Antifragility

4 min readAug 4, 2019

Originally written in June 2019, based on the book by @nntaleb

What is the opposite of fragile?

A moment’s thought suggests it is beyond resilience (the ability to recovery from failure) and robustness (resist failure), which are “neutral” properties in that there is no supersedence of the original level of performance.

Antifragility describes systems that improve as a result of stressors, shocks, volatility, noise, mistakes, faults, attacks, or failures.

Examples

Nature

Nature’s guiding force, evolution, is the most enduring example of antifragility. Species and ecosystems benefit from the uncertainty and viciousness of the life by selecting for random genetic mutations that can vault them into dominance.

The human body is a highly-antifragile machine. It springs back stronger from the shock of exercise and other physical tests. The immune system is strengthened by the perturbation of vaccine doses. At the molecular level, genetic expressions change in response to external conditions.

Business

Silicon Valley is antifragile. The technology industry regularly benefits from positive Black Swans of new inventions and “going viral.” A cultural ethos of “failing fast” and the Invisible Hand fosters a capitalist version of evolution.

In contrast, large financial institutions are fragile because they are exposed to negative Black Swans. Unforeseen stressors almost exclusively hurt them, sometimes existentially. They habitually overreach and are paid bonuses on success, but bailed out on failure. Regulations prevent collapse of ineffective businesses, allowing rot and tinderwood to collect in the system. Primum, non nocere.

Government

Taleb advocates bottom-up, decentralized, lightly-regulated and heavily-entrepreneurial countries with borders maintained from ancient times as a model antifragile government. Historical examples include the city states of Genoa and Venice and Switzerland and Lebanon in present-day.

Oppositely, top-down, centrally-planned, artificially-unioned nation-states have show themselves to be extremely fragile. The most prominent examples are the Communist countries of the 20th century — the Soviet Bloc, and Asian experiments in North Korea and China as well as the chaos of the Middle East.

Why does Antifragility matter?

We are at very unique moment in history. This line is overused, but like any adage there is an element of truth.

In the last 100 years, technological and social systems have advanced to such a point that the future of the world’s most essential constructs — governments, social networks, economies — are beyond the control or even the understanding of any single person or committee of people.

At the same time, the cost of total failure (a calling card of fragile systems), has become correspondingly more costly as our world grows. Therefore, antifragile designs at every level, from personal lives to global organizations, is increasingly important because it reduces our reliance on inflexible plans and imprecise predictions in an extremely uncertain future.

Antifragility is the antidote to Black Swans.

How do you make your own life antifragile?

Taleb says avoid what makes you fragile: debt, optimization, and routine. Just like a bank, excessive financial leverage can deliver you into bankruptcy. Optimization for local maxima should be avoided when there may be other, much bigger global maxima. Similarly, routine offers known, often incremental payoffs — know when to abandon it.

The popular mental models blog @farnamstreet says stick to simple rules that have survived the test of time, build in redundancy, and avoid existential risks. It also suggests having Skin in the Game and taking many small risks.

My personal recommendations follow.

Cultivate Honest Feedback

The small stressor of regular feedback, good or bad, helps one close blind-spots and improve regularly instead of suffering at length from a personal fatal flaw (this is from Ray Dalio’s Principles)

Be a Generalist, not a Specialist

Most adult’s professional and personal development looks like a one-dimensional line growing longer over time: one set of skills, one base of knowledge, one strong friendship. This may seem like the right way to simplify life in an incredibly complex world.

But a one-dimensional strategy that may pay linearly in the near term may blow up without warning (a Black Swan) in the same incredibly complex world: A single set of skills or knowledge base may be automated away or open-sourced. A friendship may be clipped by departure.

So develop “radially,” or in many different directions at once. Learn the fundamentals of multiple disciplines, including those completely orthogonal to your current one. Practice rotating between them. Listen to the opposing point of view. Be balanced.

Generalist learning is multiplicative (see) — the value of the approach is concave and compounding. Expanding in multiple directions pays off exponentially with increasing surface area (i.e. with rn) instead of marginally decreasing with length (log(n)).