Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder

In The Black Swan, Taleb showed us that highly improbable and unpredictable events underlie almost everything about our world. Here Taleb stands uncertainty on its head, making it desirable, even necessary.

The antifragile is beyond the resilient or robust. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better and better. Just as human bones get stronger when subjected to stress and tension, many things in life benefit from stress, disorder, volatility, and turmoil. What Taleb has identified and calls antifragile are things that not only gain from chaos but need it in order to survive and flourish. What’s more, the antifragile is immune to prediction errors and protected from adverse events.

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