Antifragile

Radical philosopher Nassim Nicholas Taleb offers a blueprint for how to live - and thrive - in a world we don't understand, and which is too uncertain for us to even try to predict.

RSA Keynote

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the bestselling author of 'The Black Swan' and one of the most radical and iconoclastic thinkers of our times, visits the RSA to reveal how to thrive in an uncertain world.

In 'The Black Swan', Taleb showed that highly improbable and unpredictable events underlie almost everything about our world. In his new book Antifragile, he provides a blueprint for living in a Black Swan world. Standing uncertainty on its head, making it desirable, even necessary, Taleb 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. The book spans innovation by trial and error, life decisions, politics, urban planning, war, personal finance, economic systems, and medicine, in Taleb’s uniquely interdisciplinary and erudite style.

At the RSA, Nassim Taleb will show how the antifragile is immune to prediction errors and protected from adverse events, and will consider a number of critical questions, such as: why is the city-state better than the nation-state; why is debt bad for you; why is what we call “efficient” not efficient at all; and why do government responses and social policies protect the strong and hurt the weak?
Speaker: Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Distinguished Professor of Risk Engineering at New York University's Polytechnic Institute and author of 'Antifragile: how to live in a world we don’t understand' (Allen Lane, 2012).

Discussant: Rohan Silva, senior policy adviser to the Prime Minister at No 10 Downing Street.
Chair: Fraser Nelson, editor, The Spectator