Antifragile PDF Download

Author: Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0679645276
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 545

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Book Description
Antifragile is a standalone book in Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s landmark Incerto series, an investigation of opacity, luck, uncertainty, probability, human error, risk, and decision-making in a world we don’t understand. The other books in the series are Fooled by Randomness, The Black Swan, Skin in the Game, and The Bed of Procrustes. 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. Praise for Antifragile “Ambitious and thought-provoking . . . highly entertaining.”—The Economist “A bold book explaining how and why we should embrace uncertainty, randomness, and error . . . It may just change our lives.”—Newsweek

Author: Shane Parrish
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0593719972
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
Discover the essential thinking tools you’ve been missing with The Great Mental Models series by Shane Parrish, New York Times bestselling author and the mind behind the acclaimed Farnam Street blog and “The Knowledge Project” podcast. This first book in the series is your guide to learning the crucial thinking tools nobody ever taught you. Time and time again, great thinkers such as Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett have credited their success to mental models–representations of how something works that can scale onto other fields. Mastering a small number of mental models enables you to rapidly grasp new information, identify patterns others miss, and avoid the common mistakes that hold people back. The Great Mental Models: Volume 1, General Thinking Concepts shows you how making a few tiny changes in the way you think can deliver big results. Drawing on examples from history, business, art, and science, this book details nine of the most versatile, all-purpose mental models you can use right away to improve your decision making and productivity. This book will teach you how to: Avoid blind spots when looking at problems. Find non-obvious solutions. Anticipate and achieve desired outcomes. Play to your strengths, avoid your weaknesses, … and more. The Great Mental Models series demystifies once elusive concepts and illuminates rich knowledge that traditional education overlooks. This series is the most comprehensive and accessible guide on using mental models to better understand our world, solve problems, and gain an advantage.

Author: Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0812997697
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 1377

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Book Description
Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s landmark Incerto series is an investigation of luck, uncertainty, probability, opacity, human error, risk, disorder, and decision-making in a world we don’t understand, in nonoverlapping and standalone books. All four volumes—Antifragile, The Black Swan, Fooled by Randomness, and the expanded edition of The Bed of Procrustes, updated with more than 50 percent new material—are now together in one ebook bundle. ANTIFRAGILE “Startling . . . richly crammed with insights, stories, fine phrases and intriguing asides.”—The Wall Street Journal Just as human bones get stronger when subjected to stress and tension, many things in life benefit from 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. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better and better. What is crucial is that the antifragile loves errors, as it incurs small harm and large benefits from them. Spanning politics, urban planning, war, personal finance, economic systems, and medicine in an interdisciplinary and erudite style, Antifragile is a blueprint for living in a Black Swan world. THE BLACK SWAN “[A book] that altered modern thinking.”—The Times (London) A black swan is a highly improbable event with three principal characteristics: It is unpredictable; it carries a massive impact; and, after the fact, we concoct an explanation that makes it appear less random and more predictable. The astonishing success of Google was a black swan; so was 9/11. In this groundbreaking and prophetic book, Taleb shows that black swan events underlie almost everything about our world, from the rise of religions to events in our own personal lives, and yet we—especially the experts—are blind to them. FOOLED BY RANDOMNESS “[Fooled by Randomness] is to conventional Wall Street wisdom approximately what Martin Luther’s ninety-five theses were to the Catholic Church.”—Malcolm Gladwell, The New Yorker Are we capable of distinguishing the fortunate charlatan from the genuine visionary? Must we always try to uncover nonexistent messages in random events? Fooled by Randomness is about luck: more precisely, about how we perceive luck in our personal and professional experiences. Set against the backdrop of the most conspicuous forum in which luck is mistaken for skill—the markets—Fooled by Randomness is an irreverent, eye-opening, and endlessly entertaining exploration of one of the least understood forces in our lives. THE BED OF PROCRUSTES “Taleb’s crystalline nuggets of thought stand alone like esoteric poems.”—Financial Times This collection of aphorisms and meditations expresses Taleb’s major ideas in ways you least expect. The Bed of Procrustes takes its title from Greek mythology: the story of a man who made his visitors fit his bed to perfection by either stretching them or cutting their limbs. With a rare combination of pointed wit and potent wisdom, Taleb plows through human illusions, contrasting the classical views of courage, elegance, and erudition against the modern diseases of nerdiness, philistinism, and phoniness.

