Antifragile quotes

“Taleb opens with the triad that organizes the whole book: fragile, robust, antifragile.”

“The mechanism by which biological and many engineered systems become antifragile is overcompensation.”

“The cat is the opposite — under-stimulation makes it weaker, while normal activity and small stresses keep it healthy.”

“Antifragility at one scale often requires fragility at the smaller scale below it.”

“The mechanism is that reality is too complicated for the theory to cover all the relevant variables.”

“Aerodynamicists did not teach the birds to fly; they reverse-engineered what the birds were already doing.”

“The asymmetry produces antifragile decisions when skin in the game is present and fragile decisions when it isn't.”

“The mathematical heart of the book, simplified: antifragile things have positive convexity — they have more upside than downside under uncertainty.”

“A book that has survived two thousand years is a better bet to survive two thousand more than a book that came out last year.”

“Taleb extends it as a general concept: the systematic harm done by interventions whose benefit is overestimated and whose downside is hidden.”