Antifragility

Antifragility is a property of systems that increase in capability, resilience, or robustness as a result of stressors, shocks, volatility, noise, mistakes, faults, attacks, or failures. It's fundamentally different from the concepts of resiliency (ability to recover from failure) and robustness (ability to resist failure).

• Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same. The antifragile gets better.
• Antifragile systems benefit from a process of trial and error. experimentation and learning from failures are essential for improving and evolving.
• Evolution is antifragile.
  • In a stable system, animals won't evolve. In a volatile system, they will.
  • A little bit of disorder is good. Evolution is a system that allows volatility rather than unwisely trying to buffer against it.
  • Being exposed to evolution sucks - animals very often die. Perhaps it would be much kinder if somebody gave unfit animals some food to prevent them from starving. But such kindness would prevent natural selection, and gradually weaken the species (or, more technically, the species' suitability to its niche) until eventual cataclysm.
• On areas with frequent catastrophes, where the catastrophes have externalities on people who didn't choose them, you want to lower variance, so that nothing ever gets bad enough to produce the catastrophe. In an area where people can choose whatever they want, and are smart enough to choose good things rather than bad ones, you want to raise variance, so that the best thing will be very good indeed, and then everybody can choose that and bask in its goodness.
• Maintain a portfolio of options and avoid being locked into a single path. Having multiple choices allows you to benefit from positive Black Swan events while minimizing the impact of negative ones.