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

(Part 2 available here)

What’s the opposite of fragility? Most people say robustness, resilience, or strength. Most people, says Taleb, are wrong. Fragility is to be weakened by uncertainty or volatility, while resilience is to be unaffected by volatility. What we need is something strengthened by volatility and change – something antifragile.

In antiquity, Taleb points out, he would rather be the hydra which regrew two heads when one was cut off, rather than the phoenix, which rose identical from the ashes when destroyed, or the Gordian Knot, which fell apart at the first unexpected shock (a sword, to be specific). It’s not enough to ignore volatility; we must love volatility.

That, in a nutshell, is Antifragile. Like all the best ideas, it’s a simple idea with immediate, important, and interesting consequences. In particular, Taleb argues that the modern world, in its quest for efficiency and optimization, has ignored the effects of volatility. As a result, shocks (Black Swans) have catastrophic consequences. When one hits, however, we ask the wrong question. We demand to know why we failed to predict the housing bubble or disease outbreak, instead of asking ourselves why we built a system that is tremendously vulnerable to such shocks.

Instead of eliminating centralization and vulnerability in our systems, like big corporations or big bureaucracies, however, we keep trying to predict the future, an endeavor doomed to failure. Shocks, as Taleb has argued in other books, are rare, and so attempting to predict them is impossible because they happen so rarely – we never have enough data points to draw conclusions. (For the economists reading, he believes in fat tails). Rather than trying to predict the future, we should build systems that can evolve and adapt to it.

The second major problem he points out (the first being that our world is extremely fragile), is that many areas of antifragility in our world today are only so because people have shifted risk to others. Bankers, for example, are antifragile because they can just get a bailout if something goes wrong, while taxpayers and/or deposit holders get it in the shorts.