What's the opposite of fragile? Most people's immediate answer is "robust" or "resilient". But consider… if we subject something that is fragile to stress, shock, randomness or volatility, we can expect that it will be harmed. If we do the same to something that is robust or resilient, we can expect that it will resist harm - but won't be any better off than when we started. But what if something that is subjected to stress, shock, randomness or volatility actually benefited ? That would be the opposite of fragile: antifragile. This is the core theme of Nassim Nicholas Taleb's book Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder . What does fragility and antifragility look like? As human beings, we often think of things that have uncertainty or randomness as having a range of possible outcomes that are centered around some "most likely" outcome, as in the diagram below. However in many domains, there is an asymmetr