Prix livre imprimé :	EUR 12,50
Prix Kindle :	EUR 9,49 Économisez EUR 3,01 (24%)
	TVA incluse

Saisir un code promo ou un chèque-cadeau

Partager <Intégrer>

Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder (English Edition) par [Nassim Taleb]

Suivre l'auteur

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder (English Edition) Format Kindle

Édition en Anglais de Nassim Taleb (Auteur) Format : Format Kindle

3 905 évaluations

Livre 3 sur 5 : Incerto

Afficher tous les formats et éditions

Prix Amazon

Neuf à partir de

Occasion à partir de

Format Kindle

"Veuillez réessayer"

9,49 €

—

Livres audio Audible, Version intégrale

"Veuillez réessayer"

0,00 €

Gratuit avec l'offre d'essai Audible

Relié

"Veuillez réessayer"

32,00 €

23,00 €

14,00 €

Broché

"Veuillez réessayer"

12,47 €

12,27 €

CD, Livre audio, Version intégrale

"Veuillez réessayer"

—

108,00 €

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, many things in life benefit from stress, disorder, volatility, and turmoil. What Taleb has identified and calls antifragile are 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. Here Taleb stands uncertainty on its head, making it desirable, even necessary. The antifragile is beyond the resilient or robust. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better and better.

What's more, 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 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, drawing on modern street wisdom and ancient sources.

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.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb has devoted his life to problems of uncertainty, probability, and knowledge and has led three careers around this focus, as a businessman-trader, a philosophical essayist, and an academic researcher. Although he now spends most of his time working in intense seclusion in his study, in the manner of independent scholars, he is currently Distinguished Professor of Risk Engineering at New York University's Polytechnic Institute. His main subject matter is "decision making under opacity," that is, a map and a protocol on how we should live in a world we don't understand.

His books Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan have been published in thirty-three languages.

Taleb believes that prizes, honorary degrees, awards, and ceremonialism debase knowledge by turning it into a spectator sport.

En lire plus

Nombre de pages de l'édition imprimée

504 pages
Langue

Anglais
Éditeur

Penguin
Date de publication

27 novembre 2012
Taille du fichier

3663 KB
Page Flip

Activé
Word Wise

Activé
Confort de lecture

Activé
Voir tous les détails

Les 3 prochains articles de cette série pour vous Voir la série complète

Prix total Kindle EUR 24,18 TVA incluse

En cliquant sur le bouton ci-dessus, vous acceptez les Conditions d’utilisation de la Boutique Kindle.

Vendu par : Amazon Media EU S.à r.l.

Description du produit

Quatrième de couverture

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, many things in life benefit from stress, disorder, volatility, and turmoil. What Taleb has identified and calls antifragile are 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. Here Taleb stands uncertainty on its head, making it desirable, even necessary. The antifragile is beyond the resilient or robust. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better and better.

What's more, 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 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, drawing on modern street wisdom and ancient sources.
--Ce texte fait référence à l'édition kindle_edition.

Revue de presse

“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

“Revelatory . . . [Taleb] pulls the reader along with the logic of a Socrates.”—Chicago Tribune

“Startling . . . richly crammed with insights, stories, fine phrases and intriguing asides . . . I will have to read it again. And again.”—Matt Ridley, The Wall Street Journal

“Trenchant and persuasive . . . Taleb’s insatiable polymathic curiosity knows no bounds. . . . You finish the book feeling braver and uplifted.”—New Statesman

“Antifragility isn’t just sound economic and political doctrine. It’s also the key to a good life.”—Fortune

“At once thought-provoking and brilliant.”—Los Angeles Times

“[Taleb] writes as if he were the illegitimate spawn of David Hume and Rev. Bayes, with some DNA mixed in from Norbert Weiner and Laurence Sterne. . . . Taleb is writing original stuff—not only within the management space but for readers of any literature—and . . . you will learn more about more things from this book and be challenged in more ways than by any other book you have read this year. Trust me on this.”—Harvard Business Review

“By far my favorite book among several good ones published in 2012. In addition to being an enjoyable and interesting read, Taleb’s new book advances general understanding of how different systems operate, the great variation in how they respond to unthinkables, and how to make them more adaptable and agile. His systemic insights extend very well to company-specific operational issues—from ensuring that mistakes provide a learning process to the importance of ensuring sufficient transparency to the myriad of specific risk issues.”—Mohamed El-Erian, CEO of PIMCO, Bloomberg --Ce texte fait référence à l'édition paperback.

