I'm starting to think that Taleb used the wrong word in choosing "fragile" as his comparitor, and then complaining that it doesn't have an opposite. A fragile

I'm starting to think that Taleb used the wrong word in choosing "fragile" as his comparitor, and then complaining that it doesn't have an opposite. A fragile object may break easily, but this does not mean that it will keep breaking more easily the more stress it is subjected to. This is seen in breaking ice, for instance. It's much easier to fracture a large icicle than it is to continue fracturing the smaller fragments of the icicle. The fragments of a fragile object may be more robust than they were when part of the larger object. (Irrespective of which weak points they actually fragmented on - that is to say that an icicle may 'randomly' fragment at certain weak points instead of others, but that it may still be more difficult to fragment the resulting pieces on the remaining weak points than it would have been to fragment the larger icicle on those particular weak points in the first place. A large object facilitates it's own shattering thanks to the leverage it's large body provides.) So fragile objects can actually demonstrate some of Taleb's "antifragility" after the initial demonstration of fragility. Just as there's no word (outside of specialist terms used by physicists?) for Taleb's "antifragile", there's also no word for the opposite of his "antifragile". I think decent compound words to describe these two ideas might be "systems robustness" and "fragile systems"; or "compositional robustness" and "decompositionally fragile".