Antifragile: things that benefit from clutter

Abstract

What happens after a storm? The fragile breaks. The robust stays the same. But the antifragile is different; the antifragile improves. This is the property coined by the Lebanese-American mathematician Nassim Nicholas Taleb to refer to elements or organisms that profit from disorder and uncertainty, and even need it to survive. In his book Antifragile: Things that Profit from Disorder, he proposes a conceptual framework with which to identify antifragility in different domains of human life. In our skeletal system, in the way we govern ourselves and manage the economy, and even in the books we read. All of them can be located somewhere along the same spectrum from the most fragile to the most antifragile. What follows is a review of the book's key ideas, with a special focus on the realm of human creativity: what makes something antifragile, what are the stressors that feed that property, and why ingenuity dies in the absence of them.