Just a side remark, I always wonder when reading about Taleb whether he was truly the first to discover the balance between fragility and robustness or anti-fra

Just a side remark, I always wonder when reading about Taleb whether he was truly the first to discover the balance between fragility and robustness or anti-fragility. I remember some really inspiring work by John Doyle [1] at Caltech in the early 2000s on the concept of Highly Optimized Tolerance [2] and complexity and robustness [3], stating that natural and engineered networks exhibit a high tolerance towards common perturbations, yet can show catastrophic failures when encountering extremely rare events (as described by power law distributions). Never read much about Nassim Taleb's hypotheses, yet sounds similar at first. Has Taleb popularized a concept that got stuck in the unpopulated wasteland between theoretical physics and control theory? [1] http://leecenter.caltech.edu/doyle-res.html http://leecenter.caltech.edu/doyle-res.html [2] Highly optimized tolerance: A mechanism for power laws in designed systems, JM Carlson, J Doyle, Phys Rev E 60(2) 2, 1999 [3] http://www.pnas.org/content/99/suppl_1/2538.abstract http://www.pnas.org/content/99/suppl_1/2538.abstract