About a recent NNT talk. I hope there’s audio. HatTip to Dave Lull.

“The Triad” is Taleb’s system to categorize entities as fragile, robust, or anti-fragile. Some basic examples follow: debt would be considered fragile; equity, robust; and venture capital equity, anti-fragile. A nation-state would be considered fragile, while a city-state would be considered anti-fragile. The issue, however, is that it’s a lot easier to identify something as fragile than it is to classify it as anti-fragile. Both fragile and anti-fragile entities experience non-linearities and non-linear responses; however, there are some important distinctions between them, which Taleb highlights in his book.

Taleb discusses fragility and anti-fragility, plus their implications, in the draft of his technical paper “A Map and Simple Heuristic to Detect Fragility, Anti-fragility, and Model Error,” which can be found on his website. For those in the audience who had very little technical understanding of fragility, Taleb provided a simpler, more intuitive explanation of his central ideas. The difference between fragility and anti-fragility and their connection to his previous work, “The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable” can be understood using a very good example from the paper.

via Nassim Taleb presents the concept of anti-fragility – The Stute – Stevens Institute of Technology.