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

by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better.

The antifragile loves randomness and uncertainty, which also means—crucially—a love of errors, a certain class of errors.

Antifragility has a singular property of allowing us to deal with the unknown, to do things without understanding them—and do them well.

And we can almost always detect antifragility (and fragility) using a simple test of asymmetry: anything that has more upside than downside from random events (or certain shocks) is antifragile; the reverse is fragile.

We have been fragilizing the economy, our health, political life, education, almost everything … by suppressing randomness and volatility.

Much of our modern, structured, world has been harming us with top-down policies and contraptions (dubbed “Soviet-Harvard delusions” in the book) which do precisely this: an insult to the antifragility of systems.

At no point in history have so many non-risk-takers, that is, those with no personal exposure, exerted so much control.

A complex system, contrary to what people believe, does not require complicated systems and regulations and intricate policies. The simpler, the better.