Author: Casey Rosenthal
Publisher: "O'Reilly Media, Inc."
ISBN: 1492043818
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
As more companies move toward microservices and other distributed technologies, the complexity of these systems increases. You can't remove the complexity, but through Chaos Engineering you can discover vulnerabilities and prevent outages before they impact your customers. This practical guide shows engineers how to navigate complex systems while optimizing to meet business goals. Two of the field's prominent figures, Casey Rosenthal and Nora Jones, pioneered the discipline while working together at Netflix. In this book, they expound on the what, how, and why of Chaos Engineering while facilitating a conversation from practitioners across industries. Many chapters are written by contributing authors to widen the perspective across verticals within (and beyond) the software industry. Learn how Chaos Engineering enables your organization to navigate complexity Explore a methodology to avoid failures within your application, network, and infrastructure Move from theory to practice through real-world stories from industry experts at Google, Microsoft, Slack, and LinkedIn, among others Establish a framework for thinking about complexity within software systems Design a Chaos Engineering program around game days and move toward highly targeted, automated experiments Learn how to design continuous collaborative chaos experiments

Author: Greg Lukianoff
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0735224919
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 354

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Book Description
New York Times Bestseller • Finalist for the 2018 National Book Critics Circle Award in Nonfiction • A New York Times Notable Book • Bloomberg Best Book of 2018 “Their distinctive contribution to the higher-education debate is to meet safetyism on its own, psychological turf . . . Lukianoff and Haidt tell us that safetyism undermines the freedom of inquiry and speech that are indispensable to universities.” —Jonathan Marks, Commentary “The remedies the book outlines should be considered on college campuses, among parents of current and future students, and by anyone longing for a more sane society.” —Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Something has been going wrong on many college campuses in the last few years. Speakers are shouted down. Students and professors say they are walking on eggshells and are afraid to speak honestly. Rates of anxiety, depression, and suicide are rising—on campus as well as nationally. How did this happen? First Amendment expert Greg Lukianoff and social psychologist Jonathan Haidt show how the new problems on campus have their origins in three terrible ideas that have become increasingly woven into American childhood and education: What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker; always trust your feelings; and life is a battle between good people and evil people. These three Great Untruths contradict basic psychological principles about well-being and ancient wisdom from many cultures. Embracing these untruths—and the resulting culture of safetyism—interferes with young people’s social, emotional, and intellectual development. It makes it harder for them to become autonomous adults who are able to navigate the bumpy road of life. Lukianoff and Haidt investigate the many social trends that have intersected to promote the spread of these untruths. They explore changes in childhood such as the rise of fearful parenting, the decline of unsupervised, child-directed play, and the new world of social media that has engulfed teenagers in the last decade. They examine changes on campus, including the corporatization of universities and the emergence of new ideas about identity and justice. They situate the conflicts on campus within the context of America’s rapidly rising political polarization and dysfunction. This is a book for anyone who is confused by what is happening on college campuses today, or has children, or is concerned about the growing inability of Americans to live, work, and cooperate across party lines.

Author: Kjell Jørgen Hole
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319300709
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 159

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Book Description
This book introduces a novel approach to the design and operation of large ICT systems. It views the technical solutions and their stakeholders as complex adaptive systems and argues that traditional risk analyses cannot predict all future incidents with major impacts. To avoid unacceptable events, it is necessary to establish and operate anti-fragile ICT systems that limit the impact of all incidents, and which learn from small-impact incidents how to function increasingly well in changing environments. The book applies four design principles and one operational principle to achieve anti-fragility for different classes of incidents. It discusses how systems can achieve high availability, prevent malware epidemics, and detect anomalies. Analyses of Netflix’s media streaming solution, Norwegian telecom infrastructures, e-government platforms, and Numenta’s anomaly detection software show that cloud computing is essential to achieving anti-fragility for classes of events with negative impacts.

Author: James Altucher
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0062998935
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
The entrepreneur, angel investor, and bestselling author of Choose Yourself busts the 10,000-hour rule of achieving mastery, offering a new mindset and dozens of techniques that will inspire any professional—no matter their age or managerial level—to pursue their passions and quickly acquire the skills they need to succeed and achieve their dreams. We live in a hierarchical world where experience has traditionally been the key to promotion. But that period is over! Straight, clear-cut career trajectories no longer exist. Industries disappear, job descriptions change, and people’s interests and passions evolve. The key to riding this wave, entrepreneur James Altucher advises, is to constantly be curious about what’s next, to be comfortable with uncertainty so you can keep navigating the rough waters ahead, and most important, to pursue the things that interest you. In Skip the Line, he reveals how he went from struggling and depressed to making his personal, financial, and creative dreams come true, despite—and perhaps due to—his many failures along the way. Altucher combines his personal story with concrete—and unorthodox—insights that work. But Skip the Line isn’t about hacks and shortcuts—it’s about transforming the way you think, work, and live, letting your interests guide your learning, time, and resources. It’s about allowing yourself to do what comes naturally; the more you do what you love, the better you do it. While showing you how to approach change and crisis, Altucher gives you tools to help easily execute ideas, become an expert negotiator, attract the attention of those around you, scale promising ideas, and improve leadership—all of which will catapult you higher than you ever thought possible and at a speed that everyone will tell you is impossible.

