Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (Incerto)

PFS Book Club-28th October 2023 Nitin reviewed the book “Anti fragile- Things that Gain from Disorder” by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Nitin started the session with a biography of the author Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Nassim, a Lebanese by origin is now based out of America. He was a quantitative trader before transitioning as an academic researcher and writer. His other famous works include-Black Swan, Fooled by Randomness etc. Nitin described that systems can be categorized as – Fragile, robust and Anti fragile. While we tag fragile goods with a sticker stating “Fragile” when we submit our baggage at airports, we never tag any baggage as “robust”. Fragility is something that will be at its best unharmed; anti-fragile is something that improves when an unexpected volatile event occurs. Under stress and pressure, antifragile things don’t break or merely retain their shape. Instead, they become stronger than before. Chandrasekhar sir gave an example of how the 9/11 event and lately the Covid 19 event have in turn positively impacted many businesses and several ways of living. Nitin described how nature and humans are a demonstration of antifragility. Just by living life and undergoing many stressful challenges, we become more and more anti-fragile. To distinguish anti-fragile from robust, the author has used an example of a cat vs a washing machine. Everything that has life is anti-fragile to some extent whereas a washing machine is robust now and will eventually wear away. Prateek mentioned that even human evolution is a good example of being anti-fragile. We talked about how in organizations, these unpredictable and random events lead to more antifragility. This randomness makes one stronger. Nitin quoted an example of twin brothers- one who was a banker and had a predictable routine(fragile) and the other who was a driver with no predictable schedule. Eventually when an absolutely unpredictable situation (say losing a job or Covid 19) occurrs, the brother who is a driver will be at an advantage(anti fragile) as he has tested several waters. To this Vijaya P mam commented that to be in your cocoon and safe zone can be disastrous at times. Lack of stressors can also make you fragile. When you don’t use your muscles, your body becomes weak. Sometimes the chaos and randomness leads to more strength. Errors are valuable as long as we learn from them. Nitin narrated how an air crash though is a huge tragedy but in the hindsight the lessons learnt from 1 plane crash can prevent several upcoming plane crashes. Nitin mentioned that it is a 500 page book and the author seems to be swayed away from the main theme at times. The author has described a Lindy effect which means that the longer something nonperishable has been around, the longer it is expected to stick around in future. For example, a book that has been around in bookstores for 20 years has a high predictability of being there for next 5 years as well. The author has also drafted that information is anti fragile i.e. it benefits more from the efforts to harm it than the efforts to promote it. If you ban something, it is more likely to gain more interest and viewership. Nitin talked about the author’s perspective of how less is more and usually more effective. There is a need for people to have “skin in the game”. He spoke about Switzerland, a country which does not have a large central government but rather a collection of municipal entities. Switzerland’s economic success can be attributed to its anti-fragile and decentralized nature. This point brought about many discussions on the emphasis of building smaller and more empowered agile teams in organizations as small is usually more effective. Kids are meant to be anti-fragile. They thrive in randomness and learning through trial and errors. It was amazing to hear such different perspectives and varied examples of fragile, anti-fragile and robust. All in all, a great session.

In many ways this book is more interesting than The Black Swan, and I agree with a lot of what Taleb writes about in the book. I especially enjoyed and agreed with his thoughts on diet. (Eat only what ancient man ate, and including limited meat). But there are also more things in this book that can be picked apart, either because he is wrong or flippantly unclear about them. Maybe that just makes the book more interesting to discuss in a book club or seminar.