Free Republic

after this, you’ll welcome obstacles “The general principle of antifragility, it is much better to do things you cannot explain than explain things you cannot do.” – Nassim Taleb“Being an entrepreneur is an existential, not just a financial thing.” – Nassim Taleb“They have turned the wolf into a dog and man himself into the man’s best domesticated animal.” – Friedrich Nietzsche  The ideas in this post have been the most transformative in my life over the last couple years. I avoided writing about them because I didn’t feel I could. Finally, I feel that I’ve internalized, tested, and understand them...

Author and philosopher Nassim Nicholas Taleb offers a definitive solution for how to gain from disorder and chaos, while being protected from fragilities and adverse events. Taleb argues that many things in life benefit from stress, disorder, volatility, and turmoil. What he calls the antifragile is actually beyond the robust, because it benefits from shocks, uncertainty, and stressors, just as human bones get stronger when subjected to stress and tension. The antifragile needs disorder in order to survive and flourish

Reason's Nick Gillespie sat down with Taleb for a wide-ranging discussion about why debt leads to fragility (5:16); the importance of "skin in the game" to a properly functioning financial system (10:45); why large banks should be nationalized (21:47); why technology won't rule the future (24:20); the value of studying the classics (26:09); his intellectual adversaries (33:30); why removing things is often the best way to solve problems (36:50); his intellectual influences (39:10); why capitalism is more about disincentives than incentives (43:10); why large, centralized states are prone to fail (44:50); his libertarianism (47:30); and why he'll never take writing...

Nassim Nicholas Taleb has little tolerance for, well, a lot of things. But, as his latest book demonstrates, he holds a particular grievance against the mediocre, the safe middle ground, and most forms of moderation. True to form, Antifragile: Things that Gain From Disorder, is a work of non-fiction that trades in extremes—a book that, in complete earnestness, offers thoughts on everything from the philosophy of Seneca and the structure of the Swiss government to the value of procrastination and the limits of academic research. He is just as likely to bring in Ben Bernanke and Ralph Nader as Hammurabi...