Extrait

Chapter 1

Between Damocles and Hydra

Please cut my head off—How by some magic, colors become colors— How to lift weight in Dubai

Half of Life Has No Name

You are in the post office about to send a gift, a package full of champagne glasses, to a cousin in Central Siberia. As the package can be damaged during transportation, you would stamp “fragile,” “breakable,” or “handle with care” on it (in red). Now what is the exact opposite of such situation, the exact opposite of “fragile”?

Almost all people answer that the opposite of “fragile” is “robust,” “resilient,” “solid,” or something of the sort. But the resilient, robust (and company) are items that neither break nor improve, so you would not need to write anything on them—have you ever seen a package with “robust” in thick green letters stamped on it? Logically, the exact opposite of a “fragile” parcel would be a package on which one has written “please mishandle” or “please handle carelessly.” Its contents would not just be unbreakable, but would benefit from shocks and a wide array of trauma. The fragile is the package that would be at best unharmed, the robust would be at best and at worst unharmed. And the opposite of fragile is therefore what is at worst unharmed.

We gave the appellation “antifragile” to such a package; a neologism was necessary as there is no simple, noncompound word in the Oxford English Dictionary that expresses the point of reverse fragility. For the idea of antifragility is not part of our consciousness—but, luckily, it is part of our ancestral behavior, our biological apparatus, and a ubiquitous property of every system that has survived.

Figure 1. A package begging for stressors and disorder. Credit: Giotto Enterprise and George Nasr.

To see how alien the concept is to our minds, repeat the experiment and ask around at the next gathering, picnic, or pre-riot congregation what’s the antonym of fragile (and specify insistently that you mean the exact reverse, something that has opposite properties and payoff). The likely answers will be, aside from robust: unbreakable, solid, well-built, resilient, strong, something-proof (say, waterproof, windproof, rustproof)— unless they’ve heard of this book. Wrong—and it is not just individuals but branches of knowledge that are confused by it; this is a mistake made in every dictionary of synonyms and antonyms I’ve found.

Another way to view it: since the opposite of positive is negative, not neutral, the opposite of positive fragility should be negative fragility (hence my appellation “antifragility”), not neutral, which would just convey robustness, strength, and unbreakability. Indeed, when one writes things down mathematically, antifragility is fragility with a negative sign in front of it.

This blind spot seems universal. There is no word for “antifragility” in the main known languages, modern, ancient, colloquial, or slang. Even Russian (Soviet version) and Standard Brooklyn English don’t seem to have a designation for antifragility, conflating it with robustness.

Half of life—the interesting half of life—we don’t have a name for.

Please Behead Me

If we have no common name for antifragility, we can find a mythological equivalence, the expression of historical intelligence through potent metaphors. In a Roman recycled version of a Greek myth, the Sicilian tyrant Dionysius II has the fawning courtier Damocles enjoy the luxury of a fancy banquet, but with a sword hanging over his head, tied to the ceiling with a single hair from a horse’s tail. A horse’s hair is the kind of thing that eventually breaks under pressure, followed by a scene of blood, high-pitched screams, and the equivalent of ancient ambulances. Damocles is fragile—it is only a matter of time before the sword strikes him down.

In another ancient legend, this time the Greek recycling of an ancient Semitic and Egyptian legend, we find Phoenix, the bird with splendid colors. Whenever it is destroyed, it is reborn from it own ashes. It always returns to its initial state. Phoenix happens to be the ancient symbol of Beirut, the city where I grew up. According to legend, Berytus (Beirut’s historical name) has been destroyed seven times in its close to five-thousand-year history, and has come back seven times. The story seems cogent, as I myself saw the eighth episode; central Beirut (the ancient part of the city) was completely destroyed for the eighth time during my late childhood, thanks to the brutal civil war. I also saw its eighth rebuilding.

But Beirut was, in its latest version, rebuilt in even better shape than the previous incarnation—and with an interesting irony: the earthquake of a.d. 551 had buried the Roman law school, which was discovered, like a bonus from history, during the reconstruction (with archeologists and real estate developers trading public insults). That’s not Phoenix, but something else beyond the robust. Which brings us to the third mythological metaphor: Hydra.

Hydra, in Greek mythology, is a serpent-like creature that dwells in the lake of Lerna, near Argos, and has numerous heads. Each time one is cut off, two grow back. So harm is what it likes. Hydra represents antifragility.

The sword of Damocles represents the side effect of power and success: you cannot rise and rule without facing this continuous danger— someone out there will be actively working to topple you. And like the sword, the danger will be silent, inexorable, and discontinuous. It will fall abruptly after long periods of quiet, perhaps at the very moment one has gotten used to it and forgotten about its existence. Black Swans will be out there to get you as you now have much more to lose, a cost of success (and growth), perhaps an unavoidable penalty of excessive success. At the end, what matters is the strength of the string—not the wealth and power of the dining party. But, luckily, this is an identifiable, measurable, and tractable vulnerability, for those who want to listen. The entire point of the Triad is that in many situations we can measure the strength of the string.

Further, consider how toxic such growth-followed-by-a-fall can be to society, as the fall of the dining guest, in response to the fall of the sword of Damocles, will bring what we now call collateral damage, harming others. For instance, the collapse of a large institution will have effects on society.

Sophistication, a certain brand of sophistication, also brings fragility to Black Swans: as societies gain in complexity, with more and more “cutting edge” sophistication in them, and more and more specialization, they become increasingly vulnerable to collapse. This idea has been brilliantly—and convincingly—adumbrated by the archeologist Joseph Tainter. But it does not have to be so: it is so only for those unwilling to go the extra step and understand the matrix of reality. To counter success, you need a high offsetting dose of robustness, even high doses of antifragility. You want to be Phoenix, or possibly Hydra. Otherwise the sword of Damocles will get you.

On the Necessity of Naming

We know more than we think we do, a lot more than we can articulate. If our formal systems of thought denigrate the natural, and in fact we don’t have a name for antifragility, and fight the concept whenever we use our brains, it does not mean that our actions neglect it. Our perceptions and intuitions, as expressed in deeds, can be superior to what we know and tabulate, discuss in words, and teach in a classroom. We will have ample discussions of the point particularly with the potent notion of the apophatic (what cannot be explicitly said, or directly described, in our current vocabulary); so for now, take this curious phenomenon.

In Through the Language Glass, the linguist Guy Deutscher reports that many primitive populations, without being color-blind, have verbal designations for only two or three colors. But when given a simple test, they can successfully match strings to their corresponding colors. They are capable of detecting the differences between the various nuances of the rainbow, but they do not express these in their vocabularies. These populations are culturally, though not biologically, color-blind.

Just as we are intellectually, not organically, antifragility-blind. To see the difference just consider that you need the name “blue” for the construction of a narrative, but not when you engage in action.

It is not well known that many colors we take for granted had no name for a long time, and had no names in the central texts in Western culture. Ancient Mediterranean texts, both Greek and Semitic, also had a reduced vocabulary of a small number of colors polarized around the dark and the light—Homer and his contemporaries were limited to about three or four main colors: black, white, and some indeterminate part of the rainbow, often subsumed as red, or yellow.

I contacted Guy Deutscher. He was extremely generous with his help and pointed out to me that the ancients even lacked words for something as elementary as blue. This absence of the word “blue” in ancient Greek explains the recurring reference by Homer to the “wine-dark sea” (oinopa ponton), which has been quite puzzling to readers (including this one). --Ce texte fait référence à l'édition paperback.

Biographie de l'auteur

Nassim Nicholas Taleb has devoted his life to problems of uncertainty, probability, and knowledge. He spent nearly two decades as a businessman and quantitative trader before becoming a full-time philosophical essayist and academic researcher in 2006. Although he spends most of his time in the intense seclusion of his study, or as a flâneur meditating in cafés, he is currently Distinguished Professor of Risk Engineering at New York University’s Polytechnic Institute. His main subject matter is “decision making under opacity”—that is, a map and a protocol on how we should live in a world we don’t understand.

Taleb’s books have been published in forty-one languages. --Ce texte fait référence à l'édition paperback.

