Antifragility Quotes & Sayings

Some libertarians use the example of Drachten, a town in the Netherlands, in which a dream experiment was conducted. All street signs were removed. The deregulation led to an increase in safety, confirming the antifragility of attention at work, how it is whetted by a sense of danger and responsibility. As a result, many German and Dutch towns have reduced the number of street signs. We saw a version of the Drachten effect in Chapter 2 in the discussion of the automation of planes, which produces the exact opposite effect than what is intended by making pilots lose alertness. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

I'll tell you who I absolutely adore: Ian McEwan. — David Bowie

I love playing Chekhov. That's the hardest; that's why I love it most. — Uta Hagen

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 — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

As a kid, death seemed boring to me. As an adult, I think that it seems more like a waste of everything. Somebody once said every time a professor dies, a library burns. — Stephen King

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. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Hardship is the hardest moment to soften the soul. — Lailah Gifty Akita

We can simplify the relationships between fragility, errors, and antifragility as follows. When you are fragile, you depend on things following the exact planned course, with as little deviation as possible - for deviations are more harmful than helpful. This is why the fragile needs to be very predictive in its approach, and, conversely, predictive systems cause fragility. When you want deviations, and you don't care about the possible dispersion of outcomes that the future can bring, since most will be helpful, you are antifragile. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

To see how transfer of antifragility works, consider two scenarios, in which the market does the same thing on average but following different paths. Path 1: market goes up 50 percent, then goes back down to erase all gains. Path 2: market does not move at all. Visibly Path 1, the more volatile, is more profitable to the managers, who can cash in their stock options. So the more jagged the route, the better it is for them. And of course society - here the retirees - has the exact opposite payoff since they finance bankers and chief executives. Retirees get less upside than downside. Society pays for the losses of the bankers, but gets no bonuses from them. If you don't see this transfer of antifragility as theft, you certainly have a problem. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

People never know how strong is their lust for being cheated. — Joe Chung

Philosophers talk about truth and falsehood. People in life talk about payoff, exposure, and consequences (risks and rewards), hence fragility and antifragility. And sometimes philosophers and thinkers and those who study conflate Truth with risks and rewards. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

It is certain that such a revolution in thought - that is, such an expansion of consciousness, such an evolution of intelligence - is not the result of a whim. It is in fact a question of a cosmic influence to which the earth, along with everything in it, is subjected. A phase in the gestation of the planetary particle of our solar system is completed. Gaston Bachelard observes, in this connection, what he calls "a mutation of Spirit." A new period must begin, and this is heralded by seismic movement, climate changes, and finally, above all, by the spirit that animates man. — Schwaller De Lubicz

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

Love is the sum of all the arts, as it is the reason for their existence. — Jack London

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. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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. It is my soul fighting the Procrustean bed of modernity. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Alas, it has been hard for me to fit these ideas about fragility and antifragility within the current U.S. political discourse - that beastly two-fossil system. Most of the time, the Democratic side of the U.S. spectrum favors hyper-intervention, unconditional regulation, and large government, while the Republican side loves large corporations, unconditional deregulation, and militarism - both are the same to me here. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb