Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (Incerto Book 3)

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

anything that has more upside than downside from random events (or certain shocks) is antifragile; the reverse is fragile.

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.

It is far easier to figure out if something is fragile than to predict the occurrence of an event that may harm it. Fragility can be measured;

Fragility can be measured;

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. Let me be more aggressive: we are largely better at doing than we are at thinking, thanks t

And antifragility determines the boundary between what is living and organic

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

At no point in history have so many non-risk-takers, that is, those with no personal exposure, exerted so much control. The chief ethical rule is the following: Thou shalt not have antifragility at the expense of the fragility of others.