En lire plus

Détails sur le produit

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B009K6DKTS
Éditeur ‏ : ‎ Penguin; 1er édition (27 novembre 2012)
Langue ‏ : ‎ Anglais
Taille du fichier ‏ : ‎ 3663 KB
Synthèse vocale ‏ : ‎ Activée
Lecteur d’écran ‏ : ‎ Pris en charge
Confort de lecture ‏ : ‎ Activé
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Activé
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Activé
Nombre de pages de l'édition imprimée ‏ : ‎ 504 pages

Classement des meilleures ventes d'Amazon : 25,715 en Boutique Kindle (Voir les 100 premiers en Boutique Kindle)
- 4 en Theory of Economics
- 9 en Applied Psychology
- 21 en Decision-Making & Problem Solving

Commentaires client :
3 905 évaluations

À propos de l'auteur

Suivez les auteurs pour obtenir de nouvelles mises à jour et des recommandations améliorées.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.

Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

Découvrir d'autres livres de l'auteur, voir des auteurs similaires, lire des blogs d'auteurs et plus encore

Nassim Taleb
1 767
Format Kindle
1 offre à partir de 9,49 €
Nassim Taleb
2 735
Format Kindle
dans Economic Statistics
1 offre à partir de 7,10 €
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
2 793
Format Kindle
1 offre à partir de 9,49 €
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
746
Format Kindle
1 offre à partir de 5,20 €
Ryan Holiday
21 646
Format Kindle
1 offre à partir de 7,37 €
Daniel Kahneman
27 812
Format Kindle
1 offre à partir de 9,93 €

Commentaires client

5 étoiles		71%
4 étoiles		16%
3 étoiles		7%
2 étoiles		3%
1 étoile		4%

Comment fonctionnent les avis et les évaluations des clients

Meilleures évaluations de France

Traduire tous les commentaires en français

Un problème s'est produit lors du filtrage des commentaires. Veuillez réessayer ultérieurement.

Client Amazon

Un nouvel éclairage sur une question fondamentale

Commenté en France le 9 décembre 2012

Achat vérifié

Le nouvel ouvrage de Nassim Nicholas Taleb, "Antifragile", venant à la suite de l'excellent "Cygne noir", était très attendu. Taleb y revisite nombre de ses thèmes favoris et en développe un en particulier: la notion d'antifragilité, un néologisme qu'il crée pour l'occasion. Selon lui, le modèle dominant de prise de décision, et de stratégie en général, est basé sur la prédiction. Or la stratégie prédictive nous rend fragiles, car si la prédiction ne se réalise pas, la stratégie ne fonctionne pas et le coût peut être très important (échec d'un produit, d'une fusion, retrait d'un marché, etc). Or nous sommes très mauvais en prédiction: non seulement la crise actuelle n'a été prévue par presque aucun des 'experts', mais on peut même arguer - et Taleb ne s'en prive pas - qu'elle résulte précisément de l'approche de ces experts, prédictive et basée sur des hypothèses épistémiques profondément erronées (par exemple celle selon laquelle nos systèmes sont caractérisés par une distribution normale ou gaussienne, niant ainsi la possibilité d'évènements de faible probabilité et à fort impact, que Taleb nomme 'cygnes noirs').

Taleb milite donc pour une réduction de la fragilité de nos économies et de nos entreprises en cessant de faire reposer leur fonctionnement sur la prédiction, qui est intrinsèquement impossible pour la plupart des environnements auxquels nous sommes confrontés. Bien conscient que nous finiront quand même par utiliser la prédiction, son approche pragmatique consiste plutôt à nous inciter à réduire les conséquences d'une prédiction ratée, par exemple en ayant une stratégie de rechange et en ayant plusieurs fers au feu, ce que les spécialistes appellent des "options réelles". Moins sensibles aux aléas et aux surprises, nous devenons donc plus robustes, c'est à dire que l'aléatoire de notre environnement nous atteint moins. Mais Taleb estime à juste titre que cela ne suffit pas: une entreprise ne peut pas se définir "négativement" par une approche de protection face à l'aléatoire. Pour Taleb, ce qu'il faut véritablement c'est devenir ce qu'il appelle "antifragile". Antifragile, c'est le vrai opposé de fragile, ce que robuste n'est pas. Antifragile dénote une organisation qui bénéficie de l'aléatoire, qui s'améliore au fur et à mesure qu'elle subit les coups du sort (positifs ou négatifs). Taleb a bien sûr en tête le système qui a le mieux démontré sa capacité à être antifragile, la nature elle-même avec son évolution. Sur ce modèle, Taleb recommande une approche totalement différente de la stratégie actuelle qui a pour principe d'éliminer la volatilité et de se protéger de l'aléatoire, considéré comme néfaste en lui-même. Au contraire, une stratégie antifragile, basée sur l'essai-erreur, est à l'aise avec la volatilité et permet d'évoluer avec des pertes limitées ce qui au final réduit son risque. En économie, la startup est l'exemple même de structure antifragile, du moins celle qui ne se lance pas dans un pari "ça passe ou ça casse". La plupart des startups progressent par itérations, une approche popularisée et théorisée par Eric Ries, avec son "Lean startup" et par Saras Sarasvathy, avec l'Effectuation.

