Book Review: Antifragile

This was a great review. I started reading antifragile but the writing style really bugged me so I stopped, despite finding many of the ideas interesting - maybe I'll give it another go.

One of the problems with the concept of antifragility that I didn't see addressed in the book is that things are only ever antifragile up to a point. Enough volatility will overwhelm even the most antifragile system eventually, and probably without warning.

For example, exercise is antifragile right up until the point that you overdo it and blow your back out. Evolution is antifragile right up until the sun goes supernova.

If there's no way to know in advance how much volatility an antifragile system can endure before it reverts to being merely fragile, the idea has a lot less practical value.

Looking back, I wonder what we will think of our current trend towards political correctness; to me it seems fragile. For instance, what do people gain from teasing or being risque? It seems like we're doing so much to be inclusive, that we're reducing the space where the risque exists; precisely the idea that something "shouldn't be said", but that boundaries may be pushed by virtue of where or how it is done.

I wonder a lot about why some things are deserving of being teased or excluded. Should anything be? It should, right?

If we were all truly accepting, we could tease each other gently and not want to take each others jobs and Twitter accounts away. That would be an "antifragile" social ethic.

"Interventionism is a sucker's game" - intervening in a system requires some kind of theory, some kind of model where the positive effects will definitely be better than the side effects - and given how little people know and how bad we are at prediction, this will probably be wrong. But removing things is kind of like a negative intervention, and so probably good."

seems especially apt today