Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of The Black Swan, has a new book out, and, if anything, it’s probably even more potent (if also self-contradictory in many places).
The book is called Antifragile and this is his definition of the term:
Some things benefit from shocks; they thrive and grow when exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder, and stressors and love adventure. Yet in spite of the ubiquity of the phenomenon, there is no word for the exact opposite of fragile. Let us call it antifragile. Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better.
Although Taleb is adamant that the real world is nothing like the world of games – that game theory works fine to address the contrived experience of the game – I was still struck by the way his theory of antifragility seemed to dovetail with my fantasy football philosophy.
In just the past four years I’ve played well over 200 leagues, many of them for substantial amounts of money. And here’s the thing: value-based drafting, the default method used by almost all supposed fantasy “experts,” does not work.