Au final, une nouvelle fois, Taleb apporte un éclairage original et fécond sur une question fondamentale, la prise de décision en environnement incertain. Comme ses ouvrages précédents, on y trouvera nombre d’anecdotes, traits d'humour et digressions, parfois passionnantes comme son dialogue imaginaire avec Socrate ou ses réflexions sur l'enseignement, parfois agaçantes comme son idée de ne pas se soigner car la nature soigne bien toute seule, car Taleb semble avoir un avis catégorique sur tout. L'ouvrage est parfois verbeux, un peu brouillon, reprenant nombre de points déjà mis en avant dans le "Cygne Noir". Mais c'est du Taleb, et la question étant loin d'être tranchée - Il semble encore prêcher dans le désert, beaucoup lu, peu compris et encore moins admis en pratique par les universitaires et les praticiens - ce nouvel éclairage n'est finalement pas de trop. Pour ceux que la question intéresse, c'est à dire beaucoup de monde, sa lecture (en anglais seulement pour l'instant) s'impose.

En lire plus

24 personnes ont trouvé cela utile

Utile

Billy Durant

A superego of the mind

Commenté en France le 6 juin 2013

Achat vérifié

Grand fan de Fooled by Randomness, déçu du Black Swan, je me précipite sur ce qui est censé être la somme philosophique de Taleb, son opus magnus... et circulez, il n'y a rien de nouveau. L'ensemble est une collection de chapitres désorganisée, Taleb cite à tour de bras (et comme il a tout lu, ça en fait des références) et fait dans le péremptoire, le jus d'orange c'est mal, le jeûne c'est bien, comme d'habitude désormais les journalistes sont vendus, les économistes des carriéristes incompétents, les banquiers des gens stupides, courir avec des chaussures bare-feet c'est top, il faut souffrir chez le docteur, et Fat Tony l'ami inventé de Taleb met une pile en joute oratoire à Socrate... J'arrête là, mais cela m'a épuisé de reprendre ce livre tant il me tombait des mains. Sur le fond, il demeure des remarques très profondes et très justes, sur ce qui dure et demeure, les apparences sociales, l'impératif du risque... mais tout cela est trop étiré sur la tartine, ça en a perdu le goût.

En lire plus

17 personnes ont trouvé cela utile

Utile

Mario Rossi

Ennuyeux

Commenté en France le 2 mars 2015

Achat vérifié

La volatilité d'un phénomène, d'un marché, d'une situation, d'un processus, loin de fragiliser ceux qui y sont confrontés ou doivent vivre avec, peut au contraire les stimuler, les rendre plus forts, plus résistants, en un mot de N. Taleb les rendre anti-fragiles.

Voilà l'idée. Certes l'auteur l'exprime mieux que moi et peut-être cette idée mérite-t-elle un article un peu étoffé pour être correctement et exhaustivement exposée, mais certaines pas des centaines de pages.

Le livre est répétitif, ennuyeux à mourir et les références incessantes de N. Taleb aux philosophes latins et grecs ou aux écrivains français et italiens donnent l'impression que l'auteur essaie de compenser un sujet un peu court avec un étalage de culture qui malheureusement n'enrichit pas l'argument.

Ce livre n'est pas un livre sur l'économie, la finance ou les marchés. Après son succès avec le Cygne Noir, N. Taleb est sorti de son domaine de compétence. Dommage.

