Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Linda Geddes interviewed Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of Antifragile: How To Live in a World We Don't Understand, for Slate. Part of their dialogue:

Linda Geddes: In your new book you talk about things being "antifragile." What do you mean exactly?

Nassim Nicholas Taleb: When you ask people what is the opposite of fragile, they mostly answer something that is resilient or unbreakable—an unbreakable package would be robust. However, the opposite of fragile is something that actually gains from disorder. In the book, I classify things into fragile, robust, or antifragile.

LG: Can you give me some examples?

NNT: Nature builds things that are antifragile. In the case of evolution, nature uses disorder to grow stronger. Occasional starvation or going to the gym also makes you stronger, because you subject your body to stressors and gain from them. Another example is the restaurant industry. It benefits from the fact that individual restaurants are fragile by exploiting their mistakes as it tries to figure out why a particular restaurant went bust. Trial and error is an antifragile activity.

LG: How is antifragility different from the saying "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger"?

NNT: I look at it in terms of systems: Situations where what kills me makes others stronger, how the fragility of some parts of the system brings overall benefits. There are good and bad systems organized in terms of whether the system gets stronger or weaker from errors made by an individual part. Every plane crash makes...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue