Question
Antifragility is a concept developed by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his book "Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder". It refers to systems that actually benefit from shocks, volatility, and uncertainty, as opposed to merely being able to withstand them (resilience) or being vulnerable to them (fragility). A good example of a business that has applied this concept successfully is Amazon. Amazon started as an online bookstore but quickly diversified into selling a wide range of products, and later into cloud services with AWS. This diversification allows Amazon to benefit from shocks and volatility in any one market sector, as it can compensate with gains in another sector. Furthermore, Amazon's culture of experimentation and willingness to fail also embodies the concept of antifragility. By constantly trying new things and learning from failures, Amazon is able to adapt and grow stronger in the face of uncertainty and change.
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Evolution can be thought of as getting stronger under harm—it loves stressors, randomness, and uncertainty. One individual may be relatively fragile, but its suffering strengthens the gene pool. If nature ran the economy and its institutions, it would not waste effort constantly bailing out every individual to help it to live forever. For evolution, the more noise and disturbances in the system, the more that reproduction of the fittest and random mutations will help to define the next generation. Of course, this is true only up to a point: a calamity that wiped out all life on earth wouldn't help the fittest to survive. Nevertheless, evolution happens when harm to an individual organism helps the species as a whole to survive.
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