En lire plus

3 personnes ont trouvé cela utile

Utile

Charles12

Another excellent book from N. Taleb

Commenté en France le 17 décembre 2012

Achat vérifié

A thought provoking book, like all the books of N. Taleb. The concept of antifragility, or gaining from volatility, deserves to be known. It's so much different from all the other books that "postdict" events and explain why events happened...
The author explains how to live in a world that we don't understand and why we must learn to live with volatility instead of trying to change it (like trying to eliminate business cycles which will lead to disasters, as usual when we intervene in a complex system)
The description of Stiglitz, Friedman, Krugman is.... How to say, I love it!
The only negative point is the aggressiveness of Taleb (but i have to admit that i found this very amusing)
A must read!

En lire plus

3 personnes ont trouvé cela utile

Utile

Traduire les commentaires en Français

James Pop

Bonne lecture - c'est du brutal

Commenté en France le 31 janvier 2016

Achat vérifié

Trés bon ouvrage pour méditer sur votre vie professionnelle : est-ce que je suis vraiment si protégé que cela ? Qu'est-ce que la liberté dans la vie professionnelle ? Quels sont les choix qui nous enferment, ceux qui nous offrent davantage de liberté et d'épanouissement ? C'est trés argumenté. D'accord ou pas avec l'auteur, on dialogue en fait en permanence avec lui car c'est d'une grande honnêteté intellectuelle (il ne fait pas dans la dentelle, il est plutôt brut de décoffrage). A lire en anglais (très simple). Quand une de mes petites cousine m'a demandé un conseil sur son orientation professionnelle, je lui ai répondu : fait un métier où tu pourras être plus tard à ton compte (que ce soit maçon, dentiste, coiffeur ou expert-comptable). Ce livre est un peu dans cette idée. Sa thèse est très stoïcienne (accorder de l'importance à ce qui dépend de nous).

En lire plus

Une personne a trouvé cela utile

Utile

Meilleurs commentaires provenant d’autres pays

Traduire tous les commentaires en français

Ed209

I loved Fooled by Randomness and the Black Swan

Commenté au Royaume-Uni le 18 février 2018

Achat vérifié

I loved Fooled by Randomness and the Black Swan, but this follow up is disappointing. There's two reasons for this. the first is that Taleb seems to have explained his key thoughts in those earlier books, and there's little new material here. The second is that Taleb suffers from what I would call 'Harry Potter Syndrome', in that as he's become more popular editors seem more reluctant to take a scalpel to his work (actually he repeatedly voices his disdain for editors). The result of this is 500 pages of rambling thoughts, and it's hard to get to the end of it let alone draw any conclusions. I feel bad criticising Taleb as his earlier books made a huge impression on me, but this just isn't up the same standards. Hopefully his publishers will lay down the law next time and insist on a more active editor.

En lire plus

85 personnes ont trouvé cela utile

Traduire les commentaires en Français

Karl P

Like swimming in an ocean of words and contempt

Commenté au Royaume-Uni le 7 août 2019

Achat vérifié

I really, really wanted to like this book.

I tried to read it and stick with it - I genuinely did. But Taleb literally was repeating the same thing over and over again to the point I thought that there had been an error in printing. The author's disdain towards other academics and scholars using terms like the "Soviet-Harvard illusion" was quite off-putting and his use of "big-words-for-big-words-sake" really started to chafe.

Honestly, I think that the ideas presented in the book are fantastic and worthy of praise but his tone, hubris and diatribes against others made the book unreadable.

I've put it down and I won't pick it up again. What a shame.

En lire plus

52 personnes ont trouvé cela utile

Traduire les commentaires en Français

M. Ingham

A MUST read.

Commenté au Royaume-Uni le 24 juin 2020

Achat vérifié

Not a super easy read. But, why should it be? Really. Life is far more complex than most folks would like to admit. Especially our politicians, bosses, leaders etc. A good focus on this book is very rewarding. There is a dreadful truth. Which is probably that most of the time we are kidding ourselves about the control and our resilience we really have. Whether it's over our society, environment, the weather, conflicts and confrontations, physical, political, romantic, etc, etc. Life. Having just come through the first wave of Covid 19. I found it was a perfect example of Taleb's concept. The topic presented in this work is 100% spot on. The response of the public governments and health providers was just as Taleb' anticipates. The progress of Covid 19 through the global community was influenced by all the randomness and unpredictability that Taleb identifies as being massively influential on our everyday lives, yet un-recognised and discounted by most of us. I'm not saying the book is some kind of prophecy. No, the book is a description of the way people cope with, try to cope with, or don't cope with reality and that which cannot be predicted. So, armed with Taleb's thoughts and observations of the way that humans do and don't cope with life, I feel that I now have something that I'm sure most of us want. Yet few of us have. An edge, over everyone else, which is simply, a better idea of how things happen and whats really going on. Also a little sadness that humans have a LONG way to go yet, before enough of us ''Get it'' . To make a worthwhile difference to our societies. Essential reading, if you would like to make the most of your life. Taleb, is not, by the way an un-educated scrawler of self help books. He has devoted a signifcant life time effort to producing three books this being the third, on the topic of 'randomness' and how we cope or don't cope with it. He is also clever enough to have made enough money and a reputation as a serious thinker, that he doesn't have to write books for a living nor have them edited by a publisher in order to attract an audience. If folks don't read his books it's their loss.

