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antifragility FAQ

What is antifragility?

In 2012 ‘Antifragile’ was published. An ingenious book, written by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Until then no word existed for the exact opposite of fragility. We used robustness and resilience to indicate that something was not fragile.

The graph below shows the difference between these terms.

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Fragile

Fragile systems will deteriorate from the moment they exist. They are vulnerable.

Robust

Robust systems persist for a long time, but once they encounter an unexpected event, they will break.

Resilient

Resilient systems are able to recover from shocks but will never get better than they were.

Antifragile

Antifragile systems gain from disorder. They break a little all the time and evolve as a result, becoming less prone to catastrophic failure.

The logo of Antifragility.works refers to Hydra, the multi headed monster in Greek and Roman mythology. When Hercules attacked the monster by chopping of one of its heads, he discovered that it was immediately replaced by two new heads. With every attack it became stronger. Hydra was antifragile avant la lettre.