Wind extinguishes a candle and energizes fire. Likewise with randomness, uncertainty, chaos: you want to use them, not hide from them. You want to be the fire and wish for the wind. This summarizes this author’s nonmeek attitude to randomness and uncertainty.

So we propose to stand our current approaches to prediction, prognostication, and risk management on their heads.

Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness.

Which brings us to the largest fragilizer of society, and greatest generator of crises, absence of “skin in the game.”

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

People with too much smoke and complicated tricks and methods in their brains start missing elementary, very elementary things. Persons in the real world can’t afford to miss these things; otherwise they crash the plane.

Explains how we missed the word “antifragility” in classrooms. Fragile-Robust-Antifragile as Damocles-Phoenix-Hydra. Domain dependence.

property is behind everything that has changed with time: evolution, culture, ideas, revolutions, political systems, technological innovation, cultural and economic success, corporate survival, good recipes (say, chicken soup or steak tartare with a drop of cognac), the rise of cities, cultures, legal systems, equatorial forests, bacterial

complex systems are weakened, even killed, when deprived of stressors.