Antifragility, a term coined by financial professor Nassim Nicholas Taleb, is one of the newest terms I have come across in life. In one sense it is obvious, in another it is unintuitive, and absolutely deserves a place among the school curriculum for the young citizens of Earth. Antifragile entities are basically things that get stronger with adversity. Here is a graph of it:
There, I have successfully modeled all of human existence. Follow this graph and you will go far in life.
Points to make about the graph
- Parents who over protect their children are fearing they end up on the far right of the graph which ends up making their children be on the far left of the graph
- The ideal human will be somewhere near the top of the graph
- Everyone has a breaking point and that is where the drop off is. TOO much adversity will lead to irreversible damage and even death
- This is a HUGE oversimplification, it is just meant to get you started and get you thinking about antifragility
- Things that are antifragile: Children, humans, animals, muscles, the immune system, the free market economy, open-source software, personal relationships, forest ecosystems (with forest fires as an example of adversity), learning, open dialogue, questioning everything, etc.
- A trend I see is the political right criticizes the left for appearing to veer too far to the left of the graph, and the left criticizes the right for being unsympathetic toward people who have a lower tolerance toward adversity. Because different people have different tolerances to different people. Like for some people the drop-off happens closer to the left and for others it happens further to the right