Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (Incerto, #4)

by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Again, crucially, we are talking of partial, not general, mistakes, small, not severe and terminal ones. This creates a separation between good and bad systems. Good systems such as airlines are set up to have small errors, independent from each other—or, in effect, negatively correlated to each other, since mistakes lower the odds of future mistakes. This is one way to see how one environment can be antifragile (aviation) and the other fragile (modern economic life with “earth is flat” style interconnectedness). If every plane crash makes the next one less likely, every bank crash makes the next one more likely. We need to eliminate the second type of error—the one that produces contagion—in our construction of an ideal socioeconomic system.