Expressed like this, Taleb’s argument about the merits of resilience – and change – might seem almost laughably simple. However, the book develops the theme on multiple levels. Some of his arguments are highly technical: he uses mathematical techniques to prove how the antifragile concept can be measured, and to demonstrate why popular statistical measures of probability are wrong.

The bulk of the text is made up of personal anecdotes and philosophical musings that draw widely from Taleb’s eclectic, polymath mind. They reflect his family’s experience of the Lebanese civil war – and his own previous life as a successful financial trader, who used his iconoclastic analysis to predict earlier financial crashes and make money.

Taleb has plenty of advice to offer us on how to become more antifragile. We should embrace unpredictable change, rather than chase after an illusion of stability; refuse to believe anyone who offers advice without taking personal risk; keep institutions and systems small and self-contained to ensure that they can fail without bringing the entire system down; build slack into our lives and systems to accommodate surprises; and, above all, recognise the impossibility of predicting anything with too much precision.

via Whatever the weather – FT.com.