xxi, 519 pages : 21 cm "The acclaimed author of the influential bestseller The Black Swan, Nicholas Nassim Taleb takes a next big step with a deceptively simple concept: the "antifragile." Like the Greek hydra that grows two heads for each one it loses, people, systems, and institutions that are antifragile not only withstand shocks, they benefit from them. In a modern world dominated by chaos and uncertainty, Antifragile is a revolutionary vision from one of the most subversive and important thinkers of our time"-- Includes bibliographical references (pages 481-504) and index Appendix : The triad, or a map of the world and things along the three properties -- Book I. The antifragile: an introduction : Between democies and Hydra : Half of life has no name ; Please behead me ; Proto-antifragility ; Domain independence is domain dependent -- Overcompensation and overreaction everywhere : How to win a horse race ; On the antifragility of riots, love, and other unexpected beneficiaries of stress -- The cat and the washing machine : Stressors are information ; Crimes against children -- What kills me makes other stronger : Antifragility by layers ; Thank you, errors ; Why the aggregate hates the individual ; What does not kill me kills others -- Book II. Modernity and the denial of antifragility : The souk and the office building : Two types of professions ; Bottom-up variations ; Away from Extremistan ; Twelve thousand years -- Tell them I love (some) randomness : Hungry donkeys ; That time bomb called stability ; What do we call here modernity -- Naive intervention ; Intervention and iatrogenics ; In praise of procrastination: the Fabian kind ; Neuroticism in industrial proportions ; The state can help, when incompetent ; Catalyst-as cause confusion -- Prediction as a child of modernity -- Book III. A nonpredictive view of the world : Fat Tony and the Fragilistas : Indolent fellow travelers ; On suckers and nonsuckers -- Seneca's upside and downside -- Never marry the rock star ; On the irreversibility of broken packages ; Seneca's barbell -- Book IV. Optionality, technology, and the intelligence of antifragility : Do you really know where you are going? -- Thales' sweet grapes : Option and asymmetry ; The Thalesian and the Aristotelian -- Lecturing birds on how to fly : The Soviet-Harvard department of ornithology ; Epiphenomena -- When two things are not the "same thing : The green lumber fallacy ; Conflation ; Prometheus and Epimetheus -- History written by the losers : The case in medicine ; The inverse turkey problem ; The charlatan, the academic, and the showman -- A lesson in disorder : The ecological and the Ludic ; An antifragile (barbell) education -- Fat Tony debates Socrates : Euthyphro ; Fat Tony versus Socrates ; Primacy of definitional knowledge ; The sucker-nonsucker distinction ; Conclusion to Book IV -- Book V. The nonlinear and the nonlinear : On the importance of attics -- On the difference between a large stone and a thousand pebbles : A simple rule to detect the fragile ; Traffic in New York ; Where more in different ; Small may be ugly, it is certainly less fragile ; Projects and prediction ; Where the "efficient" is not efficient -- The philosopher's stone and its inverse : how to detect who will go bust ; How to lose a grandmother ; Now the philosopher's stone ; Barbells, again -- Time and fragility : From Simonides to Jensen ; Learning to subtract ; To age in reverse: the Lindy effect ; A few mental biases ; Architecture and the irreversible neomania ; Turning science into journalism ; What should break ; Prophets and the present ; Empedocles' dog -- Medicine, convexity, and opacity : How to argue in an emergency room ; First principle of Iatrogenics (empiricism) ; Second principles of iatrogenics (nonlinearity in response) ; Burying the evidence ; Nature's opaque logic -- To live long, but not too long : life expectancy and convexity ; If it's Wednesday, I must be vegan -- Book VII. The ethics of fragility and antifrigility : Skin in the game: antifragility and optionality at the expense of others : Hammurabi ; The talker's free option ; The ancients and the Stiglitz syndrome ; Options, antifragility, and social fairness ; The antifragility and ethics of (large) corporations -- Fitting ethics to a profession : The professionals and the collective ; The ethical and the legal ; Big Data and the researcher's option ; The tyranny of the collective -- Conclusion -- Epilogue : Glossary -- Appendix I.A graphical tour of the book -- Appendix II. Where most economic models fragilize and blow people up