Summary of the book titled Antifragile: Things that gain from disorder from 2014 by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. This summary is based on Larry Prusak’s summary which Taleb has praised, another summary found on Farnam Steet Blog, and my own reading experience.

Since we are investigating the future of cities, I though it would be interesting to see how systems can work beyond sustainability and robustness, antifragile, as Nassim Nicholas Taleb defines it. The book is about how systems can become antifragile and what the advantages are of becoming one through many different examples.

You can find the book through this link.

Book description from Amazon:

• Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the bestselling author of The Black Swan and one of the foremost thinkers of our time, reveals how to thrive in an uncertain world. Just as human bones get stronger when subjected to stress and tension, and rumors or riots intensify when someone tries to repress them, many things in life benefit from stress, disorder, volatility, and turmoil. What Taleb has identified and calls “antifragile” is that category of things that not only gain from chaos but need it in order to survive and flourish. In The Black Swan, Taleb showed us that highly improbable and unpredictable events underlie almost everything about our world. In Antifragile, Taleb stands uncertainty on its head, making it desirable, even necessary, and proposes that things be built in an antifragile manner. The antifragile is beyond the resilient or robust. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better and better.

Furthermore, the antifragile is immune to prediction errors and protected from adverse events. Why is the city-state better than the nation-state, why is debt bad for you, and why is what we call “efficient” not efficient at all? Why do government responses and social policies protect the strong and hurt the weak? Why should you write your resignation letter before even starting on the job? How did the sinking of the Titanic save lives? The book spans innovation by trial and error, life decisions, politics, urban planning, war, personal finance, economic systems, and medicine. And throughout, in addition to the street wisdom of Fat Tony of Brooklyn, the voices and recipes of ancient wisdom, from Roman, Greek, Semitic, and medieval sources, are loud and clear.

Antifragile is a blueprint for living in a Black Swan world.Erudite, witty, and iconoclastic, Taleb’s message is revolutionary: The antifragile, and only the antifragile, will make it.

The transcripts are available through this link.

What wast the most interesting part for you? What questions did arise for you? Let me know on twitter @WTF4Cities!

I hope this was an interesting episode for you and thanks for tuning in.

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