FORTUNE — How did Switzerland become the most stable country in history? Its currency, unlike ours, keeps hitting new highs post-crisis, yet Switzerland doesn’t have a large central bank working behind the scenes. For that matter, it doesn’t have much of a central government. In Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder, Nassim Taleb jokes that the average Swiss citizen can name the presidents of France and the United States before they can name their own.

It turns out Switzerland perfectly captures Taleb’s idea of antifragility — the concept that certain things grow stronger with shock and turmoil, as opposed to fragile things, which just break down.

Taleb argues that Switzerland is a model of stability precisely because it doesn’t have a big central bank or national government. Instead, its dozens of sovereign mini-states squabble and fight constantly. This turmoil actually makes the country stronger because the Swiss get small problems out of the way before they can metastasize into something bigger like, say, a fiscal cliff.

via Antifragility: How disorder makes us stronger – Fortune Features.

Taleb’s new book is a study of survival of the fittest in the jungle of the 21st century. Although it is not explicitly a guide to portfolio management, many of the author’s tales offer metaphoric lessons for hedge fund managers and investors. There might be cold comfort, for example, in Taleb’s view that if the Titanic had not sunk, we would have kept building larger and larger ocean liners and the next disaster would have been even more tragic. After all, hedge funds hit icebergs too. In Taleb’s view, good errors are those that help either financial or shipbuilding engineers create stronger (i.e. antifragile) systems; bad errors — banks getting overleveraged, for example — produce contagion.

Nassim Taleb Channels Charles Darwin | Institutional Investor’s Alpha.

9) Bottom up is better than top down. Bottom up is the fight for success of little small parts, easily fixed and changed. Top Down is good as long as it is always right. However the errors are huge and institution threatening. Taleb actually makes the case that freedom is more important than peace.

10) React to signal not noise. Only look at very large changes in conditions not small ones. Otherwise you can get problems from intervening, causing unintended consequences. Information has a nasty property of hiding failures because of the great opportunities to cherry pick results. Detail gives us comfort when it should not. We react to change more than direction.

11) Have a surplus of options. Get out of debt. It would be better to live in a smaller house with no debt than a fancy house with a huge debt. Have multiple career options and a backup plan. Need and want less, then you are not susceptible. Avoid stupid risks like smoking. Use emotions to make one successful by transforming fear into prudence, pain into information, mistakes into initiation and desire into undertaking.

12) Avoid banking on the mean or the middle, instead build a bimodal strategy that builds for maximally safe and maximally speculative. For example, in every economy the super rich have money to waste. Better yet instead of doing a single path analysis, do multiple path assessments. Taleb gives some great examples where one can win big with a 20% chance of winning as long as the winning is huge and one invests in multiple 20% big win chances. Asymmetrical relationships are key here. A 10% increase in New York Traffic does not cause a 10% slowdown, it causes total blockage. Track payoffs not probabilities.

via MN Progressive Project:: Book Review: Antifragile.