neomania and Treadmill Effects
	Architecture and the Irreversible Neomania
	Wall to Wall Windows
	Metrification
	Turning Science into Journalism
	What Should Break
	Prophets and the Present
	Empedocles’ Dog
	What Does Not Make Sense
	Chapter 21. Medicine, Convexity, and Opacity
	How to Argue in an Emergency Room
	First Principle of Iatrogenics (Empiricism)
	Second Principle of Iatrogenics (Nonlinearity in Response)
	Jensen’s Inequality in Medicine
	Burying the Evidence
	The Never-ending History of Turkey Situations
	Nature’s Opaque Logic
	Guilty or Innocent
	Plead Ignorance of Biology: Phenomenology
	The Ancients Were More Caustic
	How to Medicate Half the Population
	The “Rigor of Mathematics” in Medicine
	Next
	Chapter 22. To Live Long, but Not Too Long
	Life Expectancy and Convexity
	Subtraction Adds to Your Life
	The Iatrogenics of Money
	Religion and Naive Interventionism
	If It’s Wednesday, I Must Be Vegan
	Convexity Effects and Random Nutrition
	How to Eat Yourself
	Walk-Deprived
	I Want to Live Forever
	BOOK VII: THE ETHICS OF FRAGILITY AND ANTIFRAGILITY
	Chapter 23. Skin in the Game: Antifragility and Optionality at the Expense of Others
	Hammurabi
	The Talker’s Free Option
	Postdicting
	The Stiglitz Syndrome
	The Problem of Frequency, or How to Lose Arguments
	The Right Decision for the Wrong Reason
	The Ancients and the Stiglitz Syndrome
	To Burn One’s Vessels
	How Poetry Can Kill You
	The Problem of Insulation
	Champagne Socialism
	Soul in the Game
	Options, Antifragility, and Social Fairness
	The Robert Rubin Free Option
	Which Adam Smith?
	The Antifragility and Ethics of (Large) Corporations
	Artisans, Marketing, and the Cheapest to Deliver
	Lawrence of Arabia or Meyer Lansky
	Next
	Chapter 24. Fitting Ethics to a Profession
	Wealth Without Independence
	The Professionals and the Collective
	The Ethical and the Legal
	Casuistry as Optionality
	Big Data and the Researcher’s Option
	The Tyranny of the Collective
	Chapter 25. Conclusion
	Epilogue
	Glossary
	Appendix I
	Appendix II
	Additional Notes, Afterthoughts, and Further Reading
	Bibliography
	Acknowledgments
	Other Books by This Author
	About the Author