En lire plus

8 personnes ont trouvé cela utile

Traduire les commentaires en Français

Kevin Ramsey

interrupted by "wow I never thought of it like that before"

Commenté au Royaume-Uni le 25 mai 2017

Achat vérifié

It's hard to know where to stop when talking about this book. Some books are described as life changing, but are not. This one really is. I will never look at any aspect of my life again in quite the same way. I wish I'd read it years ago. I'm now buying it for my (adult) children. It can become a struggle to read at times but if it does, put it down and come back to it. Having said that most of the book is compulsive and humorous reading, interrupted by "wow I never thought of it like that before". I would however recommend reading "The Black Swan" first as I think you might miss the point of this book, at least initially, if you don't.

En lire plus

31 personnes ont trouvé cela utile

Traduire les commentaires en Français

AK

The author is certainly highly erudite and makes some excellent points but does so in a relatively wayward fashion

Commenté au Royaume-Uni le 8 avril 2016

Achat vérifié

If you have read any of the previous Taleb books, such as The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable or Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets you are most likely not in for a surprise. The author is certainly highly erudite and makes some excellent points but does so in a relatively blunt and confrontational manner (explaining the number of reviews giving alternatively 1 or 5 stars).

In the current book he discusses the concept of anti-fragility, i.e. a feature of systems that benefit, rather than get harmed by unpredictability. There are lots of good points made and I certainly buy into the concept. We do tend to be fooled by randomness (pun intended) and do tend to discount rare events - much to our detriment.

Where the success of the book will depend on the disposition of the reader much more, is it's typically Taleb style. He is confrontational and that to an extent where quite some readers may be put off. While this does not bother me generally, I find that he actually belabored the point somewhat too much and that the book would definitely benefit from an abridgement to something like 300 pages. While I did not find any part of the book completely replaceable, the point does get a bit too repetitive after a while.

If you want to get much of the content in a less confrontational, and slimmer volume, I recommend you try A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits Of Disorder first. If, however you have enjoyed his previous work, do go for it by all means - he is much the same (perhaps even a tad more extreme) as always and the content is certainly worthwhile.

En lire plus

24 personnes ont trouvé cela utile

Traduire les commentaires en Français

Afficher tous les commentaires

Signaler un problème

Cet article contient-il des contenus inappropriés ?

Rapport

Pensez-vous que cet article enfreint un droit d'auteur ?

Rapport

Est-ce que cet article présente des problèmes de qualité ou de mise en forme ?

Rapport

Amazon Music Écoutez des millions de chansons	AbeBooks Livres, art & articles de collection	Amazon Web Services Services de Cloud Computing Flexibles	Audible Livres audio télécharger	Book Depository Livres expédiés dans le monde entier

Kindle Direct Publishing Auto-publiez facilement vos livres au format numérique	Offres Reconditionnées Bonnes affaires	Shopbop Vêtements de Marque & Mode	Amazon Advertising Ciblez, attirez et fidélisez vos clients	Amazon Business Paiement 30 jours. Hors TVA. Pour les professionnels.

Choisir vos préférences en matière de cookies

Offrir cet ebook

Acheter et envoyer des ebooks à d'autres personnes

Suivre l'auteur

Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder (English Edition) Format Kindle

Description du produit

Quatrième de couverture

Revue de presse

Extrait

Biographie de l'auteur

Détails sur le produit

À propos de l'auteur

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Les clients ayant consulté cet article ont également regardé

Commentaires client

Meilleures évaluations de France

Un problème s'est produit lors du filtrage des commentaires. Veuillez réessayer ultérieurement.

Meilleurs commentaires provenant d’autres pays