Quotes About Antifragility

Let me be more aggressive: we are largely better at doing than we are at thinking, thanks to antifragility. I'd rather be dumb and antifragile than extremely smart and fragile, any time.

You cannot teach antifragility directly, but you can give your children the gift of experience—the thousands of experiences they need to become resilient, autonomous adults.

We know that chasing efficiency too far leads to fragility, and the current excellence models lack explicit minimal governance safeguards and the justification of weighting to be seen currently as universal models of anti-fragility.

This process of applying stress to increase resilience was named antifragility by author and risk analyst Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

Let me be more aggressive: we are largely better at doing than we are at thinking, thanks to antifragility. I'd rather be dumb and antifragile than extremely smart and fragile, any time.

The chief ethical rule is the following: Thou shalt not have antifragility at the expense of the fragility of others.

My dream—the solution—is that we would have a National Entrepreneur Day, with the following message: Most of you will fail, disrespected, impoverished, but we are grateful for the risks you are taking and the sacrifices you are making for the sake of the economic growth of the planet and pulling others out of poverty. You are at the source of our antifragility. Our nation thanks you.

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 to antifragility. I'd rather be dumb and antifragile than extremely smart and fragile, any time.

Technology is the result of antifragility, exploited by risk-takers in the form of tinkering and trial and error, with nerd-driven design confined to the backstage.

The very idea of exercise is to gain from antifragility to workout stressors—as we saw, all kinds of exercise are just exploitations of convexity effects.

I once procrastinated and kept delaying a spinal cord operation as a response to a back injury—and was completely cured of the back problem after a hiking vacation in the Alps, followed by weight-lifting sessions. These psychologists and economists want me to kill my naturalistic instinct (the inner b****t detector) that allowed me to delay the elective operation and minimize the risks—an insult to the antifragility of our bodies.

But fragility and antifragility are part of the current property of an object, a coffee table, a company, an industry, a country, a political system. We can detect fragility, see it, even in many cases measure it, or at least measure comparative fragility with a small error while comparisons of risk have been (so far) unreliable.

One Thousand And One Days, or How Not to Be a Sucker

I am not here to live forever, as a sick animal. Recall that the antifragility of a system comes from the mortality of its components—and I am part of that larger population called humans. I am here to die a heroic death for the sake of the collective, to produce offspring (and prepare them for life and provide for them), or eventually, books—my information, that is, my genes, the antifragile in me, should be the ones seeking immortality, not me. Then

We have been unconsciously exploiting antifragility in practical life and, consciously, rejecting it—particularly in intellectual life. The

What makes life simple is that the robust and antifragile don't have to have as accurate a comprehension of the world as the fragile—and

They game the system while citizens pay the price. 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.

Seneca's version of that Stoicism is antifragility from fate. No downside from Lady Fortuna, plenty of upside.

The worst problem of modernity lies in the malignant transfer of fragility and antifragility from one party to the other, with one getting the benefits, the other (unwittingly) getting the harm, with such transfer facilitated by the growing wedge between the ethical and the legal.

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.

The hidden benefit of antifragility is that you can guess worse than random and still end up outperforming.

Few understand that procrastination is our natural defense, letting things take care of themselves and exercise their antifragility; it results from some ecological or naturalistic wisdom, and is not always bad—at an existential level, it is my body rebelling against its entrapment.

We can mistake the antifragility of the system for that of the individual, when in fact it takes place at the expense of the individual

antifragility equals more to gain than to lose equals more upside than downside equals asymmetry (favorable) equals likes volatility.