Author: Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 1588367673
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 369

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Book Description
Fooled by Randomness is a standalone book in Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s landmark Incerto series, an investigation of opacity, luck, uncertainty, probability, human error, risk, and decision-making in a world we don’t understand. The other books in the series are The Black Swan, Antifragile, Skin in the Game, and The Bed of Procrustes. Fooled by Randomness is the word-of-mouth sensation that will change the way you think about business and the world. Nassim Nicholas Taleb–veteran trader, renowned risk expert, polymathic scholar, erudite raconteur, and New York Times bestselling author of The Black Swan–has written a modern classic that turns on its head what we believe about luck and skill. This book is about luck–or more precisely, about how we perceive and deal with luck in life and business. Set against the backdrop of the most conspicuous forum in which luck is mistaken for skill–the world of trading–Fooled by Randomness provides captivating insight into one of the least understood factors in all our lives. Writing in an entertaining narrative style, the author tackles major intellectual issues related to the underestimation of the influence of happenstance on our lives. The book is populated with an array of characters, some of whom have grasped, in their own way, the significance of chance: the baseball legend Yogi Berra; the philosopher of knowledge Karl Popper; the ancient world’s wisest man, Solon; the modern financier George Soros; and the Greek voyager Odysseus. We also meet the fictional Nero, who seems to understand the role of randomness in his professional life but falls victim to his own superstitious foolishness. However, the most recognizable character of all remains unnamed–the lucky fool who happens to be in the right place at the right time–he embodies the “survival of the least fit.” Such individuals attract devoted followers who believe in their guru’s insights and methods. But no one can replicate what is obtained by chance. Are we capable of distinguishing the fortunate charlatan from the genuine visionary? Must we always try to uncover nonexistent messages in random events? It may be impossible to guard ourselves against the vagaries of the goddess Fortuna, but after reading Fooled by Randomness we can be a little better prepared. Named by Fortune One of the Smartest Books of All Time A Financial Times Best Business Book of the Year

Author: Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0425284638
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A bold work from the author of The Black Swan that challenges many of our long-held beliefs about risk and reward, politics and religion, finance and personal responsibility In his most provocative and practical book yet, one of the foremost thinkers of our time redefines what it means to understand the world, succeed in a profession, contribute to a fair and just society, detect nonsense, and influence others. Citing examples ranging from Hammurabi to Seneca, Antaeus the Giant to Donald Trump, Nassim Nicholas Taleb shows how the willingness to accept one’s own risks is an essential attribute of heroes, saints, and flourishing people in all walks of life. As always both accessible and iconoclastic, Taleb challenges long-held beliefs about the values of those who spearhead military interventions, make financial investments, and propagate religious faiths. Among his insights: • For social justice, focus on symmetry and risk sharing. You cannot make profits and transfer the risks to others, as bankers and large corporations do. You cannot get rich without owning your own risk and paying for your own losses. Forcing skin in the game corrects this asymmetry better than thousands of laws and regulations. • Ethical rules aren’t universal. You’re part of a group larger than you, but it’s still smaller than humanity in general. • Minorities, not majorities, run the world. The world is not run by consensus but by stubborn minorities imposing their tastes and ethics on others. • You can be an intellectual yet still be an idiot. “Educated philistines” have been wrong on everything from Stalinism to Iraq to low-carb diets. • Beware of complicated solutions (that someone was paid to find). A simple barbell can build muscle better than expensive new machines. • True religion is commitment, not just faith. How much you believe in something is manifested only by what you’re willing to risk for it. The phrase “skin in the game” is one we have often heard but rarely stopped to truly dissect. It is the backbone of risk management, but it’s also an astonishingly rich worldview that, as Taleb shows in this book, applies to all aspects of our lives. As Taleb says, “The symmetry of skin in the game is a simple rule that’s necessary for fairness and justice, and the ultimate BS-buster,” and “Never trust anyone who doesn’t have skin in the game. Without it, fools and crooks will benefit, and their mistakes will never come back to haunt them.”

Author: Tony Bendell
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317171063
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
Every day human organisations fail. Building Anti-Fragile Organisations explores a powerful alternative framework for risk in the design and management of human systems. Anti-Fragility is a new way of thinking about mitigating risk that builds on earlier work on the characteristics of biological systems that, being more than just robust, actually improve their resilience through being stressed. Professor Bendell explains how applying this concept to the development and management of organisations, services and products, allows us to identify the characteristics that will not only mitigate against the realisation of hazards, but enable growth in protection, strength and anti-fragility over time. In this context, anti-fragility also encompasses flexibility, agility and the exploitation of opportunities. At the organisational level, anti-fragility (or its absence) is determined by the organisational strategy, structure and systems, its people, relationships and culture. The book focuses on establishing the Anti-Fragile concept of the firm, and explores its application in private and public sector organisations of all types. It identifies characteristics relevant to survival in a turbulent world, and how our approaches to risk and governance need to change in order to create and manage anti-fragile organisations. It provides practical insight into the concept of Anti-Fragility and its deployment within human organisations of all types, and give readers the opportunity to start to make sense to applying the concepts within their own worlds.