Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder

This was one of the best books that I’ve been able to read this year. Often, you get the sense of repetition of argument and trope reading even some of the highest quality in non-fiction, and the juxtaposition of Taleb to the more mainstream of public intellectualism is so wonderfully stark. A lot of people are fooled and perturbed by Taleb’s demeanor — it’s obvious, though, that this is a feature of his, not a bug.

It takes someone able to weather chaos unfazed and emboldened (coincidentally, the definition of anti-fragility) to make the line of argumentation about the world that he does. Reading this book makes you not only intellectually smarter but more importantly far better at “sense-making” the world around you — better able to identify irrationalities in the standard orthodoxy that is compounded by academia and the business community. I still haven’t read the other books in his Incerto series, including Black Swan, but they are top on my list.